The Team-Up Companion Preview

Sometimes, a hero can’t go it alone.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SILVER & BRONZE AGE TEAM-UP COMICS

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION

Go behind the scenes of your favorite teamup comic books with specially curated and all-new creator recollections from: ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-112-7 ISBN-10: 1-60549-112-8

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Neal Adams • Jim Aparo • Mike W. Barr Eliot R. Brown • Nick Cardy • Chris Claremont • Gerry Conway • Steve Englehart • Kerry Gammill • Steve Gerber • Steven Grant • Bob Haney Tony Isabella • Paul Kupperberg • Paul Levitz • Ralph Macchio • Dennis O’Neil Martin Pasko • Joe Rubinstein • Roy Thomas • Len Wein • Marv Wolfman and many other all-star writers and artists who produced the team-up tales that so captivated comics readers during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina 978-1-60549-112-7 $39.95 in the US

Printed in China

The Team-Up Companion examines team-up comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics—DC’s The Brave and the Bold and DC Comics Presents, Marvel’s Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Twoin-One, plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly illustrated selection of informative essays, special features, and trivia-loaded issue-by-issue indexes.

TEAM-UP CREATORS

MICHAEL EURY

He needs a brave ally, a bold companion.

Side-by-side, two-in-one, they become an unbeatable team.

TEAM-UP INDEXES

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TEAM-UP trivia

PLU

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BOB HANEY, COMICS’ MOST OUTRAGEOUS WRITER! AND MEET THE FAN WHO TEAMED WITH THE MAN OF STEEL!

Written and Edited by Michael Eury Book Design by Rich J. Fowlks Cover and Logo Design by Michael Kronenberg Fact-Checking and Supplemental Information by John Wells Proofreading by David Baldy and Kevin Sharp Front Cover Art by Curt Swan and Josef Rubinstein Front Cover Colors by Glenn Whitmore

Dedicated to the memory of Neal Adams (1941–2022)

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 919-449-0344 www.twomorrows.com ISBN 978-1-60549-112-7 First printing, June 2022 Printed in the China The Team-Up Companion: The Ultimate Guide to Silver & Bronze Age Team-Up Comics © 2022 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication, except for limited review use, may be reproduced in any manner without express permission. All quotes and image reproductions are © the respective owners, and are used here for historical presentation, journalistic commentary, and scholarly analysis.

Adam Strange, Ambush Bug, Anti-Monitor, Aqualad, The Atom, Atomic Skull, Batgirl, Batman, Batman Family, Big Barda, Black Canary, Black Spider, The Brave and the Bold, Captain Atom, Captain Comet, Captain Marvel/Shazam!, Catwoman, Challengers of the Unknown, Clark Kent, The Creeper, Darkseid, DC Comics Presents, DC Special Series, DC Super-Stars, Deadman, The Demon, Doctor Fate, Doctor Sivana, Doctor Thirteen, Doll Man, Doom Patrol, Female Furies, Firestorm, The Flash, Golden Gladiator, Gorilla Grodd, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Guardian, Hawk and Dove, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, House of Mystery, Inferior Five, The Joker, Johnny Cloud, Justice League of America, Kid Flash, Killer Moth, Lady Quark, Legion of Substitute Heroes, Legion of Super-Heroes, Lex Luthor, Liberty Belle, Lord of Time, Madame Xanadu, Mademoiselle Marie, Man-Bat, Martian Manhunter/Manhunter from Mars, Mary Marvel, Metal Men, Metamorpho the Element Man, Mister America, Mongul, Nemesis, New Gods, Nightshade, OMAC One Man Army Corps, Our Army at War, Parasite, Phantom Stranger, Phantom Zone, Red Bee, Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter, Robin the Boy/Teen Wonder, Robotman, Scarecrow, Secret Society of Super-Villains, Sgt. Rock, Shazam!, Shazam!

Family, Shining Knight, Showcase, Silent Knight, Solomon Grundy, The Spectre, Starman, Jeb Stuart, Superboy, Superman, Superman Family, Super-Team Family, Superwoman, Teen Titans, Two-Face, Unknown Soldier, V for Vendetta,Vigilante,Viking Prince,Vixen, Weird Western Tales, The Whip, Wildcat, Wonder Woman, World’s Finest Comics, and Zatanna TM & © DC Comics.

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The Team-Up Companion

Abomination, American Eagle, Angel, Ant-Man, Arnim Zola, Aunt May, The Avengers, Black Bolt, Black Panther, Black Widow, Brother Voodoo, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Colossus, Dakota Kid, Daredevil, Dark Phoenix, Deathlok the Demolisher, The Defenders, Devil-Slayer, Doc Samson, Doctor Doom, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Franklin Richards, Frog-Man, Galactus, Giant-Man, Giant-Size Kid Colt, Giant-Size Spider-Man, Grapplers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hate-Monger, Hercules, Human Torch, Iceman, Incredible Hulk, Inhumans, Invisible Girl, Iron Fist, Iron Man, Karma, Kang, Kid Colt Outlaw, Leader, Machine Man, Magneto, Marvel Fanfare, Marvel Feature, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-in-One, Master of Kung Fu, Mister Fantastic, Mockingbird, Moondragon, Moon Knight, Morbius, Nighthawk, Night Rider, Not Brand Echh, Nova, Outlaw Kid, Power Man, Rawhide Kid, Red Skull, Rhino, Sandman, Sasquatch, Shaper of Worlds, She-Hulk, The Shroud, Son of Satan, Spider-Man, Starhawk, Sub-Mariner, Super-Villain Team-Up, Thanos, Thing, Thor, Thundra, Tomb of Dracula, Warlock, Werewolf by Night, Western Team-Up, Wonder Man, Wundarr, and X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Magicman and Nemesis TM & © Roger Broughton. Black Cat, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Jackie Jokers, Little Dot, Nightmare, Professor Keenbean, Richie Rich, Timmy Time, and Wendy the Good Little Witch TM & © Classic Media LLC. The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Scooby-Doo and related characters, The Flintstones, Magilla Gorilla, and Yogi Bear TM & © Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. Life with Archie, Fly Man, and Josie and the Pussycats TM & © Archie Comics Publications, Inc. Captain Action TM & © Captain Action Enterprises. Lady Luck TM & © Will Eisner Studios, Inc. The Phantom and Popeye TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Sherlock Holmes TM & © The Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. Hopalong Cassidy TM & © William Boyd Enterprises. National Lampoon’s Vacation and Bugs Bunny TM & © Warner Bros. Laurel and Hardy TM & © Larry Harmon Productions. The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Avenger TM & © Condé Nast Publications, Inc. Carson of Venus, John Carter, Korak, and Tarzan TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. HeMan, Masters of the Universe, and Skeletor TM & © Mattel. Godzilla TM & © Toho Co, Ltd. Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja, LLC. King Kull TM & © Conan Properties International. Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman TM & © NBCUniversal. Star Trek, Petticoat Junction, and I Love Lucy © CBS Studios, Inc. The Brady Kids and the Fonz © Paramount Television. ABC Saturday Morning Sneak Peak © ABC. Saturday Night Live/ Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players © NBC. Mickey Mouse, Roger Rabbit, and Super Goof TM & © Disney. The Wizard of Oz © MGM. Muhammad Ali © Muhammad Ali Enterprises LLC. Snake Eyes TM & © Hasbro. Spy vs.

Spy TM & © EC Publications, Inc. Jon Sable Freelance TM & © Mike Grell. Zorro TM & © Zorro Productions, Inc. The Green Hornet and Kato TM & © The Green Hornet, Inc. Campbell Kids © Campbell Soup. Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders © Dallas Cowboys. E-Man © Joe Staton and Nick Cuti. S-329 and the Foozle © Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers. The Bold and the Brave © 1956 RKO Pictures. The Andromeda Strain and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein TM & © Universal Pictures.

Introduction by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Chapter 1 The Brave and the Bold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 B&B Creator Spotlight: Bob Haney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 B&B Creator Spotlight: Jim Aparo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 B&B Creator Spotlight: Charlie Boatner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Chapter 2 World’s Finest Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Chapter 3 Marvel Team-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 MTU Creator Spotlight: Marvel Team-Up and Me (a brief affair) by Mike W. Barr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 MTU Creator Spotlight: Marvel Team-Up #128 Cover Memories by Eliot R. Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Chapter 4 The New Scooby-Doo Movies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Chapter 5 Marvel Two-in-One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Chapter 6 Western Team-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Chapter 7 Super-Villain Team-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Chapter 8 Super-Team Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Chapter 9 DC-Marvel Team-Ups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Chapter 10 Harvey Team-Ups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Chapter 11 DC Super-Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Chapter 12 DC Comics Presents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 DCCP Fan Spotlight: DC Comics Presents #11 Guest-star Marc Teichman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Chapter 13 The ‘Superman vs.’ Team-Ups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 End Notes and Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 The Team-Up Companion Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel Family.

Batman created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger.

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The first team-up comic book: The Brave and the Bold #50 (Oct.–Nov. 1963), co-starring Green Arrow and Manhunter from Mars. Cover art by George Roussos.

TM & © DC Comics.

The Brave and the Bold was DC Comics’ most influential series of the Silver and Bronze Ages.

There. I said it.

You can stop laughing now.

It’s easy to dismiss The Brave and the Bold simply as “the Batman team-up” comic—that was its role for almost two-thirds of its 200-issue run (1955–1983).

Granted, the words “brave and bold” have become synonymous with the team-up concept: DC has frequently revived the title, as miniseries and ongoing series, to unite some of its heroes, most frequently Batman; writer Dwayne McDuffie’s “The Brave and the Bold” Justice League Cartoon Network two-parter involved a Flash/Green Lantern pairing at its story core; The Brave and the Bold, a 2002 Star Trek novel by Keith R.A. DeCandido, was a generations-spanning epic involving characters from three different eras; and Batman: The Brave and the Bold was a popular Cartoon Network animated series, in the spirit of the Silver and Bronze Age version of the DC title, that produced 65 episodes from 2008–2011 and spawned two comic-book spinoffs as well as children’s books and a successful line of action figures.

But The Brave and the Bold was much more than the DC Comics equivalent of a buddy movie. The title was the source of several phenomenally important comic-book milestones that make my audacious opening claim not so far-fetched after all: • It was the home of the original incarnation of the Suicide Squad, a concept that was reimagined in 1987 as a ragtag team of supervillains and errant antiheroes undertaking impossible missions, which has since enjoyed multiple revivals and two live-action major motion pictures; • It was the launch pad for the perennially popular Justice League of America, whose success spawned golf-course bragging rights from DC’s publisher to Marvel’s publisher and inspired the latter to mandate his editor to create a super-team comic, that series being Fantastic Four; • It was the original home of the Teen Titans, a team that has endured myriad incarnations, including dual versions of an extremely successful, widely merchandized TV cartoon as well as a live-action television series; • It was the title where Neal Adams, the extraordinary illustrator who, at the end of the Silver Age, almost single-handedly elevated comics art to a new level, first began to visually transform Batman from a wisecracking Caped Crusader to a fearsome creature of the night; • It was where Green Arrow first stepped out of the long-standing stigma of his “Batman with a bow” second-string status by appearing in his bearded, more dynamic look (which he still sports today); and • It was the first series where Jim Aparo, who would ultimately emerge as one of the great Bat-artists, got to try his hand at drawing the Dark Knight.

