The story is a very densely written murder mystery plotted by Ditko and scripted by a "Sergius O'Shaughnessy", which the internet tells me was a pen name for Denny O'Neil. There are plenty of characters zipping in and out of the panels as possible suspects and as many names to keep track of as in a Miss Marple mystery, but who cares? It's the Creeper bounding through a gaggle of thugs we want to see, and we get plenty of that, too.

I've mentioned before in a previous post regarding Gil Kane's Spider-Man comics: he and Andru breathed so much life into Spider-Man's New York City that it became a supporting character itself, far more even than Batman's Gotham. I had a sense of an almost real Rockefeller Plaza and Times Square from the issues in which Ross had carried the story's action through those settings. He didn't blow my mind like Kirby or Steranko later would, he just created a world with an amazing sense of visual depth and space for my childhood fantasies to be played out in. Add to that his wonderfully down-to-earth figure drawing (that panel of Spidey running on the ferris wheel-- really looks like a guy running on a ferris wheel. I don't know how else to verbalize it)-- and it felt like I wasn't being drawn into Ross' world; he was illustrating mine.

The Inhumans shared this book with the Black Widow in her first pre-Daredevil solo adventures which weren't exactly standouts, so we'll ignore them. The earliest chapters of the Inhumans story were by Jack Kirby, who created some memorable clashes between the Atillans and the Fantastic Four and the whole of the outside world. Somewhere about halfway through the series, however, Jack defected to DC and the series landed in the capable hands of Roy Thomas and Neal Adams.

The mission gets off to a bad start as A.I.M. soldiers shoot down the good guys' helicopter, causing it to crash in the swamp. Ka-Zar and his pet sabretooth Zabu both get to demonstrate their gator-wrestling prowess as their guides make it to safety, then lead them to the (apparently poorly) hidden lab where Sallis' colleagues continue their work. They are shown to an infirmary, where an aged scientist clings to life, victim of a gunshot wound. As they ponder her seemingly incoherent ramblings, a mossy form shambles up to the window to observe them from outside.

Oh. That can't be right. This is a pre-Vertigo, code approved superhero book published when I was 1 year old. I thought Alan Moore or Frank Miller invented this grim-n-gritty real world deconstruction stuff.

With everything going against this series, Marvel had to heap one more thing onto the pile: an intrusive crossover with the "Inferno" storyline over in X-Men. New York has been overrun by demons, but since the cause and resolution will be confined to the two (!) X-titles that summer, we just had to put up with all the rest of our comics making absolutely no sense for a couple months. I never understood the logic behind these crossovers; if Nova guest starred in Spider-Man's mag, it was to get Spidey readers to check out Nova. Did they decide that not enough people reading the Marvel line of books were checking out the X-Men on a monthly basis, so they were trying to lure in the legions of Englehart fans? The crossovers certainly weren't required reading for the X-Men series', so I can't imagine the goal was the other way around.

Brought into the home of Abel Stack, one of the X-project's chief scientists, the robot has been named Aaron and "raised" as a human being, even coming to address his creator as "Dad." This foster father removes X-51's self destruct device when he hears of the order and sends his robot progeny away, sacrificing himself in the detonation of the bomb without Aaron being aware of his fate. The military hunts the fugitive robot down when he is spotted flying over an unnamed city (he flies by "cancelling the gravity equation"-- flight powered by math!) and he is quickly recaptured.

This issue is just a few episodes into the DeFalco/Frenz run. Ron is obviously starting to evoke Kirby with many of his layouts, but inker Brett Breeding is reining him in a bit, giving the pages a hint of a Buscema/Palmer look. These guys are actually among my favorite pairings of illustrators. DeFalco channels Stan Lee hyperbole with ease and knows how to write with a cosmic scope; the first several issues after Simonson included a three-part battle with the Celestials which was itself all kinds of awesome. In this issue, Thor is finally returning to Earth after the long absence begun in Walt's series, and he finds a number of things have changed.

