Product Description: The Thing can't stay out of trouble, but at least he makes friends wherever he goes! The Ever-Lovin' Idol o' Millions teams up with heroes both frontline and forgotten against menaces spanning time and space! Gods! Aliens! Spies! Demons! Dinosaurs! Time travellers! Martial artists! The Living Eraser and the Mountain That Walked Like a Man! A veritable who's who of history's horror heroes! Collects Marvel Feature #11-12; Marvel Two-In-One #1-20, 22-25 and Annual #1; Fantastic Four Annual #11; and Marvel Team-Up #47.
Black-and-white reprints of The Thing's mid-1970's team-up series "Marvel Feature" #11 and #12 paired Ben Grimm, "The Thing" from the Fantastic Four, with The Hulk and Iron Man, respectively. From this emerged the mid-1970s "Marvel Two-In-One" (MTIO) bimonthly series which starred The Thing and a second Marvel character. Similar to the coincident Spider-Man "Marvel Team Up" series, the co-star roster ranged from the popular (Captain America, Spider-Man, Daredevil) to the obscure (The Golem, The Scarecrow). Perhaps the thickest Marvel Essential volume, this collects a hefty twenty-nine issues originally published between 1974 and 1976. Besides MTIO #1-20, #22-25 and Annual 1, this includes the aforementioned pair of Marvel Features plus a Team-Up and a Fantastic Four annual. MTIO #21 is missing because Marvel lost the rights to the Doc Savage character. Few issues have the same creative team as the preceding one. Steve Gerber, Bill Mantlo or Roy Thomas is listed as the writer for most issues. This collection also includes contributions from future Marvel editor-in-chiefs Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and Jim Shooter. Chris Claremont is listed prominently on the cover but is credited on just two of these issues. The majority of these issues credit Sal Buscema or Ron Wilson as penciler. This series does not translate to the black-and-white Essential format quite as well as some others from this era. Without his distinct orange coloring, The Thing sometimes fades into a muddled background. Big fans of The Thing or the Fantastic Four would enjoy this reprint collection, especially given the value. I'm unaware of these comics having been collected in any other format.
Clobber Me! Okay, if you just want some fun reading without much thinking or deep plotlines, this is just the ticket. After seeing how well Spider-Man did in his team-up book, Marvel put the Thing in his own. When you read these all in a row, the redundancy is frightening. Every time the Thing shouts, "It's Clobberin' Time!" I think back to the tag-lines of all those 70s and 80s TV shows. "What choo talkin' bout, Willis?" and other classics... The art is above average, and there are some interesting team-ups. There is one issue left out, due to the Doc Savage copyright issue, but it is fun to read and worth a glance.
Nostalgia and comics I agree with the other review here...its a very evocative experience to re-read (or read for the first time) stories you read in your youth. I learned to read through a combination of the Bible and Marvel comics, so I have a lot to be grateful to them for. Even today I can pick up a copy of an old comic (if I brave the loft and a dust mountain) and still pick out at random a comic that has 2 or 3 words which my friends don't know. They were, besides fun, quite expanding for the mind of a young boy. Having your imagination fuelled has a lot to be said for it, aside from the vocabulary I gained. Of course, a few poor spelling habits crept in, too, courtesy of our American cousins....but I soon had those beaten out of me.
This edition follows one of Stan Lee's five favourite creations, The Thing, in one of the team up formats Marvel used. I was never that fond of Ron Wilson's art, and I'm always struck by how inconsistent the various versions of the human form Ben Grimm are - they wouldn't pass for cousins in the same room half the time. But that's part of the beauty of fiction. Everybody takes the same material and interprets it their own way. The Thing is the classic tragic monster, a gentle, caring but slighly intemperate person trapped inside a rockslide. If he really did exist, you'd hope he'd be exactly the man Stan Lee created. And he's usually written with a good degree of affection which shows through. They put such characters, like Spider-Man, through a heck of a lot in a comic life-cycle.
The two-in-one format, for me anyway, was limited as it was difficult to establish continuity and timelines against other plots in the 'parent' comics. Its a small detail, but it did lead to a few weaker stories feeling fairly contrived and self-contained. But this is comic books, not two chapters of Jane Austen. In any event, the Thing was the most 'clubbable' of Lee's characters so lent himself to the format better than most others.
A small mystery here is why issue 21 is missing as it clearly dovetails into issue 22 - leaving a bit of a blip in the chronology. Its deliberate so maybe there is a copyright issue or maybe they just pulped the original art by mistake. Anyway, a trip down memory lane, with the Nazi-episodes the highlight for the sheer value in the continuity between the several story lines.
The Thing stars with .... If you are a Marvel comics fan this is superb value for money. You get 29 episodes (although some stories run over more than one episode) featuring The Thing with a variety of other Marvel superheroes. The Hulk, Sub Mariner, Dr Strange, Daredevil, Captain America, Thor, Iron-Man and many others battle alongside, and occasionally against, Ben Grimm in these stories.
The artwork as always is marvellous, and whilst some of the stories now seem a little hackneyed to my cynical 40 something eyes, once I've been reading for a while I am transported back to 30+ years ago and all such thoughts are banished as I become completely lost in the Marvel Universe.
These essential Marvel series of books are so good. I just hope they keep them in print long enough so that I can buy the whole lot! Wonder if I can get a 2nd mortgage to pay for them?!
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