There was a second volume of Marvel Team-Up in the mid-90s that lasted about a year. I owned an issue at some point, where Spider-Man "teams up" with Man-Thing, trying to recover some gem for some mysterious guy. In the mid-2000s, Robert Kirkman got a crack at it. Kirkman tended to write 4 to 6 issue story arcs that swapped in and out heroes as they went, most of which tied together into some bigger arc. But his run is probably best known for the crossover with his and Cory Walker's character, Invincible, in issue 14.
I don't care about that, so the issues I have are 15 through 18, the "League of Losers" story, where a guy named Chronok travels back from 2099 to kill all the heroes using all the information the future has about them. If that sort of shit actually worked, it seems like Kang would have pulled it off years ago, but I guess Chronok attacks them in their homes, dispensing with whatever honor Kang pretends to have.
The only survivors are a bunch of heroes who were too unknown for there to be any solid intel about them. They sort of stumble into each other and manage to steal Chronok's device, traveling to 2099 to stop him before he puts his plan in motion. From left to right up there we've got Darkhawk, X-23, Gravity, Sleepwalker, Terror Inc., Speedball, Dagger, Mutant 2099(?), and Reed Richards' brain in a Ben Grimm robot-suit.
My initial thought was that Reed had hijacked Ben's corpse, but no. Arana was one of the initial survivors, but she got killed and Terror, Inc., is wearing her right arm, which grants him her weird exoskeleton ability.
The heroes triumph, but this is one of those stories where the rule is you just create a new timeline. So in their past, Chronok still succeeded and their world is ruined, but there's another timeline where he never made it back there, and versions of them already exist, so they just stay in 2099.
Kirkman gives Darkhawk center stage as the one who leads and rallies the others, and who ends up bringing down Chronok. Gravity and Sleepwalker seem like much heavier hitters, and Speedball and Dagger were both around for a long time before Darkhawk. It's weird seeing Darkhawk talk to Speedball like 'Hawk is the grizzled vet and Speedball the child, but Kirkman's playing pretty loose here anyway. I've never seen X-23 written the way he does, as having survived the initial attack on the X-Men because she got scared and ran, and eventually getting giggly and cuddly with Gravity.
I think the only time that story was ever referenced was the Deadpool/Great Lakes Initiative Summer Fun Spectacular, when Squirrel Girl uses Doom's time machine to try and retrieve this Speedball to replace the one in her present, who is calling himself Penance.
3 comments:
I'm pretty sure I read the whole of Kirkman's run and I remember quite enjoying it, although I don't remember any details, beyond the back half of the series being about an "evil" Iron Man from another dimension.
The only other bit I remembered was Kirkman introducing a new character, Freedom Ring, with a reality warping ring (maybe part of a Cosmic Cube?), and the evil Iron Man killed him? The character may have been gay, and his getting murdered pissed some folks off? Less sure about that part.
That sounds familiar! Yes, I think there was some Cosmic Cube related business there.
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