The Brave and the Bold also unveiled the lauded Silver Age revival of Hawkman and introduced the oddball hero Metamorpho, the Element Man; and ended its impressive run of nearly three decades with the inaugural appearance of Batman and the Outsiders, a group that would spin off to star in one

CHAPTER 1

From Earth-B to TV, the Metamorph-ing Batman Team-Up Classic

of DC’s bestselling titles of the 1980s. And along the way, The Brave and the Bold hosted meetings of everyone from the Flash and the Doom Patrol to Aquaman and the Atom to Batman and… just about everybody. Even their girlfriends and cousins.

In its capacity as comics’ premier team-up title, The Brave and the Bold further proved its mettle by: • becoming an important “entry level” series, affording lesserknown DC characters a larger audience by riding piggyback on a more visible main star, mostly fan-favorite Batman; and • offering exposure to “homeless” heroes not currently seen in their own features (for a time, it was the only place you could encounter Aquaman, the Teen Titans, and the Metal Men).

B&B 101

The Brave and the Bold—affectionately known to its readers as B&B— got its start in 1955 as a “high adventure” title, appropriating its name from Horatio Alger, Jr.’s novel, Brave and Bold or The Fortunes of Robert Rushton (interestingly, a 1956 war movie titled The Bold and the Brave earned an Oscar nomination for actor Mickey Rooney).

Edited by DC partisan Robert Kanigher, B&B was home to short stories starring a trio of swashbucklers: the Viking Prince (illustrated

by Joe Kubert), the Silent Knight (drawn by Irv Novick), and the Golden Gladiator (with art by Russ Heath), the latter of which soon vacated the series to be replaced by Robin Hood. Editor Kanigher was the series’ chief scribe, although the book also featured scripts from France Herron, Bill Finger, and the writer who would become eternally associated with B&B, Bob Haney (more—much more— on him later). Some of these brilliantly illustrated tales have resurfaced in various reprints, most notably DC Special #12 (May–June 1971), headlined

by Kubert’s Viking Prince, and a 2010 Viking Prince hardcover reprint edition.

By the end of the 1950s, the successful reintroductions TM & © DC Comics. of the Flash and Green Lantern in DC’s Showcase prompted a change in B&B’s format: Beginning with issue #25 (Aug.–Sept. 1959), The Brave and the Bold parroted Showcase as a tryout series, with DC ambitiously looking for the next big thing(s).

First out the gate was the Suicide Squad, a.k.a. “Task Force X,” another brainchild of Kanigher’s, a war-spy series illustrated

by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito that floundered through a trio of three-issue appearances before being absorbed into DC’s Star Spangled War Stories and “War That Time Forgot” series. The Suicide Squad’s ultimate claim to fame would be its reimagining, in the wake of DC’s “Legends” crossover, into a long-running (originally, 67 issues) supervillain super-team series beginning in 1987 that would later spawn revivals and movies.

The Squad was followed in issue #28 by a concept that would prove to be one of DC’s greatest triumphs: the Justice League of America (JLA), edited by Julius “Julie” Schwartz; this issue has been reprinted upon numerous occasions, including as an insert in a 1999 Justice League of America Monopoly game collector’s edition, and a 2020 facsimile edition published by DC. Three issues of B&B was all the JLA needed to promptly be promoted into its own title, with another Kanigher creation, “Cave Carson – Adventures Inside Earth,” following for three mostly forgotten issues. Schwartz returned with B&B #34’s

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The Team-Up Companion

Hawkman rebirth, written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Joe Kubert. After a three-issue run that has since become highly collectible, Hawkman was seen again in issues #42–44 before taking wing in his own series.

But the Justice League and Hawkman aside, B&B was not proving to be a hitmaker like Showcase: neither the Suicide Squad nor Cave Carson graduated to their own magazines at the time. Julie Schwartz eagerly infused athletic competition with his passion for science fiction and concocted the utterly bizarre anthology “Strange Sports Stories,” which included everything from phantom pugilists to a gorilla baseball team, but despite a five-issue spotlight in issues #45–49, that series struck out with readers.

Maybe DC didn’t need two tryout titles, the thinking went.

And so, commencing in 1963 with issue #50, The Brave and the Bold changed its format yet again.

Two Great Heroes—Teamed in a Book-Length Blockbuster

Green Arrow and the Manhunter from Mars joined forces in B&B #50 (Oct.–Nov. 1963), their logos (actually, facsimiles thereof) appearing side-by-side on the cover, marking the first-ever superhero team-up comic book.

This was a revolutionary idea. As explained in the introduction to this book, superhero crossovers and super-teams had been around since the 1940s, but never before The Brave and the Bold was the team-up concept—two separate heroes sharing one adventure, with a different combination following in the next issue— employed (even DC’s own World’s Finest Comics featured the same Superman/ Batman team-up each issue).

DC trumpeted the new team-up format in house ads to incite reader interest. As writer Mike W. Barr, who scripted the final B&B team-ups in the original series’ run, recalled to me in Back Issue #7 (Dec. 2004), “Back in the 1960s, when it was rare for DC characters to even acknowledge each others’ existence outside of the pages of Justice League of America and World’s Finest, the idea of a regular exhibition of DC team-ups was exciting.”

Less exciting, however, was the initial team-up choice of Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter, not quite the heavy hitters one would expect to inaugurate a groundbreaking new series. In our contemporary society where superhero cinema has become a bankable Hollywood genre, where a live-action show called Arrow can anchor a television network’s superhero franchise for eight seasons, and where Martian Manhunter can appear as a supporting cast member on that same network’s Supergirl, Green Arrow and the Manhunter from Mars may seem as good a choice as anyone for a team-up.

That wasn’t the world of comicdom in 1963, however. At that time, Green Arrow and the Manhunter from Mars were clearly second-stringers, despite the fact that they were members in good standing of the Justice League (Martian Manhunter was a charter JLAer, while GA was the first new member to have been inducted).

Historically, Green Arrow, with sidekick Speedy, was one of the few superheroes to survive the transition between comics’ Golden and Silver Ages. GA was always a dependable page-filler in short stories that peppered various anthology titles (at the time of B&B

#50, GA was the backup feature in World’s Finest Comics) who upon a rare occasion might score a non-JLA cover and story appearance in a title edited by the hero’s creator, Mort Weisinger (young GA meeting Superboy in 1959’s Adventure Comics #258; adult GA kissing Superman’s girlfriend in 1961’s Lois Lane #29). Martian Manhunter was largely invisible (one of his superpowers, actually!) to the average DC reader, his own feature being buried in the back pages of Detective Comics and his status as a JLA member being, more or less, that of a green Superman who rarely George Roussos. received significant story value.

And it certainly didn’t help that Brave and Bold co-editors George Kashdan and Murray Boltinoff assigned their GA/J’onn J’onzz team-up to artist George Roussos, one of their go-to illustrators and a regular contributor of pencils and inks on mystery short stories for their anthology titles, and inks over Mort Meskin’s covers and stories for the “Mark Merlin” attraction in House of Secrets. Roussos had established himself as a reliable industry workhorse who had done just about everything—penciling, inking, lettering, coloring—for almost every comic publisher. His career stretched back to the early Golden Age, on DC features including Batman, short stories starring Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred, Johnny Quick, and Airwave, plus newspaper strips. At the time of B&B #50, Roussos was simultaneously inking stories at Marvel (often ghosting as “George Bell”), and was known for his liberal use of shadowy black spaces in his art, earning him the nickname “Inky” among his peers. In B&B #50’s letters column (a short-lived addition to the title added to engender support for the new team-up format), Roussos was described by the editors as a “hard, conscientious worker” who “finds relaxation in his hobbies, which are far afield from comics—photography, serious painting, and composing music.”

Roussos certainly boasted the credentials to snag the assignment of DC’s first superhero team-up, but he was perhaps spreading himself a little too thin to do anything less than “phone in” the 25page B&B story. During the same month B&B #50’s Green Arrow/ Martian Manhunter team-up was published, Roussos’ art could also be found in eight-page stories in DC’s House of Mystery (for a tale coincidentally titled “The Arrow That Saved the World”) and Tales of the Unexpected. As an inker, that same month his credit graced Meskin’s Mark Merlin in House of Secrets, plus over at Marvel, Jack Kirby’s Iron Man and Thor covers for Tales of Suspense and Journey into Mystery, respectively; Kirby’s “Tales of Asgard” short feature in Journey into Mystery; Larry Lieber’s Ant-Man and the Wasp feature in Tales to Astonish; and a couple of Lieber-penciled sci-fi backups.

Roussos’ storytelling in the GA/J’onn J’onzz story was adequate, but without flash, in artwork that seemed better appropriate for a random filler in a mystery title than the debut of a major feature.

B&B #50’s Green Arrow/Martian Manhunter story, “Wanted— The Capsule Master,” has been frequently reprinted due to its historical significance, but had the same story appeared later in the series’ run of team-ups it probably would have been seldom reprinted due to its meager artistry and limited commerciality.

This odd pairing of also-rans seemed predicated upon B&B’s previous “showcase” format—a one-time “split” adventure was a safe way to test their marketability. That worked for the Martian Manhunter, who would soon be elevated to cover star once he took over House of Mystery with issue #143 (June 1964). Green Arrow

You Can Bet on B&B!

Mickey Rooney’s performance as gambling G.I. Willie Dooley earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1956’s World War II drama, The Bold and the Brave. © 1956 RKO Pictures. Courtesy of Heritage.

had to wait roughly another 20 years before getting his own book— and, initially, only a four-issue miniseries at that.

Nonetheless, B&B #50 seemed to click with readers. “Although G.A. and J’onn J’onzz are worlds apart in the usual storylines, you did a really fantastic job in meshing their actions,” beamed a letter writer in issue #51 who also offered a “million cheers” for the new team-up format.

The B&B Beat Goes On

Brave and Bold’s “showcase” rationale for its team-ups didn’t last for long—one issue, to be exact. Issue #51 co-starred Aquaman and Hawkman; the Sea King already had his own title, and the Winged Wonder had just landed a feature in Mystery in Space, with his eponymous series waiting in the wings (Hawkman #1 was uncaged in early 1964). And for the majority of the team-ups that followed, at least one of the characters starred in their own comic.

Howard Purcell’s artwork on B&B’s second team-up, the Aquaman/ Hawkman combo in #51, was a vast improvement over Roussos’ opening salvo for the series. Purcell, like Roussos, had been active in the field since the Golden Age, most notably on DC’s Sargon the Sorcerer and Gay (later, Grim) Howard Purcell.

Ghost features; a Purcell hallmark was his iconic cover art for 1941’s Green Lantern #1. As the adventure combined DC’s respective heroes of the sea and the air, Purcell smoothly navigated both worlds with his crisp, storybook-like

Chapter 1: The Brave and the Bold

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renditions. His Aquaman was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, like that of regular Aquaman artist Nick Cardy, and his sea creatures were horrific, without being too scary for the younger readers. Purcell’s Hawkman was lithe and lean like the version illustrated by Joe Kubert in the character’s earlier B&B tryouts, but also with polished inks reflective of the hero’s new artist, Murphy Anderson. Still, one can only imagine what this issue would have looked like had either Cardy, Anderson, or Kubert received the assignment.

