It feels like Marvel Team-Up started as a co-starring book for Spider-Man and the Human Torch, only to become essentially a second ongoing for Spider-Man after 3 issues. The Torch gets the occasional starring role in the first 50 issues (18, 23, 26, 29, 32, 36), plus a couple of co-star spots. There are a couple of issues focused on the Hulk teaming up with someone later on (Spider-Woman, Ka-Zar, Heroes for Hire) but it's Spidey's world for ~90% of the book's 150-issue run, so maybe that was always the intention.
Most of the time, each issue stands by itself, with some set of circumstances bringing Spider-Man in contact with another hero, and they have to work together to defeat some greater threat. Chris Claremont takes over as writer in issue 57, starting a 30+ issue stretch. While it wasn't unheard of before that for the events of one issue to spill into the next, Claremont seems to lean into that a lot more, and he sometimes stacks the guest stars, rather than coming up with reasons with last issues hero is gone by the next issue. Spidey gets tangled up in Davos stealing the chi of Shou-Lao from Iron Fist in issue 63, then works with Misty Knight and Colleen Wing in issue 64 to try and help Iron Fist not get killed fighting Davos.
Some of those work better than others. By the end of the story that starts in issue 82, Nick Fury's recruited Shang-Chi to help him, Spider-Man and the Black Widow. Maybe the Master of Kung Fu had some backstory with Viper or Silver Samurai I didn't catch, but it seemed a bit random.
Sometimes Spider-Man gets to be the hero, sometimes he gets bailed out by the guest star, or does something that helps the guest star save the day. Ms. Marvel might be the one who ultimately beats the Super-Skrull, but Spider-Man had to keep him busy until they could set things up for her to have the chance to win. Frog-Man catches the White Rabbit, but after Spidey caught the getaway van and took down the rest of the gang.
Like a lot of books we've looked at lately, Marvel Team-Up lends itself to selective reading. I own 16 issues out of the 150, with 10 of those written by Claremont. Mostly drawn by John Byrne or the Buscema/Leialoha duo. But looking at a cover gallery, there's almost that many other issues I read at some point. The cover promises a character I'm interested in, or at least a wild premise that makes me want to know more about what's actually happening.
2 comments:
I feel like Marvel Team-Up should be constantly in print, sales figures be damned. It feels like the sort of thing that should always be around, but maybe unhook it from Spidey and have it be just a random team-up (!) between two heroes each issue.
Maybe make it an exquisite corpse type thing and have one of the two heroes carry forward into the next issue, teaming up with a new hero, and so on. I'm sure they probably did that at some point.
Anyway, MTU. I like it!
I was thinking maybe Robert Kirkman did that with MTU vol. 3, which we'll see next week, but I think he still tended to either swap heroes out entirely from one issue to the next, or ultimately looped back around to the ones he started with by the end of the arc.
Maybe the closest I've seen to what you describe was the last year or so of Cable/Deadpool, when Nicieza had lost Cable to Mike Carey's X-Men and Deadpool just started teaming up (or fighting, mostly) different heroes each issue as part of a larger story.
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