Brother Voodoo is the Haitian Doctor Strange, a witch doctor superhero whose loosely defined and mysterious powers are apparently the result of Thomas and writer Len Wein having just seen Live and Let Die in the theatre earlier that year. Most of the Marvel "Phase 2" characters seem to have been created by committee, the result of Thomas sitting down with a writer over lunch to discuss the "kind of character" he had in mind before the writer fleshed out the concept. As with Wolverine and the Punisher, John Romita probably designed the look of the character before passing it on to the series' artist, Gene Colan.

Back to MOKF: Allegedly Marvel had gained the rights to Fu Manchu and related characters at the same time as securing rights for a comic series based on David Carradine’s Kung Fu TV show. Someone had the notion to meld the two concepts together, giving us Shang-Chi, who discovers one day that the father he revered is actually the greatest force for evil on Earth, so he splits from the family temple to walk the Earth helping people-- like Julius from Pulp Fiction-- and battling against his father’s plots. This issue opens with a couple of Fu Manchu’s assassins chasing Shang Chi into the Florida everglades, where waits a shambling, barely sentient pile of mud and moss not quite known for his kung fu skills. Our hero is already tripping before he even sees Man-Thing, thanks to an assassin’s poison his body is fighting, so the encounter goes about as badly a conceivably possible.

Hey, did Dr. Strange just say…? HELL YES!

Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen must have had a blast with this book. It’s filled with all sorts of affectionate references to classic Marvel material delivered in an atmosphere of pure fun. The single-minded simplicity of the Hulk is mined for comedy like he’s a giant, surly Leslie Nielsen, while the Sub-Mariner acts as his straight man and foil. Doctor Strange and the Silver Surfer trade off the superior-minded role of a Charles Winchester III, viewing their teammates with exasperated contempt. Imagine the overly serious, Alex Ross-loving comic fan of today picking up a book like this and reacting in horror when his spandex clad, magic ring-bearing crime fighters aren’t taken with stone-faced seriousness. This book was like an ice-cold enema to the people who were about to ruin comics for me.

The 1979/1989 issue is the one that is set during the time Byrne himself was a major player at Marvel and DC, so on some level it reads like a regular John Byrne comic. This is the issue where all the plot threads come together and it’s all kinds of awesome, so I’m focusing on this one anyway.

Superman/Batman: Generations #3

The wedding of the century is about to go on, but nobody knows about it since everyone involved has secret identities. Batman III and Supergirl (Bruce Wayne jr. and Kara Kent) are set to get hitched just as soon as they get back from fighting Brainiac in deep space. The father of the groom is missing the ceremony because, unbeknownst to everyone else, he’s been captured by Ra’s Al Ghul (another device used in the story is that characters are introduced during the time period they originally appeared in, so Bruce Wayne is already an old guy when he meets Ra’s), but reformed smoker Lois Lane has battled her cancer long and hard enough to have lived to be present at the ceremony. Unfortunately, there are a couple wedding crashers as well.

Earlier chapters showed Lois Lane being exposed to gold Kryptonite by Lex Luthor and the Joker, causing her unborn son to be stripped of any powers he may have inherited from his father. Later, their daughter Kara is born very much her father’s daughter, not as super-powered but with strengths characterized as “half of infinity is still infinity.” Their son Joel is kept in the dark about Dad’s night job and sis’ talents, but Luthor comes to him when the boy is ten years old and exposes the family secrets, having deduced Clark’s identity himself long ago. Joel becomes driven over the edge trying to compensate for his perceived weaknesses and the assumed betrayal of his family; he enlists during the Viet Nam war, leads his unit to slaughter a village of civilians, and is presumed dead when his men turn on him to stop his brutality.

So it is that the wedding is interrupted by a familiar green-and-purple armored figure who starts blowing everyone to kingdom come, exposing the true nature of the Kent family. With Clark incapacitated by a dose of Kryptonite radiation, Kara takes off after the figure as it flies away, only to discover it is her brother; rescued by a villager who took him in when he was left for dead, further brainwashed and newly empowered by Luthor, he has returned for revenge against his family. And gets it.

