Second installment of the Marvel Team-Up that reunited Spiderman with other superheroes, and sometimes villains, to live adventures beyond their usual environment, where the partner used to carry much of the weight of the narrative. Panini comics keep helping us complete our collections with these hardcover compilation volumes.
Marvel Team-Up: Spiderman and his monstrous “friends”
We are in the mid-seventies of the twentieth century. After more than a decade of publications of the Marvel Era of comics, the publisher decided to include as characters some of the most significant monsters in world literature. Until that moment he had had the opposition of the Comics Code Authority, a kind of association in charge of ensuring the content that reached American homes. The reality is that it seemed that not having the Comics Code Authority seal on the covers of the four-color publications detracted from the moral or appropriateness of those stories, so Marvel adjusted the best it could to those standards that actually ended up working. as a kind of censorship.
Stan Lee had already faced the CCA before but, far from being a setback, it strengthened him to operate outside the code if necessary at certain times. All this caused by the well-known Spiderman Drug Trilogy. The Comics Code Authority decided to relax its rigor a bit and allowed certain licenses before losing the weight it exerted on publishers. This is how the monsters made their way into the pages of The House of Ideas, introducing themselves to Dracula in the first issue that opens this volume, the Giant-Size Spiderman # 1 USA. The creature of Frankenstein and the Werewolf would follow later.
Spider-Man lives not only on novelty
Some of the characters that will accompany Peter Parker throughout these episodes, apart from The Human Torch which has its own dose of prominence, are heavyweights within the Marvel of the time. Daredevil, the Punisher, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man or Doctor Strange they also have their journey through the chapters included here. Alternating lesser-known characters with others that have their own collection helps both to empower those whose presence is more testimonial and those who, having their periodic headline, can attract readers to their adventures with a different cut than those of everyone’s favorite arachnid (saving Eddie Brock and Venom fans, who weren’t even in the works at the time).
The weight of these episodes falls mainly on the work of Len Wein and Gerry Conway, two legends of the superhero comic, who together with the arrival of Bill Mantlo for the last three issues included in this volume, make up the triplet of scriptwriters of this stage covering a year and a half of publications in the United States. Entertaining and fast-paced stories that prioritize the heroic part of the Spiderman character over the more personal treatment of the figure of Peter Parker.
The imprint that artists leave
And for the graphic facet we mainly have two cartoonists of different invoices. On the one hand, an accomplished Jim Mooney who will later be overshadowed by that great man, who is often belittled by the figure of his brother John, Sal Buscema. Sal represents a leap towards a more modern conception of the vignette, the inclusion of some spectacular splash page and the rupture of the drawing that goes beyond the limits set by the framing of the static image itself.
They will be replaced on certain occasions by a Ross Andru, in full swing, and a brief appearance by Gil Kane that is very significant, since he signs the collaboration between the Human Torch and the Iceman in the confrontation they both have with Equinox. , the thermodynamic man. This completes a luxurious line-up that brings us some of the most remembered comics of the wall-crawler in conjunction with other colleagues.