Why it's Hot:
- Signed by Chris Claremont
- CGC Signature Series
- CGC Custom Label
- White Pages
Synopsis:
CATCH A FALLING HERO It is 7 p.m. on a cool, clear weekday evening as the Silver Samurai, Boomerang, and their leader, the Viper, tune in the nightly television newscast with Walter Cronkite from S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. All the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, including Clay Quartermain, who is at the carrier's helm, are under the Viper's hypnotic control. As the Viper listens to the newscast, which announces the President's address to the nation later this evening before a joint session of Congress, she recalls the day long past when she and the Cobra, then members of the Serpent Squad, battled Nomad. When their building collapsed in flames, she plunged through the floor, and the Serpent Crown of Lemuria fell from her head. A falling brick knocked her out, and then the fires ignited a ruptured gas main and the house blew apart. She was protected by collapsing bricks and masonry that formed a cocoon around her while she was unconscious. Then she found a drainpipe, one of the Cobra's secret exits, and entered a sewer that carried her beyond the police lines around the house. She emerged from a manhole and started to walk away, weakened and disarmed. Then a van pulled up alongside, whose driver introduced himself as Ishiro Tagara, a cadre leader with the Japanese Red Army, a group that occasionally worked with HYDRA. He remembered her from the time she was Madame Hydra, one of the organization's powerful leaders. Together they drove unnoticed by Nomad and the police, and Tagara eventually brought her to his estate in Japan, where she spent several months recovering her health. She was surprised to discover that she had fallen in love with Tagara, and she also evolved a master plan to crush the United States. With America mortally wounded, she reasoned, the oppressed people of the world would rise in the ultimate revolution. The first step in her plan was to field test a hypno-beam, with which she compelled all the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the underground New York offices to depart for one hour. At the same time, she sent the Silver Samurai, one of Tagara's allies, to steal a crystal that would have made an ideal energy source for the teleportation unit that she wanted to construct. Unfortunately for her plan, Spider-Man and the Black Widow stopped the Samurai. Faced with this impasse, it required more time for her to create her teleport ring, but just as she was about to use it, the device was lost in the mail and misdelivered to none other than John Belushi of the Saturday Night Live television show. This time the Silver Samurai succeeded in retrieving it, and soon he and she teleported into the S.H.I.E.L.D. He
