BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #47

One of the changes to my school routine that happened during this year of sixth grade is that I was placed into the Gifted Student program. It had been clear for several years that I was ahead of most of the other students in my grade academically. But it was also clear that I had a difficult time relating to them emotionally. Today, it’s easy to say that I must be somewhat neurodivergent, adjacent to the Spectrum if not literally on it. But back then, that wasn’t something that was understood. So my occasional emotional flame-outs were a baffling problem to my educators, who of course responded by doubling down their efforts to hammer my square peg self into a neat round hole. But somehow in this last year, I’d been placed into this program, which turned out to be an excellent thing for me. Every Friday, rather than going to my regular grade school, I was bussed to another one in the area along with similar students from all across the district. There, we worked on more creative projects in a less structured environment–it was the 1970s, after all. I was one of the oldest students in the program, which in practical terms meant that any difficulties with bullying or the like were instantly removed in this environment, as I was one of the biggest guys in the program.

Most crucially from a comic book standpoint, I met another guy who read comics who became a close friend for many years. David Steckel went to the same elementary school that I did, but he was a year younger than I was and so a grade behind me. So out paths hadn’t crossed. But here, it quickly became apparent that we had a bunch of things in common. Steck was a lot more athletic and popular than I had ever been, but he was also obsessed at that moment with Marvel Comics (he was the first reader I encountered who actively derided DC) particularly the Fantastic Four, Star Wars and especially Battlestar: Galactica. He’d been dreaming up ideas for his own knock-off version, and when he discovered that I was routinely making my own comics, he worked tirelessly to get he to draw his series, STAR RAIDERS–which I did. Steck had a decent collection of books as well, many inherited from older cousins who had outgrown them, and so our friendship gave me access to a bunch of stories and material that I wouldn’t have read otherwise.

In any event, my first Gifted Class session would have taken place on the week when I bought this issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE featuring the Thing and his longtime comedic nemesis, the Yancy Street Gang. As I’ve reported before and as is borne out by my re-examine of these issues, MTIO was a bit of a directionless mess at this point. Since the departure of writer/editor Marv Wolfman, the series had fielded a string of lackluster one- and two-part tales that weren’t very satisfying. But it was the Thing’s title and I was all-in on the Fantastic Four, so I continued to follow it nonetheless. The two-parter that began in this issue was really more of the same. Entertaining enough, competently crafted, but missing that spark that turns a decent comic into a great one. The one really noteworthy element of this issue is that it was both penciled and inked by Chic Stone, who for a year a decade earlier had inked virtually every story Jack Kirby produced for the Marvel line, making them all a whole lot more attractive than the shaky inks the King had been getting prior to that.

Stone had left Marvel back in 1965 because he wanted to pencil his own work, and here, years later, he was doing so. His pages are solidly composed, his work a little bit open and airy (a frequent complaint about his Kirby inks was that he spotted few blacks, making the pages seem a bit coloring booky.) His material was professional, but it all felt just a hair off to me, as though he was working hard to match the Marvel house style. Writer Bill Mantlo was a jack-of-all-trades at this point, and so it was no surprise to see him step into the breech for what amounted to a pair of fill-in stories. Bill was constantly pitching off-beat ideas, so the fact that this story co-features the Yancy Street Gang, who had never really been showcased on camera much before this, was very much on brand for Bill. Throughout this issue, Mantlo and Stone keep that gag awkwardly going by constantly having the faces of the YSG members in shadow, even when they’re otherwise fully on camera. Given the limited amount of black that Stone was putting on the page, these conveniently placed shadows really stood out.

The story opens with a bunch of mob goons under the command of Mr. Carnation, a stereotypical gangster type decades old, leaning on members of the Yancy Street Gang. They’ve intercepted a letter that the YSG had tried to send to Ben Grimm apprising the Thing of what is going on down on Yancy Street–but what the goons don’t know is that the YSG also sent big Ben a package as well, and that one gets through. We cut to the Baxter Building where the Thing is celebrating is birthday with friends and family. Postman Willie Lumpkin shows up to deliver a parcel to Ben–one which is ticking. After a few tense minutes the package explodes into a floral arrangement wishing Ben a Happy Birthday. But when the Thing reads the card that came with it, his expression gets more serious. And thereafter, he’s making his way south to Yancy Street to check out the scene directly.

The card he received warned Ben to stay away from Yancy Street, but the manner in which it was written suggested that perhaps he should do the opposite. The street seems deserted at first, but as the Thing continues to poke around, he’s suddenly assaulted by driverless trucks and flickering streetlights and misfiring hydrants. Eventually, there’s a rumble in the Earth that tears open the street, and out of it pour a dozen faceless robots, all intent on killing Ben Grimm. Elsewhere, in a nearby warehouse, the Yancy Street Gang members take advantage of all the commotion to clobber Mr. Carnation’s goons, and grabbing up pipes and wrenches and two-by-fours, they race out onto their block to uncharacteristically help out the Thing.

It turns out that both Mr. Carnation and the man he’s working for have been hired by the Corporation, the underworld organization that had been appearing sporadically in CAPTAIN AMERICA, INCREDIBLE HULK and MACHINE MAN. The mystery mastermind gestures to a control panel and the Thing is suddenly struck down by a high-voltage discharge. With Ben Grimm out of the fight, the rest of the YSG is easily taken down by the goons. And as the issue is To Be Continued, we learn the identity of the man pulling the strings. He’s Machinesmith, a new villain who would later turn out to have some deep ties to Marvel history, but who now was just a weirdo with strange muttonchops. So this is a bit of an understated moment to go out on in terms of an effective cliffhanger.