Those imagining a Joe Kubert–drawn team-up would see that become a reality with the very next issue. George Kashdan and Murray Boltinoff, who co-edited the first two B&B team-ups, stepped aside for #52 (Feb.–Mar. 1964), edited by Robert Kanigher. Kanigher also wrote its story, “Suicide Mission!,” co-starring “3 Battle Stars”: Sgt. Rock, the grizzled top kick of Easy Company, whose feature headlined Our Army at War; Johnny Cloud, Native-American flying ace, a staple of the series All-American Men of War; and Jeb Stuart, tankman of the Haunted Tank, as seen in DC’s G.I. Combat. Kubert, DC’s primary war artist, beautifully illustrated the story, which included (spoiler alert!) a surprise guest-appearance by French Resistance operative Mlle. Marie. While this was, as cover-promoted, the first major

gathering of DC’s battle stars, according to DC Comics historian John Wells, B&B #52 wasn’t DC writer-editor Kanigher’s first attempt at crossing over his battle characters: Mlle. Marie had earlier met Sgt. Rock in Our Army at War #115 (Feb. 1962), and Rock had cameoed in the Johnny Cloud tale in All-American Men of War #96 (Mar.–Apr. 1963). Superhero fans might have regarded issue #52 as an oddity after the series’ back-to-back team-ups between two pairs of Justice Leaguers, but considering the popularity of DC’s war titles at the time, enlisting Sgt. Rock and his allies for B&B’s nascent team-up format was a brave and bold commercial strike.

The Kashdan/Boltinoff editorial duo returned with B&B #53, a science-based team-up between the Atom and the Flash, two characters from editor Julie Schwartz’s stable, which boasted amazing artwork by master cartoonist Alex Toth. At the time, Toth was transitioning from comic books and comic strips to the world of animation, having recently worked on the groundbreaking animated series Space Angel; in just a few short years he would find himself at Hanna-Barbera, designing a host of TV superheroes, most notably Space Ghost. (Kashdan, also a longtime DC writer, was himself doing some animation work on the side at the time, scripting for the cartoon series The Mighty Hercules.)

The third team-up took a break from superheroes in a battle classic by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Joe Kubert. Sgt. Rock would soon be no stranger to B&B.

B&B #54’s (June–July 1964) sidekick trifecta, the first appearance of the as-yet-unnamed Teen Titans. Cover art

by Bruno Premiani.

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

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The Team-Up Companion

realistically draw everything from ladies’ fashions to cars, which primed him to eventually transition to comic books. “The magic year, 1967, rolled around,” Aparo wrote. “I called Dick Giordano, then an editor at Charlton Comics, for an appointment… samples under the arm.” Giordano was impressed with Aparo’s art and gave him his first assignment, the teen comedy “Miss Bikini Luv,” in the teen humor title Go-Go. More Charlton assignments promptly followed, most notably the superhero backup series “Nightshade,” a collaboration with writer Denny O’Neil on the sci-fi Western backup “Wander,” and a stint illustrating Charlton’s licensed The Phantom series, starring King Features Syndicate’s “Ghost Who Walks” jungle hero. After Aparo jumped to DC and Aquaman, he soon picked up a second DC title, The Phantom Stranger, edited by Joe Orlando.

Aparo was comfortable with his lower-profile assignments, and at first found the prospect of drawing Batman quite daunting. “I’d never drawn Batman up till then, so this was a big thing for me,” the artist professed in a 1991 interview for DC’s Direct Currents newsletter. He was so intimidated by the prospect that he chucked his completed first page of B&B #98 and redrew it from scratch.

A Controversial Centennial Issue

His one-issue mission accomplished, Jim Aparo exited The Brave and the Bold. Briefly.

The aptly initialed Bob Brown returned to B&B with #99’s Batman/Flash team-up, which ignored Bat-lore and young Bruce Wayne’s vengeful vow at the gravesite of his murdered parents, instead depicting Thomas and Martha Wayne’s ashes stored at a Wayne coastal cottage. And it got weirder, as a peg-legged sea captain’s ghost possessed Batman!

Editor Murray Boltinoff was so impressed with #98’s Batman/ Phantom Stranger art that he offered Jim Aparo the series with issue #100, beginning what would be a phenomenally lengthy stay for the artist. Then-DC publisher Carmine Infantino revealed in an interview in Alter Ego #38 (July 2004) his fundamental role in Aparo’s assignment. “It was my idea to put Jim Aparo on Murray’s book, The Brave and the Bold, and that book was our bestselling Batman title,” Infantino said. “Aparo was great.”

Anticipation had been building in the letters column about the upcoming centennial edition. “We’re being deluged with suggestions that run the gamut of DC heroes literally from A to Z, Capt. Action, that is, to Zatara,” editor Boltinoff reported in #98’s letters page.

Some of the many Batman teammates suggested for #100 in that column that would ultimately team up with the Caped Crusader in later issues or later incarnations of the title: Robby (mistyped as “Bobby”) Reed of “Dial ‘H’ for Hero” fame; Rose and the Thorn; the Hawk and the Dove; Batman and Robin of Earth-Two; Doctor Fate; the Legion of Super-Heroes; Mister Miracle; and the Elongated Man. Boltinoff opted to stay tight-lipped and not reveal B&B #100’s special team-up until the issue’s release.

Issue #100 (Feb.–Mar. 1972) reunited Batman and Robin, along with the popular trio of Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Black Canary, collectively cover-billed as “4 Famous Co-Stars.” If that expanded combo wasn’t enough of a surprise for readers, the opening page, cinematically staged by Jim Aparo in his first official issue of what would amount to an unmatchable run, showed Batman being felled by a sniper’s bullet!

The centennial issue of B&B sidelined the Masked Manhunter as he convalesced, awaiting delicate heart surgery to remove the precariously positioned slug. It riffed off of TV’s Ironside (and perhaps DC’s own Doom Patrol) with Batman as a debilitated tactician, remotely commanding his fantastic foursome on a time-sensitive mission to intercept a drug shipment infiltrating Gotham City.

“In an attempt to capture some of the heat from the much-lauded Green Lantern/Green Arrow series,” reflected future B&B writer Mike Barr in Back Issue #7, “Bob’s script called for Green Arrow to kill a

Jim Aparo’s earlier work, such as The Phantom from Charlton Comics, honed the artist’s ability to render exotic landscapes and diverse characters. He would employ those skills for years in B&B’s pages. From The Phantom #32 (June 1969).

The Phantom © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Courtesy of Heritage.

drug dealer with an arrow to the heart. This act—uncharacteristically decisive for a DC hero—spurred a firestorm of controversy; no apology whatsoever from Haney, who maintained the pusher got what he deserved; and a ‘response’ story in Green Lantern/Green Arrow in which GA accidentally killed a thug who was trying to off him, then went on a months-long spiritual journey to seek forgiveness.”

In his Comics Journal #45 letter, Haney explained his rationale behind the controversial scene. “Yes, it was I who had Green Arrow shoot two drug traffickers in a B&B script and kill one. If anything I was compelled by Neal’s [Adams] more ballsy, bearded, swaggering huntsman [from B&B #85] in the art, along with trying to get away from the simpleton in a silly suit with his trick arrows stuff… especially in a serious story based on the real French Connection crime story (before the book, before the film), and B&B #100 did prove to be a minor classic. And I would do it again. Perhaps get both suckers with one arrow.”

Incongruences aside, Bob Haney and Jim Aparo’s Brave and Bold #100 was a tightly plotted, excitingly paced, and gorgeously rendered epic.

Chapter 1: The Brave and the Bold

25

B&B Becomes a Hit

Batman was back on his feet in #101 in a reunion with Metamorpho, but Aparo was knocked off his the next issue, or at least out of his drawing chair: A family emergency called him away halfway through illustrating #102’s Batman/Teen Titans tale, the issue being completed

by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano.

That story was noteworthy for another reason, as Mike W. Barr explained in Back Issue #7: “In B&B #102, ‘The Commune of Defiance,’ Batman exhibits a badge proving him to be ‘a deputized Gotham City sheriff.’ Haney was again going his own way in terms of B&B continuity; making Batman a deputy sheriff effectively vitiates his vigilante status.” While the badge-flashing Batman (right) did seem contrary to form, according to comics historian John Wells, “In Haney’s defense, Batman had been deputized by the Gotham City Police Department as early as 1942, in Detective Comics #70 and several others, although his badge was bat-shaped and jewelstudded. This endured into the 1960s and was even reflected in the Adam West TV show.”

Bob Brown stepped in again to cover for Aparo on #103’s Batman/ TM & © DC Comics.

Metal Men adventure, its plot involving a rogue sentient computer borrowing heavily from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Aparo was back on board with issue #104’s Batman/ Deadman team-up, the title’s third pairing of the two, with Boston “Deadman” Brand falling in love with a beautiful criminal he was investigating “undercover” (while occupying her boyfriend’s body).

B&B #105 co-starred Batman and Wonder Woman—gorgeously portrayed by Aparo—in the heroine’s second and final appearance in these pages during her powerless “Diana Prince” phase, which was winding down in her own series. With #105, interior artist Jim Aparo also took over as cover artist, replacing Nick Cardy, who had been illustrating B&B covers since #91, with the exception of three Adams covers (#93, 95, 99). A Batman/Wildcat cover by Cardy for issue #110 aside, Aparo covers would grace most issues of this series for the remainder of its run. Jim Aparo had made Brave and Bold his home.

The Brave and the Bold was now running like a well-oiled machine, with Boltinoff overseeing the Haney/Aparo creative combo. The next wave of team-ups featured repeat performances for Green Arrow (#106), Black Canary (#107), Sgt. Rock (#108), and Wildcat (#110), Issue #109 paired Batman and the Demon, the co-star’s first appearance outside of his Jack Kirby–produced comic.

B&B #111 (Feb.–Mar. 1974) was out of the ordinary, a Batman/ Joker partnership (“The Strangest Team-Up in History,” according to its cover blurb) published shortly after Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ influential “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” in Batman #251 (Sept. 1973), which returned the Clown Prince of Crime to his original homicidal personality. The issue sold phenomenally well, and the Joker soon became a recurring figure in Brave and Bold.

Issues #112 (Apr.–May 1974) through 117 (Feb.–Mar. 1975) were published in the 100-Page Super Spectacular format, featuring all-new Haney/Aparo lead stories accompanied by curated reprints and special features. Covers featured a main image spotlighting new Aparo cover artwork representing the issue’s team-up, with supplemental boxes or “bullets” (circles) with previously published art promoting the issue’s reprints.

