Comic Book / Contest of Champions (1982)

The first Contest.

Contest of Champions is a 1982 comic book limited series published by Marvel Comics. The series was written by Mark Gruenwald, with art by John Romita Jr. and Bob Layton.

An immortal alien called The Grandmaster gathers all of Earth's superheroes and chooses some of them as pawns in a game he's playing against a mysterious hooded woman - with the resurrection of his brother, The Collector (who was killed during the events of The Korvac Saga), as the prize, and all of humanity as hostages.

It was the first limited series produced by Marvel, as well as the precursor to the concept of the Crisis Crossover. The story was originally conceived as a tie-in to the next Olympic Games. Although the deal fell through, Marvel still published the story without any sports-related material. Writer Mark Gruenwald included pages describing the various heroes in each issue, which began the concept of the "superhero encyclopedia" that would later be expanded into the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

The story was adapted as an episode of the animated series Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes, but using only characters from that series.

The series has two followups, Contest Of Champions II, and Contest of Champions (2015). A storyline called Contest of Chaos will happen in certain Marvel Comics Annuals in 2023

The first series was also loosely adapted as the multi-part Season 3 finale of Ultimate Spider-Man (2012).

The Contest appears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Thor: Ragnarok. After being stranded on the junk planet Sakaar, Thor is taken prisoner by The Grandmaster and forced to fight as a gladiator against the Hulk, who ended up there after the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

The three-issue series was published from June to August 1982.

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Tropes used in Contest of Champions (1982)

• Ambiguously Brown: Talisman is supposedly an Australian Aborigine, but is drawn as if he were a bald white man and colored brown.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Death.
• Balancing Death's Books: There's a predictable price for the Collector's return from the dead.
• Blatant Lies: The Grandmaster promises Earth's heroes that he would never use them as pawns again if they won for him. He (or more likely, the writer) seems to have forgotten about this since.
• Captain Ethnic: Some of the International Heroes used can be seen as this.
• The Chessmaster: The Grandmaster. Not so much for his acts here, as for the later revelations of his true plan. (See Thanatos Gambit below.)
• Cosmic Entity: Both The Grandmaster and Death.
• Excuse Plot: It was all a means to show off Marvel's International Superheroes (for once).
• Honor Before Reason: The Grandmaster apparently.
• A House Divided: None of the heroes worked together, not even with their own teammates. This may have been just so they would be free to fight their rivals one-on-one.
  • Some of the ethnic heroes refused to work together because of their national conflicts; e.g., the Egyptian Arabian Knight and the Israeli Sabra.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The heroes needed very little provocation to fight each other. The matches were:^note note that these fights were picked by the heroes themselves, not the game's players
  • Invisible Woman vs Talisman
  • Sunfire vs Darkstar
  • Daredevil vs Iron Fist
  • She-Hulk vs Sabra
  • Black Knight vs Arabian Knight
  • Iron Man vs Defensor
  • The Thing vs Vanguard
  • Angel vs Le Peregrine
  • Wolverine vs Black Panther (with the former trying to *kill* the later!)
  • Sasquatch vs Collective Man
  • Storm vs Blitzkrieg
  • Captain America vs Shamrock
• Multinational Team: The playing teams can be seen as this, though the American heroes outnumbered the non-American ones. The latter were:
  • Blitzkrieg (Germany), Collective Man (China), Defensor (Argentina, though erroneously indicated to be from Brazil), Peregrine (France), Shamrock (Ireland), Talisman (Australia), Sunfire (Japan), Darkstar (the Soviet Union), Vanguard (also Soviet), Sabra (Israel), Arabian Knight (Egypt) and Sasquatch (Canada).
    • Wolverine is from Canada, but most of the time works in the United States with the X-Men.
    • Also in the X-Men, Storm grew up in Africa but was born in New York.
    • Black Panther comes from his own fictional African country, Wakanda.
    • The Black Knight inherited the identity of a British medieval hero but was born in Massachusetts and is active in America.
    • Iron Fist is also an American raised in a Chinese mystical land, but now lives in America.
• Original Generation: The heroes Blitzkrieg, Collective Man, Defensor, Peregrine, Shamrock and Talisman all were created for this series. (The other international heroes used had been introduced before.)
• Plot Coupon: The Globe of Life, whose four parts were hidden on four different parts of the Earth for the heroes to find. It was needed to resurrect the Collector.
• Redhead In Green: The Irish superheroine Shamrock has a green costume and flowing red hair.
• The Reveal: Death kept her identity secret until the last issue, though fans of the Adam Warlock series might have recognized her earlier.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The unknown rival tried to entice her team by offering to extend the existence of Earth's sun by a million years if they won. Unfortunately for her, the sun has still about a billion years left so a million would be an insignificant addition. Not to mention that humanity might not even exist by the time it winks out.
• Series Continuity Error: The plot got resolved only because the writer forgot who was on whose team: It would have resulted in a draw otherwise.
• Thanatos Gambit: It was later revealed (perhaps retconned) in an issue of The Avengers that the Grandmaster knew what the price for reviving his brother was all along; in fact, that was his true plan: to die so he could be allowed into Death's realm—to take it over! Then it's inverted. After the Grandmaster was defeated by the Avengers, Death exiled him from her realm forever, thus giving him what he really wanted from the start: true immortality.
• Unbuilt Trope: Today, a story like this would most likely be a massive event. At the time of publication, the modern Crisis Crossover did not exist, hence this is a crowded three issue miniseries.

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