GH: MARVEL TEAM-UP #130

MARVEL TEAM-UP had been practically from its inception a meat-and-potatoes sort of a comic book. Which is to say that it’s aspirations were rarely higher than just entertaining an audience for twenty minutes with a solid story. It wasn’t trying to stretch the medium or produce works for the ages. MARVEL TEAM-UP was a product, and it endeavored faithfully to give its readers exactly what it said on the label: an adventure pairing up the popular wall-crawler with some other disparate denizen of the Marvel Universe. As such, it was an easy book to scale back on when it came time to whittle down my buying list, and I dropped it without a second thought.

BHOC: MARVEL TEAM-UP #39

The first issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP that I purchased was, I believe, this one, which I bought out of my local drugstore’s big bin of somewhat older comics. I picked it up entirely because it co-featured the Human Torch, as I was fanatical about the Fantastic Four at that moment. It was a perfectly fine issue, but nothing that made me read the series with any regularity. At this point, I wasn’t even yet a Spider-Man reader, truth told.

I’d buy other issues over the following years from time to time, usually depending on who might be co-starring with Spider-Man. But I never began following the series with any regularity. That changed by the time that this issue, #87, came out. By this point, I was earning a regular paycheck thanks to a Pennysaver newspaper route and I could afford to buy pretty much all the comics that I wanted. And that meant that I scooped up virtually anything that looked like a part of the Marvel super hero line. Beginning here, I read the book every month, with only the occasional hiccup when funds got tight. MARVEL TEAM-UP was an easy series to skip an issue of, as it wasn’t going to have a whole lot of impact on the next one most of the time.

By the time of my final issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP for the time being, editorship had passed over to Tom DeFalco, who had been handed the entirety of the Spider-Man line by editor in chief Jim Shooter. Tom immediately set about strengthening the line, bringing a regular creative team onto MARVEL TEAM-UP and connecting it a bit more concretely with the other two books featuring Spider-Man. There was a deliberate sense of each title reflecting the developments in the others that made the entire enterprise seem more consistent and solid. On the writing end, DeFalco tapped a relative newcomer to Marvel, J.M. DeMatteis.

DeMatteis was in his early days as a comic book writer and only beginning to evidence the skills that would make him a well-celebrated author in just a few years’ time. He tended to be interested in spirituality often in his work, and this particular story, in which the Vision is forced to surrender his body to the evil sorcerer Necrodamus, gives a sense of him experimenting ways in which he can express what he wants to express in the context of a super hero story. He was still learning, but he was getting better as time went on. The artwork, of course, was delivered by the rock-solid Sal Buscema, here finished by Mike Esposito. Sal could always be counted upon to deliver the story in a straightforward manner, even if his work was seldom flashy in the manner that excited hardcore fans.

It’s a pretty solid adventure, one that follows up immediately on the prior issue’s Spider-Man and Vision story. if I have any complaint with it, it’s that the Scarlet Witch spends the first half of the story being an unconscious pawn despite her co-star status. For most of the issue, this is more rightly another Spider-Man and Vision pairing, with Wanda only giving a decent account of herself in the back half–and even there, she doesn’t save the day. But, hey, a story is a story and sometimes they work out that way. This one is perfectly fine, although it’s a bit unmemorable. I couldn’t recall much of anything about it until I cracked open the book again to write this piece.

Which I think is what made it so easy to drop the book. It was very much an additive comic book–by which I mean, if your monthly supply of Spider-Man excitement needed a little bit of a boost, it was a good book to pick up. But on its own, it wasn’t entirely satisfying. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that a year or two later, the decision was made to replace MARVEL TEAM-UP with a third regular Spider-Man series, WEB OF SPIDER-MAN. As the Direct Market became a more important part of the audience, the sorts of impulse purchase titles such as MARVEL TEAM-UP and MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE fell by the wayside in favor of more character-driven and creator-driven fare. I can’t say that I missed it all that much.

I checked in on WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #1 as it was a first issue, but didn’t find enough good there to continue following the title. It wasn’t until a bunch of years later that I came back on a regular basis with this issue, #35. And I was pulled in completely by the homage cover to AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #8. Gerry Conway wrote the issue, having come back to working on the web-slinger in recent months. And his involvement gave me nostalgic feels, as Gerry’s run in the 1970s had formed a lot of my initial interest in the character. And shortly after this, I went on staff at Marvel and began getting all of the books for free, so I read the series steadily until its end.