Like a good soldier, Cap flies to Wakanda, ready to sacrifice his most cherished possession for the good of the world. But he is met there by Klaw, longtime nemesis of the Black Panther and evil master of sound, who seeks to take advantage of the sonic wave to bolster his own power. The villain destroys Tony Stark’s device and soaks up the power of the sound wave, amplifying his own formidable power a thousand fold, then flies toward the vibranium mounds to destroy the metal which is his own sole weakness. All that stands between him, absolute power, and the destruction of countless lives is one man holding pieces of a shield bound together by duct tape. Sweet bejezus…

I’ll let the following panels speak for themselves:

That said, writer Joe Casey made it easy, distilling the basics of the character for someone just coming in. Cable’s from a ruined future world, having traveled back to change history for the better (to this day, that‘s all I know, or need to know, about the character). Arch-villain Apocalypse is the main bad guy who is gearing up for some big nastiness at the coming turn of the millennium, and he’s sent an unstoppable brute to start wiping out the humans as the first stage of his plan. The population of Manhattan has taken refuge in underground shelters while Cable and a few plucky guest stars make a desperate stand against their enemy.

The big battle scene follows! A Bendis Avengers story would stretch the scene over three issues in an effort to rob his readers of their comic buying dollars while delivering much posturing and little story; Busiek confines this most satisfactory climax to the back half of this single issue, and it’s all the more enjoyable for it. Reading these scenes, I was reminded of the awful pinup fight scenes in Secret Invasion, wherein the totally forgettable artist haphazardly crammed a jumble of figures into repeated double page spreads with no regard for backgrounds or storytelling. George Perez, on the other hand, is the master of delivering a host of characters and action while still maintaining a sense of order and context in every panel. This stuff is beautiful as always.

Here’s the setup: a prostitute named Amanda Flynn stumbles across a bipolar alien known only as Bozz who is stranded on our planet. Recognizing the usefulness of his keen intellect and space borne powers as a means of keeping herself off the streets, she establishes the detective agency of “Boswell and Flynn” in order to keep his mind engaged with interesting puzzles so he doesn’t descend into depression and kill himself. Along the way they pick up Salem Hawkshaw, a salty American barroom brawler who hangs around in case they need any heads busted. Six great issues of bizarre retro-futuristic adventures followed before the series was cancelled because I was apparently the only person reading it.

Ms. Marvel #7

I’ll be brief, because this is actually kind of painful to rehash. A fresh perspective on a female character might involve casting her in different kinds of roles within the stories she appears in. This particular issue rises to the challenge by placing her under threat of becoming the mind-controlled love slave of Modok!

The crime fighters track the Joker down to one of his old hideouts (literally: Let’s go see if he’s at one of his old hideouts!) and stumble across another grinning dead night watchmen. The Joker empties a gun at the caped crusaders before making the mistake of engaging Bats with his fists. Check out the page below, where Neal swipes himself by recreating his iconic “charging Batman” panel from Batman #251.

Kirby hauled out a somewhat different visual vocabulary for the Demon. A Kirby monster is a Kirby monster, but transplanting the creatures to a shadowy woods with an ancient stone fortress and witches dancing around a bonfire under the stars is quite a bit different from most of Jack’s back catalog. Jason Blood’s cast of supporting characters lurked in quiet studies leafing through crumbling manuscripts and Jack made it as compelling as Reed Richards hanging out by the Negative Zone portal.

Lots of scans this week; there were just too many great looking panels to choose from. Here’s Frank exploring his old homestead, where he finds a bunch of twisted mutants lowering a victim into a pit. A fight breaks out when they see him, and during the melee he gets a view into the hole where a giant spider is spinning a web around its latest offering. I love writer Gary Friedrich’s contribution to these panels: he employs an old device many readers may not be familiar with, called a “caption”, which allows the writer to add a bit of a literary touch to the narrative rather than simply scripting a movie storyboard. I won’t say one method is more or less valid than the other, but the old school way certainly adds a lot more flavor to the story and makes for a much denser read. Check out the panels below, and the text that had me checking to make sure I wasn’t holding an old EC comic in my hands.

The most prominent of which was Vlad the Impaler, better known as Dracula. Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan became the House of Ideas’ answer to Wein & Wrightson, dropping their title character’s gothic horror themes into the modern sensibilities of the late twentieth century. The result was about a gazillion issues (including magazine spin-offs and specials) devoted to a super-powered mass murderer who was always one step ahead of the plucky band of vigilantes on his tail.