Highlights during that phase include #112’s Batman/Mister Miracle team-up which, like #109’s Demon team-up, was the first interpretation of the Super Escape Artist by an artist outside of his creator, Jack Kirby; #114’s greatly anticipated Batman/Aquaman team-up (a clash,

26

The Team-Up Companion

actually), a rare appearance of the Sea King during his dry spell after the late-1970 cancellation of Aquaman; and Haney’s Fantastic Voyage– inspired story in #115’s Batman/Atom team-up, where the Tiny Titan inhabited and manipulated the brain of the clinically dead Caped Crusader! The Super Specs’ supplemental material was the responsibility of assistant editors E. Nelson Bridwell (#112) and Paul Levitz (#113–117), and included table of contents pages and illustrated info pages, usually containing excerpted art from previously published stories but sometimes featuring original illustrations by thennewcomer Pat Broderick. (Levitz, who would later become B&B’s editor before ascending up DC’s corporate ladder to ultimately become its president and publisher, also served as Boltinoff’s assistant editor on #120, a Giant issue.)

Strong sales elevated B&B’s publication status from bimonthly to eight times a year with issue #118 (Apr. 1975), yet another Batman/ Wildcat team-up, this time co-starring the Joker. “B&B eight times a year?” penned an enthusiastic reader in issue #121’s “Mailbag.” “That’s the first step towards monthly publication” (which would eventually occur).

The creative team stepped outside of their comfort zone for a handful of first-time team-ups during the next few issues. B&B #119 combined Batman and Man-Bat, the Masked Manhunter’s wannabe analog created

by Frank Robbins and Neal Adams, who had been enjoying a growing profile in editor Schwartz’s Detective Comics and Batman. Another Jack Kirby character, Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, appeared in a team-up with Batman in the Giant Brave and Bold #120, with Haney stretching credibility by transporting the Masked Manhunter to Kamandi’s future, ravaged timeline via a shaman’s manipulation of a then-ancient Batman comic book (B&B #118, no less!). A Batman/Swamp Thing team-up enlivened issue #122, and Aparo’s creepy interpretation of DC’s muck monster rivaled that of Swampy’s co-creator, artist Bernie Wrightson.

Haney and Aparo: B&B’s Team Supreme

With Murray Boltinoff standing proudly behind his writer and artist, B&B barreled ahead with team-up after team-up, paying little heed to events in DC’s other titles. Haney and Aparo formed an alliance more durable than any Batman partnership, lasting through most of the 1970s. “Bob was a good writer,” Aparo said to me in 2004. “I enjoyed him very much.”

Despite their creative compatibility, Haney and Aparo met in person only once or twice, and rarely even spoke on the phone, communicating mostly through their editor.

Murray Boltinoff.

Bob Haney’s ability to plot a © DC Comics. cohesive and unique tale each issue was uncanny. His Batman was an adaptable jack-of-all-trades, a globetrotting James Bond in a cowl. Haney’s Batman fought enemy spies and soldiers, terrorists, kidnappers, voodoo priests, demons, supervillains, and

On and on hammered Haney at his keyboard, his bounty of war and adventure scripts joined by cowboys (Hopalong Cassidy, the Trigger Twins and Johnny Thunder in All-Star Western) and even canine capers in The Adventures of Rex, the Wonder Dog! Haney spent most of 1958 gallivanting throughout Europe, coercing Kanigher to send his DC assignments and paychecks there.

“I had a French mistress and it was a great year,” he told Catron. By the end of the year he had returned to New York, but rapidly grew tired of Manhattan’s hustle-bustle and relocated to Woodstock, New York, in the Catskills, his former skiing getaway.

Bob was still unpacking and settling into his new digs when mutual friends in Woodstock introduced him to Nancy Penrose Chase Elliott, “a young, beautiful divorcée with two little children.”

Nancy Chase, born in New York on June 17, 1927, hailed from a prestigious family. Her father, Edward Leigh Chase, was a renowned illustrator who helped transform Woodstock into a fabled art colony.

Her brother, Edward Tinsley “Ned” Chase, was a Princeton-educated Stanford professor-turned-successful Manhattan book editor and the father of comedian Chevy Chase. Bob Haney and Nancy Chase Elliot were married in 1960.

TM & © DC Comics.

Bat-Skills from the Catskills

While Bob was courting Nancy in 1959, professionally he received a pair of assignments linked to his two favorite B&B Batman teammates.

With artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, Bob rolled out DC’s grizzled combat hero Sgt. Rock in “The Rock of Easy Company” in Our Army at War #81 (Apr. 1959). “I brought this one in,” Haney told Catron in the Comics Journal interview. Editor Robert Kanigher “didn’t change much of it, as I recall, hardly any of it. I’ve been officially credited by the company with it.” Two issues later, in issue #83, OAAW editor and chief writer Kanigher, with artist Joe Kubert, “took that story and ran with it,” Haney groused. Kanigher wrote the many Sgt. Rock stories that followed. Haney remained possessive of the character and reveled in teaming an older, graying Rock with Batman in a string of 1970s B&Bs. Kanigher, however, disavowed those stories. “I don’t believe in, and never wrote a Rock/Batman team-up for Brave & Bold,” Kanigher contended in the “Take Ten” lettercol of Sgt. Rock (the retitled Our Army at War) #316 (May 1978). “Regardless of editor or reader demand, Rock’s and Easy Company’s hold on readership for more than fifteen years has been utter realism. And as the creator, only I know whether Rock or Easy survived the war.

The chances are very much against it. Rock belongs in WW-2.

I did a tale once where he appeared from the Revolutionary War onwards. But that was solely due to his having a concussion from a nearby exploding shell and imaging this. Otherwise, Rock lives and probably is killed in action in WW-2.” Kanigher refused to let the matter die, often echoing this in later lettercols and emphatically declaring, in Sgt. Rock #340, “[1945] is the year Rock is killed in action. On the last day, in the last hour, in the last minute—in a place he never should have been. And only because Rock is Rock with his last breath.” Haney would come to regard Kanigher as a “whacko” tyrant.

Also in 1959, after taking aim at the archer of Sherwood Forest by scripting numerous Robin Hood tales, Haney penned his first Green Arrow (and Speedy) adventure in World’s Finest Comics #103

Haney’s Metamorpho was a modest hit for DC in the 1960s. The Element Man, who premiered in B&B, teamed with the Metal Men in issue #66 in 1966. Decades later, its artist, Ramona Fradon, illustrated this undated recreation of its cover.

TM & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Heritage.

(Aug. 1959). “The Challenge of the Phantom Bandit,” drawn by regular GA artist and Bob’s former Black Cat crony Lee Elias, opened with a patented Haney grabber as a sedan drives right through a thief who’s mocking the Battling Bowman!

That same comic, WFC #103, contained another connection to a future Haney classic. Its lead Superman/Batman adventure, written

by Bill Finger and drawn by Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff, featured two curio dealers who go power-mad after obtaining artifacts once in a magician’s possession. One of the adversaries in “The Secret of the Sorcerer’s Treasure” was named Bork—like Carl Bork, from B&B #81’s Haney/Neal Adams classic “But Bork Can Hurt You!”—and as Haney’s Bork’s inexplicable invulnerability repelled the attacks of co-stars Batman and Flash, Finger’s Bork’s magic prism bounced away the flying Superman like a rubber ball.

Coincidence? We’ll never know.

Superheroes seized the comic-book world in the 1960s in what Haney called “the revolution,” and the writer, his assignments diminishing as war comics began a slow fade, transitioned with the market change. First he scribed characters that straddled the line

Chapter 1: The Brave and the Bold

43

B&B CREATOR SPOTLIGHT: JIM APARO Batman’s Bravest and Boldest Ally

Pop quiz for the B&B booster: Who appeared most frequently with Batman in The Brave and the Bold?

Green Arrow? No, you missed the mark.

Wildcat? Think again, tiger!

The Metal Men? What, have you blown a circuit?

Appearing more with Batman in Brave and Bold was artist Jim Aparo, whose versatility with drawing a host of heroic co-stars dazzled B&B readers for almost 100 issues. For many who read DC comics during the 1970s and 1980s, Aparo was the Batman artist, following B&B’s 1983 cancellation with memorable runs on Batman and the Outsiders and the main Batman title, as well as issues of Detective Comics and other Bat-projects and covers. He was also known for his popular runs on DC’s Aquaman, The Phantom Stranger, and the critically acclaimed “Spectre” saga in Adventure Comics, and before that, several features at Charlton Comics, including The Phantom.

As stated in the previous essay, my original goal was to conduct a “Pro2Pro” interview between Jim Aparo and writer Bob Haney, B&B’s team supreme, about their collaboration on the long-running team-up title, for publication in the magazine I edit, Back Issue. However, those plans were scuttled once Mr. Haney suffered an illness during the spring of 2004 from which he did not recover. He passed away on November 25, 2004.

But a solo chat with the amiable Mr. Aparo was far from settling for second best. I am honored to have been able to do so—particularly when considering that just over a year after this conversation was conducted, he died, on July 19, 2005, making this one of the, if not the, final interviews conducted with the bravest and boldest of artists. So read on as one of Batman’s premier illustrators shares his recollections on his unparalleled tenure as the tsar of team-ups.

This interview was conducted by telephone on May 24, 2004 and transcribed by Brian K. Morris. It was originally published in Back Jim Aparo.

Issue #7 (Dec. 2004) and has been Courtesy of Eric Nolen-Weathington. edited for presentation in The Team-Up Companion.

MICHAEL EURY: You came to DC Comics at the invitation of Dick Giordano, who was your editor at Charlton Comics before he was hired by DC. JIM APARO: Dick was a really good friend of mine. He still is.

He hired me at Charlton. We’re about the same age, we had the same amount of children—two daughters and a son; we were duplicate copies, you know?

EURY: Your first issue of The Brave and the Bold was #98, teaming Batman with a character whose book you were drawing at the time: the Phantom Stranger. But you didn’t draw the next issue of B&B. Was the Phantom Stranger team-up originally a one-time event, or did editor Murray Boltinoff have you in mind to permanently take over the strip?

APARO: I believe it was just for that one issue. But I liked drawing Batman and Murray was satisfied with the work I did, and brought me back permanently [beginning with issue #100].

EURY: What approach did you bring to Batman that was different from that of Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Irv Novick, and the other Bat-artists of the day?

APARO: Not much. Neal, of course, was one of the big stars of Batman.

I know we all looked at him on how to draw Batman.

Yeah, Neal was quite a help. Not personally, but his style of art.

Now he’s in advertising, I think.

EURY: That’s true.

APARO: I was in advertising before I got into comics. I worked in an outfit in West Hartford, Connecticut. I was one of the artists on the advertising staff.

EURY: What types of accounts did you work on?

APARO: Oh, local stuff, either stores or factory-type things.

EURY: Fashion illustration?

APARO: No, it had nothing to do with that. I’d make posters, ads for sales presentations, drawing things like toasters.

EURY: I don’t remember any toasters appearing in Brave and Bold team-ups. But if Batman needed a toaster in the Batcave, you knew how to draw one, right? [laughs] APARO: [laughs] Yeah, that’s right.

EURY: In The Brave and the Bold, did the editors of the guest-star characters have any approval rights over your team-ups?

APARO: Not really. Murray was the guy.

EURY: I find that surprising, because today, using another editor’s characters involves layers of approvals.

Chapter 1: The Brave and the Bold

47

So no other editors ever reviewed, or even disapproved of, your interpretations of their characters? You were never asked to redraw, say, Wonder Woman or Green Lantern?

