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.