Marvel Team-Up 96 (Aug. 1980)

This is another issue that sticks in my head despite the fact that I didn't actually have a copy of my own. This was another one of my brother's books. I don't remember how he got it; he was only four years old when it was published, so someone must have given it to him a few years later. As was typical, all the Marvel superhero books we had access to at that early age were odd in some way--and this was one of the oddest.

Howard the Duck is a satirical character, and in this issue he and Spider-Man teamed up (sort of) to fight a man who called himself Status Quo. Status Quo was a deeply conservative librarian who hated the fads of the late '70s (e.g., hula-hooping, roller-skating, disco, Frisbee, jogging), and raised an army of "antifaddists" to attack the people in Central Park who happened to be engaging in these fads. As Spider-Man rescues the joggers, etc., of New York City, Howard (who drove Quo in his taxi all the way from Ohio to NYC) confronts the madman until Spider-Man is able to subdue him for the cops. Needless to say, 'tis a silly issue.


A typical example of this issue's humor.
Alan Kupperberg, Marvel's resident satirist, wrote and illustrated the whole thing himself. Mike and I thought it was a very weird comic. I'm guessing we were still a bit too young to "get it"--not that it's a work of subtle satirical genius or anything. We just didn't know what to make of it.

Later, after I'd become a comic book collector, I found a copy of the first issue of the black and white Howard the Duck magazine, written by Bill Mantlo and illustrated by two of my favorites, Michael Golden and Klaus Janson. By then I "got it" (particularly since by then I had already become a fan of the Batman TV show, the greatest work of satire in American popular culture). But Marvel Team-Up 96, being my first exposure to the weirdest character in the Marvel Universe, stuck in my head forever after.

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag (1974)

This book belonged to my brother. My memory of its acquisition is fuzzy, but I remember the two of us being at the mall with our dad, who bought this book for my brother at one of the kiosks, probably from some local guy who rented the space for the weekend to sell off part of his collection. This wasn't in 1974, because my brother wasn't born until 1976 and I would've been just a year old; it was probably sometime in the early '80s.

Anyway, the Holiday Grab-Bag was important because it provided Mike and me with our first experience with many Marvel superheroes in situ. We had watched Spider-Man's live-action segments on The Electric Company (until that show was canceled), tuned in to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends every Saturday morning, and read his comic strip adventures in the newspaper every day, but we had never read a Spider-Man story in an actual Marvel comic book. Here, his team-up with the Human Torch (from Marvel Team-Up 1) is entertaining, but was by no means the highlight of the book.

In terms of characters, Daredevil made the biggest impression on me. Wally Wood's lively rendition of the Sub-Mariner beating the living hell out of Daredevil for a dozen pages, and Daredevil refusing to give up the fight, is legendary (originally published in Daredevil 7). From the moment I read that story, Daredevil was, and continues to be, my favorite superhero. I remember pretending to be superheroes with my brother a few times after that (playing characters either pulled straight from this book or other, more ever-present, characters like Batman and Superman), and when I'd play as Daredevil I'd close my eyes, trying to figure out if I could fight crime just by using my sense of hearing. The Daredevil story in the Holiday Grab-Bag makes it clear, through Matt Murdock's interaction with his partner, Foggy Nelson, and his secretary, Karen Page, that he's blind, but I wasn't able to interpret, from Daredevil's fight with the Sub-Mariner, how exactly his powers worked. (Of course, if I had been reading the current issues of Daredevil at the time, Frank Miller's visual depictions of Daredevil's radar-sense would have made it much more clear to me.)

In terms of story, it's the one starring the Black Widow that made the biggest impression on me (from Amazing Adventures 5). From Gene Colon's frightening depiction of the crazy-eyed cult leader and his sinister plan to rob a blood bank (whatever that is--my eight-year-old self wondered) to Natasha Romanoff's tearful failure to save the troubled kid's life at the end of the story, it was extremely affecting.

It also contains one panel that my brother and I found hilarious. As the Black Widow fights a couple of thugs, one of them hits her in the face. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not the violence against women we found funny, but the thug's line in that panel: "S'funny, Widow-woman!" Here, we had stumbled upon one of the major limitations of comic book dialogue in the '70s and '80s (perhaps imposed, indirectly, by the Comics Code Authority), where the author would struggle to make his adult characters sound tough by using completely unobjectionable language. And sometimes (often, in fact) it sounded ridiculous. "S'funny, Widow-woman!" became a catchphrase of ours for years afterward, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it.

Less interesting to me than Daredevil and the Black Widow were the two reprints at the end of the book (from Fantastic Four 25 and 26), which featured the Fantastic Four and the Avengers fighting the Hulk. The B-list Marvel characters were the ones that most appealed to me, and this appeal continued when I began reading Marvel comic books in earnest five years later. As I mentioned in my first post, superheroes just didn't do it for me in those days. I was an Archie fan--but the Holiday Grab-Bag provided me with a tantalizing first look at the characters I would later become far more familiar with.