APARO: Yeah, that happened occasionally, Michael, but I didn’t mind, you know? Although most of the time, I was on the money. They must have enjoyed what I was doing. But I really had no interference.

EURY: Was Murray Boltinoff a hands-on editor?

APARO: Murray let me do what I had to do. He believed that I could handle it. You know, he was always constantly changing this what-not or that what-not, “You didn’t do this the way I wanted you to do it.”

The competition was always there between our artists and Murray.

And that’s true of Julie Schwartz, too, but it worked out okay.

But when changes needed to be made, [Boltinoff] would just call me on the phone and tell me, “Now, Jim, I want you to do this thing.

I’ll send you some pages back and correct them,” or whatever, and I’d send them back in.

Murray was a good man. Carmine [Infantino], he was in charge of DC at the moment. I got along with him, too. They were great guys.

They really were, once you got to know them.

I got along with Murray, although a lot of people complained about him. I got along with a lot of people at DC. But the reason was because I was not there all the time, I wasn’t down there in New York.

I was in my own studio in Connecticut. [laughs] And that helps, because normally, when you’re working together, it’s kind of hard.

EURY: How often did you actually go into the city?

APARO: Oh, not that much. In case they really needed me to come down, for whatever reason, I would make the trip. And then every once in a while, I would come down on my own to see everybody, to see what they were doing. But they left me alone.

You’re left alone, you’re doing your thing, you sent it down there.

I could send stuff down, pages at a time, because I would make copies of my pages here so I would know what I drew and then I would send the originals down by mail. They would deal with it; do the color, do the lettering, whatever they had to do.

When you’re down there, you can be doing something else and somebody will ask you, “Well, what about this?” “What about that?”

You’d blow a whole day, just answering!

EURY: You worked for a long time on Brave and Bold with Bob Haney. Tell me about Bob.

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The Team-Up Companion

Infamous to some, admired by others, the Batman/Sgt. Rock tale in B&B #124 guest-starred artist Aparo, writer Bob Haney, and editor Murray Boltinoff. (opposite page) Terrorists force the artist to draw their desired outcome in the fourth-wall-breaking Brave and Bold #124 (Jan. 1976). Original cover art by Aparo.

TM & © DC Comics. Original art scan courtesy of Heritage.

APARO: Bob was a good writer. I enjoyed him very much.

I only met him once or twice, but we got along well. We talked a lot on the phone when I needed help. “What did you mean by this?” and “What did you mean by that?” We never had any problems.

EURY: Were Haney’s Brave and Bold scripts detailed, with specific panel directions, or did he give you leeway to interpret the stories?

APARO: In Bob’s scripts, he would say, “Batman is going to be doing this, but you can do it at any angle you want.” Some other writers would say, “No, I want you to draw him straight-on.”

Haney would give you the idea of what’s supposed to be in the panel, and it would be up to you as the artist to put it down the way you think it should be and what angle it’s going to be at, looking up, looking down, sideways, upside-down, whatever. Most writers that I worked with gave me leeway.

EURY: I’m sure when you were encouraged to put more of your own storytelling there, it made you put more of yourself into the stories as well.

APARO: Right, yeah.

EURY: Many of Haney’s scripts called for Batman doing some pretty peculiar things: riding a camel in the desert [in B&B #112’s Mister Miracle team-up] and leading an army of gorilla soldiers [in B&B #120’s Kamandi team-up]. Do you recall ever reading a Haney script and thinking, “Now this is kind of outlandish for Batman”?

APARO: No, because I was going along with it.

But, Michael, it was an education for me. I would go to my local library—I knew the librarian there—and she used to give me books for reference, so I would know what these things looked like because I never went overseas to, say, the Middle East, you know? It was for me, really, an education.

Batman bows out of World’s Finest Comics (sort of) to allow Superman to team up with other heroes, starting with the Fastest Man Alive. Cover to issue #198 (Nov. 1970) by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson.

TM & © DC Comics.

Historically, Superman usually had the jump on his World’s Finest pal, Batman—unsurprising for a hero who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Superman premiered first, and was first out the gate to get his own radio show, newspaper comic strip, animated theatrical cartoons, merchandising deals, live-action television series, and Saturday morning cartoon show, with Batman’s scalloped cape flapping from the gusts kicked up by his super-friend’s successes. (The Caped Crusader did beat the Man of Steel to the punch as the star of a live-action movie serial, however, debuting on the Silver Screen in 1943, five years before Superman’s 1948 live-action serial.)

As the Silver Age of Comics began in the late 1950s, Superman was the bestselling title at National Periodical Publications (DC Comics), partially due to the hero’s television presence in the George Reeves– starring Adventures of Superman. Yet it was the iron grip not of the Man of Tomorrow but instead his editor, Mort Weisinger, that made a hit out of any book featuring the Big Red “S”—even TV show–inspired titles starring Superman’s girlfriend and pal. From his my-way-or-the-highway editorial orchestration of a vast mythology that included faraway planets, super-science, monsters, robots, super-pets, doppelgangers, and a Superman family, Mort made Superman DC’s gold standard. Batman, whose original gothic tone had been softened by the addition of a boy sidekick and the implementation of a content-controlling Comics Code, could only slam the Batmobile’s pedal to the metal to try to keep up.

By the 1960s, Batman’s editor, the erudite but line-toeing Jack Schiff, was following Weisinger’s blustery lead, adding faraway planets, super-science, monsters, robots, super-pets, doppelgangers, and a Batman family to the Bat-series. Whereas a teenage Supergirl, loyal Krypto the Superdog, mischievous pixie Mr. Mxyzptlk, and surrogate supermen were quite at home in Superman’s amazing world, their analogs Bat-Girl, Ace the Bat-Hound, Bat-Mite, and the Rainbow Batman (or Zebra Batman, or Robot Batman, or…) seemed out of place on the sinister streets of Gotham City, yet they populated the franchise’s pages for several years (although they have attracted a nostalgic appeal in more recent times). Sales of Batman and Detective Comics dropped.

As comics legend has often told us, in 1963 DC editorial director Irwin Donenfeld assigned editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz and artist Carmine Infantino the task of giving Batman’s world a makeover (as revealed in detail in my 2009 TwoMorrows book, The Batcave Companion, co-produced by Michael Kronenberg). Gone were the imprudent inclusion of aliens and extended family members (except for Robin, the Boy Wonder), replaced by a sleek, dynamic “New Look” that revolutionized Batman and Detective. Before long, the Adam West–starring Batman followed, a campy, colorful, twice-weekly program that instantly became television’s hottest show. As a result, Batman’s DC comic-book sales nudged past Superman’s. Batman, the idol of millions, also took over as the star of the team-up book The Brave and the Bold—where Batman finally got the jump on Superman. The Weisinger-edited World’s Finest Comics, long the home of Superman/Batman adventures, shrunk its blocky WORLD’S FINEST logo to allow its co-stars’ personal logos to appear—with Batman getting top billing.

Even though Superman was still holding his own during the Batmania of the 1960s due to Weisinger’s inflexible control of the character, the Man of Steel was off-limits for B&B team-ups (outside of a cameo in the Supergirl/Wonder Woman team-up in B&B #63). B&B scribe Bob Haney was able, but Weisinger was far from willing. One can only imagine the Silver Age Superman team-ups we might have seen had Mort allowed the Action Ace to appear in Brave and Bold: Superman and Green Lantern, drawn by Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson… Superman and Adam Strange, drawn by Carmine Infantino and Sid Greene… or Superman and Wonder Woman, drawn by Curt Swan and George Klein. (And if it had been a time-traveling Superman, instead of a continuity-bending young Bruce Wayne, that had the World War II meeting with Sgt. Rock in what became Brave and Bold #84, a lot of fan headaches would have been quelled.) Not only did the Action Ace miss out on team-ups during the pre-Batman, anything-goes B&B format, so did readers.

CHAPTER 2

The Bronze Age Makeover into ‘Superman’s Brave & Bold’

‘A Reasonable Scale of Superpowers’

After the Batman TV show had run its course and was cancelled in 1968, the Caped Crusader got yet another Schwartz-guided reboot in comic books, largely influenced by the atmospheric, photorealistic artwork of Neal Adams. By the end of the decade, Batman had returned to his original gothic roots, once again a creature of the night as he was initially conceived.

Weisinger’s take on Superman, conversely, was starting to buckle under its own weight. His faraway planets, super-science, monsters, robots, super-pets, doppelgangers, and Superman family were falling out of favor with a maturing comic audience.

What a perfect time for Mort to retire.

And that’s just what the stalwart Superman editor did, in 1970 (although it’s said that his retirement was actually a bitter pill he was forced to swallow after he unsuccessfully played the “pay me more or I’ll quit” card in contract negotiations that year). The Superman franchise was dispersed across several DC editorial offices: Murray Boltinoff picked up Action Comics, Superboy, and Jimmy Olsen; Lois Lane went to Mort’s long-suffering assistant editor, E. Nelson Bridwell, who also assisted on several of the other Super-books; Mike Sekowsky took over Adventure Comics, where he wrote and drew a continuity-blind take on Supergirl; and Julie Schwartz, DC’s “fix it” man, was assigned the franchise’s anchor title, Superman, and the subject of this essay, World’s Finest Comics.

Editor Schwartz, no fan of the Man of Steel, wanted to do something different with the character—and tapped as the writer of Superman the same scribe responsible for DC’s recent revitalizations of Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern/ Green Arrow: Dennis “Denny” O’Neil.

According to Schwartz, writing in his autobiography, “Now, like myself, Denny was never a great Superman fan and was not really ch[a]mping at the bit to take over the ‘man of steel’ writing duties for the title… but after a bit of coaxing, pleading, bargaining, and co-plotting, he agreed to sign on for a short while.”

O’Neil recalled to me in a 2006 Denny O’Neil. interview for The Krypton Companion © DC Comics. that despite his and Julie’s reputations for character re-dos, Superman “was still the flagship character, and I don’t remember the guys in the corner office thinking that he was particularly broken.”

Schwartz agreed, stating there was corporate reluctance to shake up the status quo. “…The higher-ups were a little worried, not wanting me to interfere too much with a proven commodity.”

Without changing the fundamental personality or basic tenets of Superman, the editor-writer duo still took the hero into new directions (that were sometimes sidestepped by the franchise’s other editors and writers): O’Neil had the idea to eliminate Superman’s primary weakness, kryptonite, but also to considerably de-power the near-omnipotent, planet-pushing Man of Tomorrow. (Schwartz also claimed that these were his ideas.)

“The problem with Superman will always be that he’s too powerful, that he’s a god,” O’Neil said. “To give myself the possibility of giving Superman stories with real conflict I decided to scale him back to a reasonable scale of superpowers.”

Schwartz and O’Neil also elected to eliminate a Weisinger-era plot device that made it “too easy” (in Julie’s words) to allow Clark Kent and Superman to appear in the same place at the same time: the Superman robots.

