Product Description: Spider-Man teams up with Marvel's most celebrated super heroes! The Fantastic Four, the greatest team of adventurers ever assembled! The X-Men, Children of the Atom! And the Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes! Plus: Namor the Sub-Mariner! Ghost Rider, Spirit of Vengeance! Captain Marvel, legendary intergalactic guardian! Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts! And the Incredible Hulk, the most powerful man-like creature ever to walk the Earth! From the far corners of the Marvel Universe they come - joining forces with the wisecracking web-slinger to strike for justice! Collects Marvel Team-Up #1-24.
Classic Marvel Fun This is how I'll always remember these characters. Fun self-contained stories, melodramatic and smart-mouthed heroes. Good Times!
Team Mediocrity The stories aren't really bad, but neither are most of them all that good, and certainly they aren't that great.
The concept is simple, Spiderman and on a couple occasions the Human Torch team up with another hero outside of their self-named titles. These adventures taking place between issues of Amazing Spiderman or Fanatastic Four.
They tend to be one shot stories of no great depth or consequence. Though there are some 2 issue and one 3 issue stories in the collection. There are no real events to be found in the collection though, nothing that changes the world for the heroes. Both art and story tend to the average, firmly making this a lower tier title in the Marvel universe.
The big positive of the concept is seeing some of the heroes and villains of the Marvel universe who aren't that well known. Ghost Rider, Brother Voodoo, the Black Panther, even Dr. Strange. The variety of seeing different faces from the same old Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Hulk, Thor are the stories I enjoyed the most. I've always had a fondness for seeing the second tier heroes utilized. It adds a nice bit of depth to the fictional universe.
Fun, fun, fun! This is one of the first essential books I bought, and I was not disappointed. Spider-Man has long been a favorite character of mine, and these early issues of his team-ups, while not great writing, are just plain fun. It was fun to see Spidey team-up with a variety of characters, from Iron Man to the Human Torch to Brother Voodoo. There's nothing earth-shattering or award-winning in here, but if you enjoyed Spidey when he was just having a good time, this is for you!
Tales with somewhat of a tossed-off feel, but still a lot of fun overall "Essential Marvel Team-Up Volume One" collects the first twenty-four issues of "Marvel Team-Up", issues that originally appeared in the early 1970's. My assessment? This is perfectly readable 70's-era Marvel Comics fare, though one can't help but feel that the writers and artists working during the early days of "Marvel Team-Up" didn't lavish quite the creative attention on these tales as they would on the ones appearing in Marvel's flagship books like "Amazing Spider-Man", "Fantastic Four", etc. Still, these are all at least two-and-a-half and three-star stories, with the occasional three-and-a-half and four-star entry peppered among the serviceable tales (Spidey and Ghost Rider versus The Orb was a good one, for example, as was the two-part "Stegron, the Dinosaur Man" story featuring Kazar and the Black Panther).
"Marvel Team-Up" got better as it progressed (maybe because Marvel's newer writers and artists started seeing it as a place to show what they could do), so I'll probably pick up subsequent volumes in this series, just not right away. As a teen (many years ago), I started reading "Marvel Team-up" around issue sixty-something (during a strong Chris Claremont/John Byrne run), so it's been interesting to go back as an adult and read those early issues I missed.
This collection also works as a helpful "Whitman's Sampler" of the Marvel Universe for new comics fans or those who've been away from the medium for a while. For example, if you enjoy a particular team up between Spider-Man and another Marvel hero or super team in this volume, you can then check out an "Essentials" collection featuring that hero or team's solo tales. It's all good fun.
Graphic SF Reader Fun, completely disposable Marvel fare, apart from one slightly longer storyline that was a little deeper. Generic formula comics. Superheroes meet, have a misunderstanding, and start to beat the crud out of each other. Then they kiss and make up and go and beat the crud out of the bad guy, generally after someone, or everyone gets captured in the process.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Not Available Comics
Trevor