My personal favorite, though, is Werewolf By Night, both for those early issues drawn by Mike Ploog (more on him next week) and for the outrageous and bizarre avenues his adventures traveled. For this week’s October monster-themed post, I’ll bring out the best of both these worlds, a Dracula/Werewolf showdown drawn by the incomparable Gene Colan.

Alan Moore’s run with the character was absolutely friggin’ brilliant, and killed the character for any writer who might try to follow when he turned the shambling swamp monster into an all-powerful deity. Worse, he removed the character from his gothic horror roots and dropped it into a science fiction setting by the time his run on the series was through. No more gloomy castles, monsters lurking in darkened corridors, mad scientists conducting gruesome experiments… That’s the kind of horror story I’d like to see but doesn’t pop up very often anymore, and which Len Wein and Berni Wrightson perfected over the first ten issues of the original Swamp Thing series.

Iron Fist’s origin shows what would happen if Bruce Wayne had gone off to be trained by Zen masters; his revenge-driven quest to become a deadly fighting machine turned him into a well-adjusted kid who ultimately found peace with himself. His seclusion in learning his skills bred a certain naiveté; a favorite scene from the final issue of the series shows him mystified by a bowl of potato salad. He wonders what the delightful dish is before the entire X-Men team bursts in and he has to kick Wolverine’s ass.

Stan suggested to Jack for the plot, “the F.F. fight God,” and Jack sent back pages of omens and signs presaging the arrival of a prophet, all the trappings of a classic myth set in modern day New York City. Here’s what our heroes witness upon their return home from their adventure in the Hidden Land: the skies turned to fire as the people panic in the streets. Soon the fire turns to a sea of stone hiding the sky, and we later learn this is the work of the Watcher, who is trying to conceal the planet from the figure approaching from deepest space on the back of a silver surfboard.

Check out the background in that splash page. Gil Kane captures the dizzying height of the bridge, as well as the far-reaching depth of the city beyond. Both he and Ross Andru after him did a splendid job of creating an environment these characters moved through, rather than dispensing endless pinup shots like most modern artists; as a kid I had a sense of what Spider-Man’s New York looked like, from this infamous bridge to Times Square to Rockefeller Plaza. I was a kid living in the Midwest, but New York lived and breathed for me through the pages of these books. I can’t say that flavor is captured by any present-day book, not even the precious Gotham of a Batman comic.

Here’s my childhood hero, right after he’s handed over his girlfriend’s lifeless body to a waiting ambulance. Things go sour pretty quick with the police who want to take him in for questioning; after he swats them away, they actually empty their sidearms at him! Anyone who doubts this sort of storytelling was way ahead of the curve, let me remind you that Batman was still playing charity baseball games for Commissioner Gordon over in the DCU.

Thanos didn’t need the competition in the universal conquest department, so he offered to step in and help Warlock with the most obvious solution: find the critical junction of his life when he is on the path to becoming the power-crazed madman, and killing himself! As Thanos holds the Magus and his army at bay, Warlock is transported to the strange Ditkoscape of his own karmic path to isolate the pivotal moment of his own future.

I didn’t know any of this yet when I read this issue; all I saw was that a friggin’ flying corpse was attacking Peter Parker! The total creepiness of Carrion’s premise and his physical appearance was bad enough, but what adds the final element of horror to the issue is that Carrion attacks Peter Parker as Peter Parker, the human side of the character the reader identifies with rather than the fantastic figure we project ourselves onto; he seems in the reader’s mind to be as vulnerable as any of us would be if a friggin’ flying corpse was attacking!

Starlin does a great job of using the props the ghost town setting has to offer as the battle rages along.

Mere words cannot describe my love for this comic. Here’s how it ends: the Thing manages to wreck the bomb, only to discover it’s a fake. The bet between the villains gets called off when it is revealed that Kurrgo is cheating by augmenting the Thing’s strength-- not that that seemed to help too much. The two protagonists get to trash a giant robot, then a spaceship blows up. The Thing is left to start walking towards home from the desert as the Hulk bounds away over the horizon.

Thanks, Len and Jim, for ruining my life with your wonderful comic.

