The Champions was a Marvel Comics supergroup of the mid-’70s created by Tony Isabella which starred Hercules, Ghost Rider, the Black Widow, Angel, and Iceman. Except for a fill-in issue by Chris Claremont, and one scripting assist by Bill Mantlo, Tony handled the first seven issues.

But with The Champions #8, the October 1976 issue (cover below), Bill took over the title and wrote the book until it was cancelled with #17, the January 1978 issue.

But before he began, he laid out his plans for the book in a two-page memo to Gerry Conway and Jim Shooter. Would you like to be able to compare his plans for the group with what actually happened? Well, thanks to my Marvel memo packrat ways, you can. Because here’s that memo!

I’ll leave it up to someone else to check the memo against the books themselves and provide a point by point comparison.

Why am I sharing this with you now? For those who haven’t seen my other findings from the vault (and by vault I mean the couple of file folders I’ve been lugging around for more than three decades)—

First, Sean Howe, editor of the fascinating Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, is working on a history of Marvel in the ’70s, and I’m trying to make sure he has all the info he needs to make it the best possible book it can be. And since I’m going to the effort of scanning these memos and letting him see them, I figure you should get a look at them, too.

But also—when Len Wein suffered a house fire a few years back, which damaged not only his comic book and original art collections but also many historical documents about the secret history of the business, I started to think … what if my house burned down, and it turned out I had the only copies of some of these memos? So I decided to get as many of them online as I could, because the info doesn’t just belong to me, it belongs to everybody who loves comics.

So when you see other posts like this from me in the future … now you’ll know why.