Saturday morning style with Marvel Team-Up #90 and Marvel Adventures #17

For a long time as a young collector, the oldest comic I owned was a beat up copy of Marvel Team-Up #90 I got from a yard sale along with some issues of DP7, Ghost Rider, and the Ultraverse's Mantra. I couldn't tell you a thing about Mantra or DP7 without revisiting them, but I can recall MTU#90 very vividly for some reason. Maybe it's the dynamic 1980's cover by Jack Abel and Al Milgrom which features Spider-Man and the Beast doing battle with gigantic, electrified Modular Man and the flying Shrike. Maybe it's the groovy, dated dialogue that I fondly remember poking fun at as a kid, or maybe it's just the done-in-one episodic completeness of the story that makes it so memorable.

Later on I would acquire some much older issues of Spider-Man and Batman and that copy of MTU#90 wouldn't seem quite as impressive, but for a window of time that was my most frequent exposure to "old comics". The Marvel and DC books I was getting in the mid-90's were glossy, printed on thicker paper, and usually contained stories that were "Part 7 of 14" or somesuch. I was already becoming a jaded hipster even then, riding a wave of fake nostalgia for a bygone era of comics from a simpler time.

(I should mention Marvel Team-Up #90 came from the simpler time of 1980.)

Nevertheless, there was a part of me as a young collector that really wanted the Marvel Team-Ups and Brave & The Bolds of yore to make a comeback, so when a new Marvel Team-Up series was announced in the backs of Spider-Man books from circa '96, I was estatic. Soon after that initial rush, I realized that I didn't have access to comic shops in my area and that series was most likely going to come and go without me ever realizing it.

I've mentioned in previous posts that the town I became a collector in (Port Aransas, Tx) had comic books on nearly every convenience store rack and if all you wanted was to piece together the monthly Superman titles or get a smattering of X-Men comics, you would have been okay. Outside of the bigger characters, it was rare to see something like Incredible Hulk or Legion of Super-Heroes in my area, but for whatever reason, Marvel Team-Up occasionally showed up. I got one taste of it, realized this wasn't to my liking and then discovered a series that carried on the legacy of Marvel Team-Up even better than its successor did.

My portal to comics being animation, I would often pick up the various Adventures books whenever I saw them: Batman Adventures, Superman Adventures, etc. Marvel got in on this trend of doing comics in the Saturday morning cartoon style and that's how I bumped into Marvel Adventures, in particular, issue #17.

This series built upon the shared visual language (gawdy as it was) between the Spider-Man and X-Men 90's cartoons and imagined a world where The Avengers and other Marvel properties could get the animated treatment. (Yeah, I know there were those Marvel Action Hour shows and a late 90's Avengers cartoon, but those don't seem to count here for some reason. I guess the Spidey and X-Men shows were more ubiquitous with fans.) Issue #17 features Spidey and Iron Man teaming up to battle the Grey Gargoyle in a simple, fun adventure that took me right back to my then only retro comic memory, which was MTU#90.

I got a few more issues here and there of Marvel Adventures, but it wouldn't be until a few years later and my first fledgling trips to the comic shop that I could seek out earlier issues. (And they were surprisingly hard to come across!) Looking at the run now, it isn't a milestone or anything special, but it's one of those series that helped expose me to characters other than Spidey and the usual X-Men. The stories would branch out beyond NYC into other locales and even go cosmic for a few issues with characters like Silver Surfer and Thanos, all rendered to look like they'd be right at home on an animation storyboard or action figure mold. It might've seemed like a lame, sterile comic to older fans at the time, but I appreciate the episodic stories and the low commitment/high entertainment value ratio.

Andy Kuhn was the main artist for the series and his stuff here is very energetic and clean, even if there were stylistic limitations due to wanting to capture that 90's animated feel. He's a manga/anime fan and it shows in his work here, as well as his more modern projects like Firebreather. Ralph Macchio, who used to be big time editor at Marvel, wrote a lot of them. They're serviceable scripts, but pretty plain when compared to what DC's writers were able to pull off in the similar Batman Adventures and Adventures in the DC Universe titles across the way.

Well shucks, I'm just rambling at this point . . . So, if you have any hidden gems from this area that you like for uncommon reasons, hit me up in the comments or follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics. Thanks for reading!