Man, there was a time Englehart could do no wrong. I have no idea what happened to him after Reagan took office. The pencils for this issue was provided by George Tuska, who was ubiquitous for much of this decade, having excellent runs on the Avengers and Iron Man as well as this book. His figures have a fluid quality to them, like a less moody Gene Colan, and his faces are wonderfully expressive. He’s one of my favorite artists everyone seems to have forgotten about.

Our story: Luke finds himself pitted against Black Mariah, one big momma who runs a ring of fake police cars and ambulances. They pick up newly deceased persons and steal their possessions, gaining access to their homes and offices for later plunder simply by stealing the keys from the corpses. Here’s Black Mariah herself: I’ll confess I’m not too sure about this character. I got the same feeling reading these panels as I might get reading a World War II-era comic and seeing the depiction of the Japanese.

Here’s the story:

1) Spider-Man is ill, having contracted a blood-borne disease from his last dustup with Morbius, the living vampire. While tracking down a scientist who might help, he discovers that Morbius has already kidnapped the man, and gets blamed for the crime himself. Turns out the scientist is an old colleague of Professor X, who assembles his students to track down Spider-Man and rescue the missing scientist. The mutants confront the wall-crawler…

2) …and a type 7 “superhero misunderstanding battle” breaks out. Check out this handful of panels wherein every single character gets to demonstrate their powers for any new readers who aren’t familiar with them. That’s excellent storytelling on the part of Gil Kane (we can thank writer Gerry Conway for the excellent dialogue: “Use your eyes! Your eyes!”). Before the fight concludes, Spider-Man collapses from his illness and is hauled back to Westchester, where Xavier figures out that he has mere hours to live unless the X-Men can track down Morbius and create a vaccine.

And here’s how a busy crimefighter gets the energy to battle injustice: Nutriment capsules! Gee, Daredevil, I wonder how your girlfriend ended up being a junkie…

While not exactly the counterculture folk heroes these characters had been a decade previous, Spider-Man and the Hulk were still quite visible. Besides their monthly comics (which could be found in most grocery or department stores—just imagine!), each had a syndicated newspaper strip and a television series. This issue is one big bundle of cross-promotion and is obviously geared towards readers more familiar with the characters from other media; the Hulk’s alter ego is introduced as “R.B. ‘David’ Banner” and goes through the entire issue grunting and growling like Lou Ferrigno’s version, without uttering a single “Hulk will smash!”

The comic is sixteen pages long; four ad pages and one page for an origin recap, leaving 11 story pages to stage “the battle of the century,” as the cover says. Each character gets a couple pages of introduction as we see a wandering R.B.D. Banner get in a jam that causes him to turn green, while Peter Parker briefly deals with juggling a class schedule with superheroing before spotting the Hulk wandering onto campus to start a ruckus.

The series employs some Pulp Fiction-style time jumps in the narrative, so you needed to be a more sophisticated reader to follow the story. This was also probably the darkest, most violent series I encountered in the first two decades of my life. I’d suggest Rich Buckler even outdoes the Frank Miller Daredevil comics that came along a decade later for simple brutality. Here are a few scans from a number of issues ranging from #25-31:

In any event, things go bad for Kulan Gath because while his trap might be fine for holding Cimmerian barbarians, spider-powered captives are another matter entirely. The pair escapes and the fight gets carried outside, where the wizard and Sonja herself gets a view of our brave new world and are quite horrified. Spider-Man takes advantage of their shock to beat the villain senseless, removing the amulet in the process so the guard reverts back to normal. Crisis averted, Mary Jane does the same.

That’s the main feature; now on to the backup stories provided by unknown artists with unexceptional talents. Immediately following the Wolverine story is… Holy crap, a Steve Ditko Captain America?!!? Eight wonderful pages, the concluding chapter of a two-part story by one of the great masters, also (like Roy Thomas from the previous post) entering his fourth (or fifth?) decade of making the coolest comics around. Ditko’s work is always a joy to behold, and he’s in top form with this story of Cap trying to unravel the mystery of the villain Wargod’s secret identity. This makes me want to dig out some of my old issues of Speedball…

Strange and company follow, having picked up Michael Morbius earlier in the story, and enlist the aid of 1970’s relic Brother Voodoo to assist in the invasion of the fort. Things get hairy when Laveau unleashes the vampires on everybody, until Brother Voodoo plays his trump card: raising Christophe’s army from their graves for a ginormous zombies-vs.-vampires showdown that delivers six comics’ worth of goodness.