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Schwartz, acknowledging the ascendance of television journalism and the boob tube’s popularity, reassigned Superman’s alter ego, reporter Clark Kent, from the newspaper offices of the Daily Planet to the newsroom of WGBS-TV, where Clark would be both an on-air anchor and roving TV newsman. No longer could Kent sneak away to a Planet cloakroom when an emergency became a “job for Superman”— now he had to concoct an escape plan to become Superman while broadcasting live as Clark Kent! Kent’s wardrobe was also jazzed up from the staid navy suit he had worn forever (and would later don again as his signature look) to a hipper wardrobe, which even earned a spotlight feature in the men’s fashion magazine, GQ. With Julie’s World’s Finest Comics, the decision was made to break up the long-running Superman/Batman team—although the duo would reunite every few issues—to allow WFC to become “Superman’s Brave and Bold,” as it’s known among fans. The Man of Steel would pair off with other DC headliners.

These editorial changes to Superman and his family were teased by a two-page “New Beginning” house ad citing the new directions coming to the Superman titles in 1971. Superman was announced as teaming up with the Flash, Robin, Green Lantern, “and others” in World’s Finest.

Off to the Races

Julie Schwartz’s first World’s Finest Comics issue was #198, which went on sale September 10, 1970, with a November cover date. With its cover layout, World’s Finest now parroted editor Murray Boltinoff’s The Brave and the Bold, with the comic’s logo stretching as a banner across the top of the cover, the co-stars’ individual logos side-by-side, underneath—in this case, Superman and the Flash. Beginning with WFC #198, both of DC’s team-up titles adopted a similar graphics layout, with encircled figures of its stars in both upper corners, allowing for easier character identification when displayed in a crowded spinner rack. The next month, Brave and Bold #93, the first B&B to be published in the wake of WFC’s revamp, repeated that layout with corner figures for its Batman/House of Mystery team-up. (Line-wide format changes would make this compatible design between the two books short-lived.)

This was no mere team-up between Superman and the Flash in #198—it was a race between DC’s fastest crimefighters, the third such competition in three years; they had previously raced in

For a brief period, DC’s two team-up books shared similar cover graphics. Covers to B&B #93 and WFC #199

by Neal Adams.

TM & © DC Comics.

Superman #199 (Aug. 1967) and The Flash #175 (Dec. 1967).

Denny O’Neil actually made his debut as the new Super-scribe here, as WFC #198 predated by almost two months his debut on Superman with issue #233, the landmark “Kryptonite Nevermore” tale. Its Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson cover, possibly laid out by then-DC cover editor Carmine Infantino, offered a slight wink to Carmine’s iconic (and oft-imitated) Superman #199 cover (inked by Anderson)—and among its throng of cheering spectators, front and center, stood WFC’s recently ousted Batman, not only lending the super-racers his moral support (by flashing a “V for victory” hand signal, no doubt interpreted at the time by readers as the “peace sign”) but more importantly catering to the reader who bought World’s Finest because they expected the Caped Crusader to appear therein.

The fingerprints of editor Schwartz, known both for his fondness for science fiction and plotting stories with his writers, were evident on #198’s “mind-staggering” story. It upped the ante from the previous Superman/Flash contests by being a “Race to Save the Universe!”— the kind of bigger-than-life story O’Neil disfavored—and a two-parter.

Despite his preference for urban-based storytelling, Denny was no stranger to sci-fi and handled the milieu quite well, his credits also including his penning of Green Lantern and Justice League of America.

O’Neil rose to the occasion here, bringing in a familiar face—a Guardian of the Universe, from his own Green Lantern—as the catalyst that lured our heroes into this space jam, to thwart an alien threat.

Issue #198’s letters column further conveyed the series’ changes.

“Cape and Cowl Comments,” which for six years had topped the WFC lettercols (usually illustrated with a Swan/Klein–drawn Superman cape and Batman cowl), was gone. It was replaced with the title “World’s Finest Fanmail,” the comic’s title incorporated into a close-up of the globe of the Daily Planet skyscraper (which looked to be drawn by Anderson). Clearly, this was now Superman’s magazine—although editor Schwartz, in his lettercol intro, promised, “Don’t worry. The World’s Finest team is not kaput! Batman will be back in these pages from time to time!”

The Superman/Flash race concluded in World’s Finest #199 (Dec. 1970), its Neal Adams cover featuring another Batman cameo (where the Caped Crusader actually loomed larger than the sprinting Superman and Flash). The previous Superman/Flash races ended in draws, so as not to disappoint either hero’s readership, but this third race actually had a victor, which will not be revealed here out of respect for readers who have yet to encounter this oft-reprinted tale.

Penciler Dick Dillin often drew facsimiles of heroes’ logos into the interior artwork of both World’s Finest and Justice League of America. From WFC #199.

TM & © DC Comics.

The Durable Duo, Dick Dillin and Joe Giella

In addition to their harmonious cover layouts and team-up concepts, Schwartz’s World’s Finest and Boltinoff’s Brave and Bold shared another kinship: each book had its own distinctive art style, with a consistent artist in residence.

Brave and Bold at the time was being drawn by Nick Cardy, aside from Neal Adams’ guest issue on the aforementioned B&B #93. Penciler Dick Dillin and inker Joe Giella were the regular artists of this era of World’s Finest (Dillin, later inked by Murphy Anderson and others, would stay on the title after its Superman team-up phase). Editor Schwartz was comfortable with both, having worked with them on Justice League and elsewhere; Giella, in particular, had long been in Schwartz’s stable. Dillin and Giella were old pros, competently and reliably producing their pages like clockwork, to the satisfaction of their grumbly editor known for keeping the “trains” running on time in a deadline-driven business where unforeseen circumstances created trickle-down problems.

Writers rotated in and out of World’s Finest, as did Superman’s guest-stars, but readers could count on the book looking the same from issue to issue, thanks to its Dillin/Giella duo.

Dick Dillin was a masterful storyteller, cleanly staging scenes and smoothly moving the story sequentially. He was adept at drawing the Metropolis skyscrapers, WGBS-TV newsroom, fantastical aliens, and fearsome beasts that populated this series. His artwork was never flashy, but was accessible and crowdpleasing, making World’s Finest an inviting gateway comic for Superman readers to discover other members of the DC Universe.

“I spend my time hunched over a drawing board in a small room with a single light bulb until the wee hours of the morning,” Dillin revealed in an autobiography on a Dick Dillin. text page in World’s Finest #216, © DC Comics. “living in constant fear of the telephone ringing and the hot breath of editors as the deadline draws near.” A Depression-era baby and native of Watertown, New York, as a teen Dillin delivered groceries after school to afford private art lessons at Watertown’s Carlos Art Academy. After an Army stint during World War II, he furthered his artistic training at the School of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. After two years of training there, Dillin, influenced by comic-strip artists Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and Alex Raymond, began “pounding a lot of pavement” in 1951. He scored a handful of assignments for war stories including Quality Comics’ military team Blackhawk, drawing “The Red Raiders vs. the Blackhawks” in issue #40 (May 1951), his first published work. Shortly, with Blackhawk #64 (May 1953), he became that series’ regular artist (with inker Chuck Cuidera) and stayed with the monthly title for years, drawing multiple stories per issue.

He transitioned from working for Quality Comics to DC Comics when Quality sold its comic-book properties to DC in the mid-1950s.

Blackhawk became a DC title beginning with issue #108 (Jan. 1957).

Under editor George Kashdan, Blackhawk increasingly adopted more and more superhero and sci-fi elements to its stories, which groomed Dillin for future work drawing giant beasts, outlandish aliens, high-tech weapons, and supervillains. Dillin officially became a superhero artist in 1966 when the Justice League of America guest-starred in Blackhawk #228 (Jan. 1967), the first issue of the title’s notorious, Bob Haney–scripted caped-crusader phase as “Junk-Heap Heroes.” Dillin would soon be assigned

Chapter 2: World’s Finest Comics

57

The team-up title that started as a buddy book: Spidey and the Torch headline Marvel Team-Up #1 (Mar. 1972). Cover by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia.

TM & © Marvel.

In this era of franchises, it’s easy to forget that during the 1960s, when Spider-Man was a new character, Marvel’s nascent superheroes—even the more popular ones—had only one title each. Some of them didn’t have even that. A few of Marvel’s former mystery/monster anthologies evolved into “split books,” with half of the title’s pages devoted to one character and half to another: Iron Man and Captain America in Tales of Suspense, Sub-Mariner and the Incredible Hulk in Tales to Astonish, and Doctor Strange and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Strange Tales. To the uninitiated reader, split books resembled team-up books since their covers featured two characters’ logos. Except upon the occasion when the stars would cross over into one story—always trumpeted with great Marvel fanfare by hyperbolic cover blurbs, carnival barker Stan Lee’s megaphone to warm up his audience—the split books were two solo comics in one.

Independent News, the company that distributed Marvel’s comic books into the network of newsstands, drug stores, and a handful of supermarkets, limited the size of Marvel’s 1960s line to a small number of releases each month. Independent News was a subsidiary of National Periodical Publications, the corporation that owned DC Comics, so in essence Mighty Marvel’s Distinguished Competition yanked a tight leash around the neck of this mongrel of a comics company that was enjoying a creative renaissance.

Yet no distribution chokehold could restrict the Marvelmania that was mushrooming among the college crowd and comics-reading thrillseekers who had outgrown the regimented, gimmick-based yarns that DC peddled. Marvel fans demanded more of these vigorous new characters, and crossovers became common.

King-size Annuals popped up, as did reprint anthologies, allowing popular new heroes like the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man to appear in more than one book without creating an undue burden upon Marvel’s relatively small pool of creative talent. Still, one Marvel hero—and an unlikely one at that—managed to graduate into a second monthly comic with all-new stories. Nick Fury, who headlined the World War II– based battle book Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, was turned into Mighty Marvel’s own James Bond in the 1960s-set “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” attraction that Lee and Kirby introduced in 1965 in the pages of Strange Tales, creating the company’s first franchise of the burgeoning Marvel Age. (Before Fantastic Four and the superhero titles that followed, in the early Silver Age Marvel franchised its popular series marketed to girls, as Millie the Model was accompanied by other Millie titles and Patsy Walker alternated months with Patsy and Hedy. Similarly, Marvel Western heroes were prone to appear in more than one series, such as Kid Colt Outlaw, whose star also appeared in Gunsmoke Western.)

The Spider’s Web

The shared universe was one of the hallmarks of the developing Marvel Age. Character crossovers actually gave The Incredible Hulk, an early Marvel casualty that was canned after only six issues, a new lease on life as the Green Goliath plodded his way through different Marvel books not necessarily as a villain but as an annoyance that required the entire X-Men or Avengers or FF to corral… the latter creating the popular Hulk vs. Thing trope, a premise that ultimately launched the Thing’s own team-up title, Marvel Two-in-One (originally Marvel Feature).

But it was the sociable, sassy Web-Slinger who was in demand as a guest-star. He was popping into other heroes’ mags—or they guest-starred in his—with increasing frequency, crossing paths with the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, the Hulk, the Avengers, the Human Torch, the X-Men, and Giant-Man and the Wasp early in his wall-crawling career. Once the Grantray-Lawrence cartoon Spider-Man became a hit on ABC-TV on Saturday mornings beginning in the fall of 1967, Spider-Man dominated the covers of the anthology book Marvel Tales, and his goofy counterpart, Spidey-Man, was frequently seen in Marvel’s hilarious self-parody, Not Brand Echh. It was only a matter of time

CHAPTER 3

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends

From 1968, two early attempts to spin off Spidey: Marvel Super-Heroes #1 and the black-and-white magazine The Spectacular Spider-Man. TM & © Marvel.

before Marvel publisher Martin Goodman rolled out another Spider-Man title.

