Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1
Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Gil Kane, Ross Andru, Sal Buscema and friends
Reprints: Marvel Team-up #1-24 (March 1972 — August 1974)
Get this if: you’re in for some Bronze Age nostalgia — Three stars
Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol 1 is the quintessential Marvel Bronze Age collection. If you want to know what a run of the mill Marvel series was like in the seventies, this is the one for you. It took me right back, it did. Not that I’m that old that I’ve read these stories when they first came out, but I did read a lot of them in Dutch translation, when they were published here a decade and a half later or so…
Though it may be heard to imagine now, I remember Christopher Priest mentioning once in an Usenet thread that the very idea of Marvel Team-Up was controversial at the time it first came out. Spider-Man was supposed to be a loner after all, somebody looked at with suspicion by most other heroes. Just look at any Silver Age crossover to see how standoffish they all were to him. If you then create a title that has him palling around with one hero after another it changes Spider-Man’s character. He can’t be mysterious and slightly creepy if he starts welcoming every new hero to the Marvel Universe…
For me that’s one of the greatest differences between Silver Age and Bronze Age Marvel, that degree of interaction between various characters. In the Silver Age, despite crossovers and guest stars titles followed their own path and you could never confuse a Fantastic Four for the Avengers; in the Bronze Age it all started to mesh together. The soap opera takes over and knits the universe together. Since that’s the Marvel I grew up with, it’s also the Marvel I like the best, midway between the Silver Age and the crossovers excesses of the eighties and nineties.
The writers in this volume are Gerry Conway on #1-12, followed by Len Wein on #13-24, with art mostly by Gil Kane but also featuring Ross Andru on early issues and Sal Buscema and Jim Mooney later on. It’s all inked in the dependable Marvel House Style, but both Kane and Buscema are immediately recognisable. On the whole I found the Wein issues to be slightly better than the Conway ones, even if Conway was more ambitious, having several multi-issues storylines going on.
Most of the stories are fairly simple: Spidey (or the Human Torch in one issue) is going his merry way and runs into the guest star du jour, either helping him fight some mooks or more often getting into a fight with them for some contrieved reason or other. Once any misunderstandings are cleared up, the villain of the story reveals themselves, manages to defeat Spidey and co so that the plot can continue, explains their plan to conquer the world|rob the bank|kill all superheroes before being stopped at the last moment. There’s little characterisation other than in references to what’s been going on in Spider-Man’s own title or subplot in these early issues. It’s heroes meet, fight each other, patch up their differences, get defeated by the real villain, escape their death trap and stop the villain reaching his or her goal. It’s all done professionally, but no great art.
Fun though. And the art, especially by Kane, makes up for a lot of deficiencies in the stories.