In this issue, the Knights of Wundagore have kidnapped Thor’s mortal friend Eric Masterson in order to lure the thunder god to their mountain fortress. They seek to enlist his aid to search for their missing leader, the High Evolutionary, who was last seen going into space with Hercules at the end of an Avengers annual. Before negotiations can begin, however, a treacherous lieutenant sends some soldiers out to greet Thor with guns blazing, and we’re treated to the beginnings of some Lee-inspired lecturing from Thor about honor and nobility as he spanks his foes.

I was surprised to see a couple jaws drop when I mentioned this; could it be no one else remembered this milestone in goofy comic lore? So at Dara’s urging, I’ve set the controls of the way back machine a few years ahead to give you these panels of the father of the new conservative movement battling Steve Rogers in his briefs. Does anyone care about the backstory? A group of anarchists called the Serpent Society have poisoned the DC water supply with a chemical that turns everyone into rampaging snake people blah blah blah… here’s the President in his underwear:

This guy must have been bred in a laboratory, a bizarre hybrid of Kirby and Warhol. Many of these pages look like old school psychedelic rock concert posters, until you get to the bare-knuckled spy thriller action. Nick Fury hops a speeding rocket sled to escape a nuclear bomb before charging into a fistfight with the villain Scorpio, and the roars of combat drown out the Donovan you might have heard playing in the background in earlier pages.

But wait, there’s more! The menace behind the strange goings on at The Mesa of Lost Souls is none other than Warlord Kaa, leader of the Shadow People, who first appeared in an old Kirby monster comic way back before Fantastic Four #1 hit the stands. His people can control humans’ minds by blending with their shadows, and they’ve started their invasion of Earth in the middle of the desert for some reason too brilliant for me to understand. The Champions arrive to put a stop to the scheme, despite the romantic tension provided by the Black Widow and her former boyfriend, Hawkeye.

Our heroes hide in the snowy forest as Von Shtupf’s henchmen pursue them on skis, Bond-villain style. We are then treated to a flashback showing the secret origin of Frankenstein, in case, y’know, anyone reading the comic hadn’t heard the story. As the tale ends, a scream draws the pair to the defense of a female skiing the slopes who the bad guys have decided to harass purely out of their own evil nature. After the good guys take care of the henchmen, she gets the drop on them with some handy sleep gas.

It turns out the Absorbing Man has been hiding out on Easter Island. He was recently stomped so badly by the Avengers that he’s been reduced to a paranoid amnesiac, hiding from unknown pursuers. Convinced Banner is one of “them”, he captures the scientist and drags him into the tunnels leading to his subterranean hiding place. Here’s a series of claustrophobic panels as Banner struggles to keep from changing into his oversized alter ego in a narrow tunnel under tons of earth:

Even though the story is steeped in post-Watergate disillusionment, a tpb release would not seem dated today. An Orwellian political operative named Quentin Hardarman (operating through his front organization, the Committee to Restore America’s Principles) has spearheaded a campaign of slander to tarnish Cap’s image and ruin his reputation. When Cap and the falcon become fugitives, Hardarman introduces a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing called Moonstone to take Cap’s place as “America’s hero.”

Hardarman works for the mysterious Number One, leader of the Secret Empire, who launches an invasion of Washington, D.C. In the country’s darkest hour, Moonstone steps up to defend the White House—only to be apparently humiliated by Number One’s main goon. Not realizing Moonstone is actually a collaborator, the dispirited country prepares to surrender until Cap and his allies come riding to the rescue. Cap chases Number one down to the Oval Office itself, where the true villain is unmasked and takes his own life. Following the events of this issue, a disillusioned Steve Rogers loses his faith in the American people and their leaders. He gives up the identity of Captain America, adopting for a time the role of Nomad, “the man without a country.”

I hope there is a special circle of Hell reserved for the editor who disrespected Sal in this fashion.