Goodman let loose a trial balloon on February 8, 1968, with the publication of Marvel Super-Heroes #14 (May 1968). That double-sized title began its life as Fantasy Masterpieces, a reprint giant. With issue #12 it was retitled Marvel Super-Heroes (MSH) and began a new format as a tryout title, heralding an all-new feature in its lead spot and filling out its back pages with oldies (see the Marvel Two-in-One chapter for more details).

Marvel Super-Heroes #14’s bold logo was top-lined with the proclamation “The Amazing Spider-Man in this month’s spotlight!”

And the spotlight he literally received, as its simple yet arresting cover art featured a vulnerable Spidey, backlit by a white circle (spotlight) to make him stand out against a stark black background, as two new supervillains closed in on him. Numerous cover blurbs broadcasted the popular Web-Slinger’s appearance, including a burst that declared, “A NEW Artist!” That artist was a DC Comics mainstay, the moonlighting Ross Andru, sticking a speculative toe into Marvel’s waters. According to the Marvel Super-Heroes Wiki, MSH #14 featured an inventoried Amazing Spider-Man fill-in story quickly hammered out by Stan Lee when regular Amazing Spider-Man artist John Romita, Sr. sustained a wrist injury. Despite his mishap, the rocket-fast Romita was able to stay on the monthly Spidey book after all, so Lee’s fill-in, with Andru’s pencils inked by Marvel veteran Bill Everett, saw print here. This easy-to-overlook Spider-Man appearance is noteworthy as both an early attempt to exploit the hero’s popularity but also as the first appearance of Andru as a Spider-Man artist.

Marvel Super-Heroes #14 was merely the opening salvo in Mighty Marvel’s 1968 franchising of Spider-Man. A bigger, bolder project would quickly follow…

I remember peddling my bicycle to Pike’s Drug Store after school one random April afternoon in 1968. My pocket was jingling with change, and as a chubby ten-year-old I waddled toward the snack bar at the back of my neighborhood drugstore with a Cherry Lemon Sun-drop and order of French fries on my mind— first detouring past the magazine shelf.

That was the day my spider-sense tingled. The wall-crawling hero I had recently discovered on a Saturday morning cartoon, the one whose life was a great big bang-up, jumped off the magazine shelf at me. He wasn’t cohabitating on the crowded

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funnybook rack with the usual suspects like Green Lantern, The Three Stooges, Hot Stuff, and Life with Archie. Instead he was poised alongside grownup magazines with content of no interest to me, periodicals with names like Esquire, Ebony, and Ladies’ Home Journal. My tastes were too unsophisticated at the time to realize that my eye had been attracted by a painted cover image, and I recall being puzzled when picking up this comic book that looked like a magazine and finding no color inside, instead page after page of black-and-white comics with a special effect I would later learn was a washtone. Still, it starred your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man! I passed on the French fries to afford its hefty 35-cent cover price… and spent the afternoon poring over what at the time was the longest comic-book story I had ever read—52 whopping pages!

Little did I know that I had purchased a moment in Mighty Marvel’s history. The Amazing Spider-Man wasn’t Marvel’s flagship title—that distinction belonged to “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine,” The Fantastic Four. But Spidey, the unlikely everyman-superhero, was the company’s undisputed breakout star.

This magazine I had purchased, The Spectacular Spider-Man #1, was Marvel’s first major attempt to franchise one of its new superheroes. Not long before, Marvel had experimented with new formats in new markets: mini-comics sold in plastic eggs in gumball machines, and black-and-white reprint Lancer paperbacks marketed toward the college crowd and older readers smitten by campy superhero mania. But Spectacular Spider-Man was published in a format that would expand the title character’s burgeoning profile into a market of mature magazine readers; issue #1’s back cover advertisement for a men’s aftershave proved the publisher was attempting to branch out toward an older readership. Four months later, The Spectacular Spider-Man #2 appeared—this time in full color—and it would be the series’ last issue. But Spider-Man’s career as a franchise-friendly star was only beginning.

This magazine was only part of Marvel’s vast expansion in 1968, the year publisher Goodman freed his company from the limiting constrictions of its distribution deal that stretched back to a 1957 agreement forged when the company—then called Atlas Comics— was small, hungry, and desperate. Now, with Marvel selling millions of copies of comic books, Goodman and editor Stan Lee unleashed a salvo of new titles, not only liberating such characters as Captain America from the limitations of the split books but aggressively challenging Archie Comics with a proliferating teen comic line— even spinning off the long-running Millie the Model series into a Mad About Millie title that could have easily been mistaken for an issue of Betty and Veronica by an inattentive parent picking up an “Archie funnybook” for their kid.

This expansion continued into the 1970s, as Mighty Marvel marched into the position of industry leader—confounding DC Comics’ editorial staff, a literary bunch who had refused to acknowledge this oncoming juggernaut through the wafts of smoke billowing from their professorial pipes and smugness that clouded their offices. But DC’s stuffy editors and executives could no longer dismiss what they had regarded the primitive fare from Marvel.

The Amazing Spider-Man was a top-seller. And Marvel realized that Peter Parker possessed not only the powers of an irradiated spider, but also those of a cash cow.

Spider-Man, Superstar

“Nobody was as popular as Spidey in those days, not even the entire FF,” Marvel Comics superstar writer-editor Roy Thomas told Jonathan Miller in Back Issue #44 (Oct. 2010).

Spidey seemed to be everywhere throughout the 1970s!

Spider-Man Comics Weekly launched in the U.K. in 1973, and a live-action “Spidey Super Stories” segment debuted in 1974 on the Children’s Television Workshop show The Electric Company, accompanied by Marvel’s comic-book counterpart, Spidey Super

Stories. There was the bestselling Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man tabloid-sized one-shot of early 1976 and a new, ongoing monthly, Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, premiering from Marvel later that year. In 1977, the Amazing Spider-Man syndicated newspaper strip began its 40-year-plus run, and Nicholas Hammond, eldest of the singing Von Trapp children in the 1965 film adaptation of the stage musical The Sound of Music, brought Peter Parker and his alter ego to life on CBS primetime beginning in The Amazing Spider-Man. Spidey even starred in his own 1978 live-action television show in Japan, where he used his webs against giant monsters and mecha-menaces! Plus there was a Spider-Man rock album; Spidey cover features on Creem and Pizzazz magazines; endless TV reruns of the Spider-Man TV cartoon; Spider-Man children’s records; Mego and Remco Spider-Man action figures in multiple sizes; and a steady stream of Spider-Man toys including Corgi vehicles; Colorforms; playsets; and coloring books… plus wannabe-Spider-Man wear including a Halloween costume, web-shooter, and utility belt.

“You’ll find the Spider-Man,” indeed—clearly, Marvel learned how to franchise the Amazing Spider-Man in the 1970s!

But it all started here, with Marvel Team-Up (MTU) #1, coverdated March 1972 and going on sale on December 21, 1971. “ALL NEW! Two of Marvel’s Mightiest—in one mind-staggering mag!!” cried its cover blurb, just the type of hootin’ and hollerin’ you’d expect from Smilin’ Stan Lee, who was in his last year in the editor’s chair when MTU was rolled out.

The issue was released during a period of Marvel history spanning August 1971 through September 1972 (on-sale dates) where all of Marvel’s covers shared a uniform “frame” layout, the cover artwork confined within a box top-bordered by the logo and trade dress graphics and bottom-bordered with a cover blurb. Yet no box frame could confine the raw energy of this cover illustration by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia. It offered a worm’s-eye-view upward, with the sinister Sandman atop a water tower, wielding his fist, which he had shaped into a sandy sledgehammer, into the tower.

His blow released a gushing torrent that doused the flames of Spider-Man’s co-star, the Human Torch, and threatened to topple Spidey himself, who dominated the cover in the foreground. The artist chose an uncharacteristic approach—especially for a first issue—of showing the heroes from behind as they scurried up toward their enemy. Yet Kane’s cinematic staging, despite being trapped within the mandated cover frame, created the illusion of movement… and if any reader didn’t recognize the co-stars from their backsides, they were shown in miniature from the front alongside their logos, employing Marvel’s longtime standard of displaying an image of a book’s star(s) beside the logo for easy identification on the crowded newsstands and spin racks.

Spidey and the Human Torch teamed up in a holiday tale titled “Have Yourself a Sandman Little Christmas.” “I had always liked Christmas stories in comics, including Batman and the like,” Roy Thomas reminisced to Jonathan Rikard Brown in Back Issue #85 (Dec. 2015). “So when Stan asked me to write at least the first issue of Marvel Team-Up to get it started, and I realized that the issue would be out around December, I used that as an excuse to humanize Sandman, one of my favorite Spidey villains.”

Yes, Sandman—beefy, brawny Flint Marko, who could morph his body or his limbs into soft or hard Roy Thomas. sand—was indeed originally one

Fly Man and His Amazing Super-Buddies

Archie Comics lacked a team-up title during its 1960s revival of its Golden Age heroes, but its characters began to make crossover appearances, not unlike Marvel’s series. This mash-up from Fly Man #33 (Sept. 1965) was quickly followed by the premiere of Archie’s super-team title, The Mighty Crusaders.

Cover by Paul Reinman. © Archie Comics Publications, Inc.

of the Web-Slinger’s rogues, having premiered in Amazing Spider-Man #4 (Sept. 1963). Yet when Spidey stumbled across him in the early pages of Marvel Team-Up #1, the Wall-Crawler— or writer Thomas—experienced a memory lapse, instead regarding Sandman as the Fantastic Four’s foe. “Sandman isn’t my enemy,” Spidey remarked. “I just tackled him once—and that was a looonnnng time ago.” Actually, prior to MTU #1, Spidey had two additional clashes with Sandy: in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (1964), where Sandman was part of the Sinister Six, and a return bout in ASM #18 (Nov. 1964).

But Roy can be forgiven for that oversight, as his story exemplified both the excitement of a team-up adventure, with the oft-squabbling Spidey/Torch duo working well together, and a Dickensian twist readers would expect from a Christmas story, as the heroes cut Sandman some slack upon discovering that the villain was on a gift-giving mission for a loved one. “I’ve been pleased to see Sandman’s gradual redemption, whose seeds perhaps I helped plant in that story,” Thomas said in Back Issue #44, referring to the Sandman’s eventual rehabilitation, much of which occurred in the pages of Marvel Two-in-One, explored elsewhere in this volume.

“He just seemed to me like a character who might have that in him… and it even came out in the third Spider-Man movie”

Chapter 3: Marvel Team-Up

65

autocratic real-world Puritan minister and author of Christian texts as well as being a driving force behind the iniquitous Salem witch trials. Also included was a subplot involving John Proctor. Historically, Proctor (1594–1672) was a landowner and farmer tried for witchcraft. His story became famous in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which was adapted to film.