My brother's copy of the Holiday Grab-Bag eventually disappeared. I distinctly remember the first page having been ripped out of the book and ending up in his trashcan (a testament to my brother's eventual, complete disinterest in comics). I did rescue it, tape it back together, and return it to its rightful place for him, but the book was gone a few years later. I recently bought my own second-hand copy on eBay, to relive my first experience with Marvel superheroes.

G.I. Joe 42 (Dec. 1985)

On a pleasant fall day in 1985 my dad and I were in the Hills Department Store in Bloomington, Indiana, and as we walked past the spinner rack this book's cover caught my eye.

At twelve years old, I was a devoted fan of Archie comics who sometimes read the occasional Richie Rich or Walt Disney comic. My acquisition of these types of books was both random and sporadic, but that didn't matter because each issue was self-contained, some might even say repetitive. Archie could never choose between Betty or Veronica (though he did seem to prefer Veronica most days), Richie wasn't ever able to reform his obnoxious cousin Reggie, and Donald Duck always lost his temper with Huey, Dewey, and Louie. So it didn't matter if I read issue 501 of Archie Giant Series Magazine before issue 472, or Ri¢hie Ri¢h Gems 33 before Ri¢hie Ri¢h Vaults of Mystery 29, because they had no chronological (to say nothing of a causal) relationship to one another. As such, I didn't consider myself a collector of comics so much as a reader of comics.

Nor did I have much interest in becoming a collector. I had one friend in grade school who was a confirmed superhero comics junkie. I distinctly remember picking out a half dozen or so comic books to give to him at his ninth birthday party, and wondering if I chose the right ones. To me, comics starring the Justice League of America (or, as I knew them at the time, the Super Friends), the Fantastic Four, or any of the other superteams were completely foreign objects that held no appeal to me. My friend John was excited about the choices I'd made for him, but when he tried to explain what was so great about the Green Lantern, the Flash, et al., I tuned him out. I couldn't help it. Oddly enough, I think I considered these books to be too mature for me, too "grown up"--filled with artwork that wasn't cartoony enough and stories that were too serious. Archie and his perennial girlfriend dilemma was more my speed than the Avengers' latest battle with the Hulk. And what held true at nine years old held true when I was twelve, or so I'd thought.

But G.I. Joe turned out to be my gateway drug. While I was reading Archie comics and spurning superhero comics, my younger brother and I were nonetheless thoroughly engrossed in playing with our Star Wars and G.I. Joe action figures, staging epic battles in the basement, acting out exactly the types of dramatic, violent scenes that took place in the books published by Marvel and DC. So when I saw that copy of G.I. Joe 42 on the Hills spinner rack, with Storm Shadow about to hack some mystery character to bits, I picked it up and started flipping through it.¹ My dad, who had read comics for a while when he was a kid (mostly Classics Illustrated, all but six of which my grandmother condemned to the trash can), quickly gauged my interest and asked me if I wanted him to buy it for me. The answer was yes, and so my days of comic book collecting began in earnest--courtesy of my father, who provided me with the chance to turn a passing interest into the beginning of a new hobby.²

As I mentioned above, this was a whole new type of comic book to me. G.I. Joe 42 began in media res, and the story it was in the middle of telling didn't wrap up at the end of the issue either. But it was fascinating. I read it repeatedly when we returned home, gleaning something new each time. I recognized most of the characters, but their relationships were new to me--different as they were from the relationships my brother and I had forged for them in action figure form (fellow Joe fans will recall that the G.I. Joe cartoon had only just begun airing on TV that fall). This was a type of comic book, then, that I would have to seek out each month if I wanted to truly understand what was going on. Thus began my slow gravitation to the Marvel universe.

At first I stuck exclusively with G.I. Joe, convinced I still wasn't interested in superheroes. But I did start to branch out. I bought the final issue of Marvel's Star Wars comic a few months later, and began browsing other nonsuperhero titles. Later still, I'd succumb to Spider-Man and the rest of the Marvel universe, becoming a full-fledged Marvel zombie. But that moment lay several months into the future. Back on that day in 1985, I was merely a kid whose eyes were opening to a wider world of comics. All thanks to my dad.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ If I were feeling poetic I might say that the mystery character on the cover represented me, about to be whacked with this new desire to collect comics.

² Earlier, my dad had also passed along his love of Mad Magazine to me, but Mad pretty much fit in with Archie and the rest of the comics I read--chronology wasn't a factor, and thus I could pick up copies of Mad as sporadically as any of the other kids' comics I read. I didn't "collect" Mad anymore than I "collected" Archie.