One of the earliest comics graced by Sal’s line work that I ever saw is also my favorite superhero slugfest, a “classic misunderstanding battle” (to paraphrase Richard Jones) with the White Tiger, in Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man #10.

The White Tiger was part of Marvel’s mid-1970’s attempt to broaden their audience by bringing some diversity to their pantheon of characters. If memory serves, Hispanic martial artist Hector Ayala himself came to a bad end (and I haven’t bothered to see what the premise of the new White Tiger books is), Bill Foster is dead, and Carol Danvers has grown several bra sizes on recent Ms. Marvel covers, so I’m not sure the experiment has carried over to the present day.

The fight rages from (George Perez) cover to cover, but there’s still a lot of story jammed into the panels thanks to writer Bill Mantlo. As seen in the previous issue, protesters on the Empire State University campus are on the verge of a riot over the closing of a night school that serves primarily minority students, and the university president has called out the guys with rubber bullets to stop them. A professor has framed the White Tiger for the theft of a valuable manuscript he hopes to fence in order to gain the funds to help keep the school open. As the real White Tiger confronts the professor, Spider-Man stumbles in, leaps to the wrong conclusion, and page one of this concluding chapter begins with the tussle that runs nearly to the end of the book.

Sal demonstrates in these pages something I find lacking in new books; a well drawn superhero fight scene. A modern book, with it’s emphasis on portraying mood and atmosphere instead of advancing any action (called “decompression”), either stretches a single action over a ridiculous number of panels (I consulted a recent Kubert Batman in which an entire page is devoted to a spear being thrown at a Man-Bat), or we’re treated to a series of disjointed images of figures slugging it out, gritting their teeth in pin-up poses with no cause-and-effect moving from panel to panel—no sense of choreography. Check out these pages instead, where the action in one panel initiates the action in the next, showing us a series of totally different events whose final panel is dependent on the first in the chain.

Writer Bill Mantlo redeems the issue on two points: the first, a single page showing once again that Doc Doom is the coolest villain in all of western literature. As Mini-Doom and Mini-Cap sneak back into the castle, Cap is surprised by Doom’s display of affection for those that serve him out of genuine loyalty. By the end of the page, however, the Doom we know returns when he gets pissed off at the sight of someone else sitting on his throne. The exchange in those last two word balloons is priceless.

In this offering from Marvel’s alternate reality series, Stan Lee has taken the place of Reed Richards, bullpen secretary Flo Steinberg fills in for Susan Storm, former Marvel VP Sol Brodsky flames on, and Jack himself dishes out the clobbering. It seems the Skrulls hatched a plan to mutate the population of Earth, and their initial experiment involved setting off a cosmic ray device at Marvel Headquarters. In this strange parallel Earth, the quartet chronicled the exploits of their fictional counterparts while they regularly saved the world in secret. Here they are gathered in Stan’s office (their leader sans moustache in his younger days), shortly before the fateful event that cursed them with strange abilities…

Here’s the plot: The Surfer has befriended Galactus’ newest herald Nova, and assured himself that she is guiding the space god only to uninhabited planets to feed. Nova falls under Mephisto’s influence, however, and believes herself to be in love with Galactus. Suddenly she serves him blindly, taking him to a series of populated planets, as we see Galactus destroy everything from militant cultures to a planet of ewoks.

Len Wein wrote the first meeting of these two characters, and Ross Andru pencilled the story. Ross was the guy who introduced me to Spider-Man, and his visual style remains the definitive look for the character for me. This issue of Marvel Team-Up appeared at about the same time as Andru was beginning his fifty-odd issue run on Amazing Spider-Man; the artwork appears slightly less developed than the later issues I remember so fondly, but the flavor is definitely there.

Maybe I can add this: one thing I’ve never heard attributed to him was his apparent desire to move comics away from purely superhero material, starting when he moved to DC in the early 70’s. While his concepts may have had the superficial trappings of garish costumes and super-powered characters, books like The Demon, Jimmy Olson, New Gods, The Eternals, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kamandi, etc., all seemed more rooted in the realms of fantasy and science fiction. The guy who specialized in westerns in the 1950’s and invented the romance comic was trying to broaden the range of material available on the spinner rack well into the back half of his career (obviously there were some exceptions, like his splendid return to Captain America).