Mantlo, in MTU #46’s lettercol, cited not The Crucible but The Devil in Massachusetts, a 1949 book by Marion L. Starkey, as his primary reference source.

Mantlo continued the Wall-Crawler’s time-displacement for two bonus issues, with Doom’s time platform misdirecting Spidey into different dystopian futures (actually, alternate timelines), Killraven’s in #45 and Deathlok’s in #46. Spidey’s journeys brought him home but also into a two-part team-up with the Thing and a crossover with MTU’s sister series, Marvel Two-in-One, with MTU #46 being continued in MTIO #17 and concluding in MTU #47, both titles written by Mantlo.

From his initial Spider-Man/Beast single-issue story, neo-scribe Bill Mantlo had transformed Marvel Team-Up from a done-in-one formulaic title to a high-stakes multi-character epic. Would the readers that had demanded a change in MTU be happy?

The improvements upon MTU were applauded in its letters column. In issue #45, future comics publisher Dean Mullaney wrote directly to Bill Mantlo, offering constructive criticism but giving the young scribe kudos for MTU #41: “It’s clearly evident that you are taking the book out of the catatonic state… it was in.” Another reader commented, “I am writing to congratulate you on a wonderful job. Sal’s artwork is perfect on MTU.” Yet another reader stated, “MTU #41 had me applauding. There’s continuation. There’s a plot.” The following issue, most letter writers continued the praise, with comments like, “MTU is really shaping up, and Bill Mantlo is turning out some good scripts.”

That tone resumed in future letters pages such as #48’s, where a fan remarked, “Whenever I used to discuss MARVEL TEAM-UP with a fellow fan, I would humorously refer to it as ‘Marvel Throw-Up.’ …

Bill Mantlo has totally outdated one of my best lines.” While the offbeat Killraven and Deathlok team-ups raised a few readers’ eyebrows, others enjoyed Spidey’s time romps: “MTU is really shaping up and the time-stuff is turning out to be a good storyline, past and future,” contended a reader in #50.

The Mantlo/Buscema/Esposito team revved forward with another four-part storyline, mostly an extended Spider-Man/ Iron Man team-up (in issues #48, 49, and 51), with the Spidey/ Doctor Strange duo headlining issue #50 (Oct. 1976). The storyline was significant for its introduction of a new supporting cast member to the Spider-mythos, hard-boiled Captain Jean DeWolff, the tough-talking, chain-smoking female police detective who could have easily stepped out of the pages of a Mickey Spillane hardboiled mystery. DeWolff, who had no trouble quipping and roughhousing her way out of the shadow cast by her now-retired cop father, would become a major figure in Spider-Man stories for the foreseeable future.

Other changes were afoot at Mighty Marvel. With MTU #49 (Sept. 1976), Archie Goodwin became the book’s editor when he succeeded Marv Wolfman as editor-in-chief.

Bill Mantlo took an issue off with MTU #52 (Dec. 1976), guest-written and guest-edited by Gerry Conway, a one-off Spidey/Captain America story picking up where writer-artist Jack Kirby’s Captain America #201–203 left off. And on the same day issue #51 was released, September 28, 1976, a new monthly Spider-book premiered: Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #1 (cover-dated Dec. 1976), written

by Conway. Its art team was the same that had recently brought consistency to Marvel Team-Up: penciler Sal Buscema and inker Mike Esposito. Would this affect their ability to keep up with MTU?

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The Team-Up Companion

Peter Parker’s Most X-Cellent Adventures

Three weeks after the release of MTU #52, the Mantlo/Buscema/ Esposito team was back—and it was evident why the book had needed a fill-in. The project was the double-sized Marvel Team-Up Annual #1, cover-dated 1976, with an on-sale date of October 19, 1976. Marvel’s king-sized Annuals had been in limbo for a while, supplanted by the (mostly) quarterly Giant-Size books, but returned with gusto during America’s Bicentennial year.

MTU Annual #1 featured a Spider-Man/X-Men team-up. Much had changed since MTU #4’s X-Men appearance, a charitable bone chucked at the exposure-ravenous mutants. By combining mutants old, new, and borrowed, starting with 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1 the new X-Men had become what its original editor, Roy Thomas, perceived as Marvel’s answer to the Golden Age’s international, multicultural Blackhawks. X-Men had been rebooted and, as a bimonthly written by Chris Claremont, had methodically cultivated a rabid audience through its stories’ exotic locales and the evolving soap opera of its compelling characters, as well as fan-favorite Dave Cockrum’s extraordinary artwork. X-Men #102 (Dec. 1976) was the current issue at the time of MTU Annual #1’s release.

With Annual #1’s “The Lords of Light and Darkness!,” Bill Mantlo dovetailed the paths of Peter Parker and Professor Charles Xavier at a

The new X-Men got a Spidey spotlight by teaming with the Wall-Crawler in 1976’s Marvel Team-Up Annual #1.

Original art by Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito.

TM & © Marvel. Courtesy of Heritage.

mutation-themed science conference. When technicians at a research facility began metamorphosing into supervillain analogs of Hindu deities, Professor X’s students and Spidey became involved. If the X-Men devotee could forgive the misspelling of Jean Grey’s surname as “Gray,” Mantlo and company did a serviceable job interpreting the personalities that Claremont was so vividly bringing to life every other month. MTU Annual #1 was also energized by a Cockrum cover.

Mantlo returned to Marvel Team-Up with issue #53’s (Jan. 1977) Spider-Man/Hulk team-up, but the book’s durable artistic duo, Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito, had moved on (for the time being, at least). A dynamic new artist made a mark on the series with #53, and would stick around for many issues to come: John Byrne.

Byrne, a Canadian born in England, had yet to achieve superstar status at the time he penciled this tale that dropped Spidey and the Hulk—and bonus co-star Woodgod, the Pan-like “Man-Brute” Mantlo had recently introduced in Marvel Premiere #31 (Aug. 1976)—into a New Mexico ghost town that was the site of top-secret experiments, but he was well on his way. After attracting attention cartooning for the fanzine CPL (Contemporary Pictorial Fanzine), he had burst onto the scene at Charlton Comics in 1975, honing his talents on TV tie-in titles like Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, based upon a Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon. Before long he landed a regular Marvel assignment: Iron Fist, beginning with the kung-fu superhero’s final tryout appearance in Marvel Premiere #25 (Oct. 1975), which was quickly followed by Iron Fist #1 (Nov. 1975). Byrne continued his Charlton output with a title of his own creation, the futuristic Doomsday + 1, plus Charlton’s adaptations of two then-popular live-action television programs, Emergency! and Space: 1999. It didn’t take long for Marvel to snatch him up full-time, and in 1976 Byrne leapfrogged through a handful of fill-ins—Marvel Chillers #6 (starring Tigra), Daredevil #138, and Ghost Rider #20—before landing MTU and, on its heels, the super-team book The Champions, as regular assignments. Buscema’s MTU had comfortably conformed Spidey and his co-stars to the Mighty Marvel house style. Conversely, Byrne, Marvel’s Next Big Thing, revitalized a book that wasn’t necessarily in need of revitalization with his style that uncannily mixed photorealism with Kirby-esque bombast. His art in the Spidey/Hulk/Woodgod teamup was good, and with each issue he got better and better. In Back Issue #66, Iron Fist writer Chris Claremont recalled of Byrne’s evolution, “You can see him perfecting his craft… It was measurable.”

Claremont’s assessment was dead-on. After the two-issue Spidey/Hulk team-up, with the Mantlo-written Spider-Man/Warlock adventure in MTU #55 (Mar. 1977), Byrne’s style had sharpened and he wowed readers with his fluency in the cosmic terrain of Jim Starlin. There was a slow burn, if you’ll forgive the pun, of reader acknowledgment of Byrne’s art in MTU’s lettercol. Issue #58’s letters page mostly addressed Mantlo’s Spidey/Hulk/Woodgod story, although there were random remarks of praise for the book’s new artist: “John Byrne did an excellent job,” said one reader. Another opined, “the Hulk looked better in MTU than I’ve ever seen him drawn in his own mag.” With #59’s lettercol, fans became more vociferous in their praise for the book’s new artist and his work on the Spidey/Warlock issue. “I hereby cast my one and only voluptuous vote for the pulsating pencils of John Byrne, artist supreme, to grace the pages of my favorite Spidey-Mag!” beamed one reader, with another chiming, “Look at the beautiful flow in those panels, the imagination in those layouts, the humor in Spidey’s battle with the Stranger! … John Byrne, I am in love with your art!”

Byrne was spelled by the returning Sal Buscema for the next three issues, teaming the Web-Slinger with Daredevil (#56), Black Widow (#57), and Ghost Rider (#58). Other changes transpired within those issues as well. The “Mail It to Team-Up” lettercol header was retired, replaced beginning in issue #58 by “Web-Zingers,” a title suggested by reader H. Hadley of Rochester, New York. (“Web-Zingers” was actually the runner-up in a name-the-lettercol contest for Spidey’s new monthly, Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.) The main change in those

A Team Up of Heroes and Artists

Before he became a Marvel star, John Byrne inked Steve Ditko on a Captain Atom/Nightshade tale appearing in 1975 in the prozine Charlton Bullseye #2. A decade later, those heroes were acquired by DC Comics and absorbed into the DC Universe.

Captain Atom and Nightshade TM & © DC Comics.

issues, however, was writer Bill Mantlo’s departure with #56. Mantlo was transitioning to the new Spectacular Spider-Man title, and was certainly busy elsewhere at Marvel, at that time writing The Champions, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and Super-Villain Team-Up, plus preparing the launches of two new Marvel titles, the stuntman comic The Human Fly and the TV tie-in The Man from Atlantis.

Replacing Mantlo as the new Marvel Team-Up scribe was Chris Claremont. “The fun part [about MTU] was coming up with a terse, powerful, memorable story,” Claremont recalled to Michael Aushenker in Back Issue #66. “You didn’t have the luxury of stringing it out for three years. You either did it in one issue or two.”

With his first issue, #57’s Spidey/Black Widow team-up, Claremont not only recruited the sultry super-spy who was the erstwhile partner of Daredevil, but he resurrected a minor villain introduced by writer Steve Gerber in Daredevil #111 (July 1974)— the sword-wielding Silver Samurai—and upgraded him to a more formidable foe. Claremont would continue to develop the Silver Samurai, having him return in more MTUs as well as Spider-Woman, The New Mutants, and The Uncanny X-Men. The villain’s Japanese heritage blended comfortably with the Land of the Rising Sun’s importance in Claremont’s X-Men saga.

Claremont’s second issue, the Spider-Man/Ghost Rider team-up in MTU #58 (June 1977), was a fun, by-the-numbers page-turner where the heroes squared off against a mutual villain. The writer himself wasn’t happy with the end result, however, remarking in Back Issue #66, “It was one of those stories where the story was not ideal, the time was not ideal. It just didn’t mesh. It didn’t matter because the books have to come down. As Archie Goodwin would say, you sit down, you swallow your pride, and you do the next issue.” Speaking of editor Archie Goodwin, he offered a hint at the title’s greatnessto-come with his bouncy blurb concluding the lettercol: “Next issue: It’s Claremont and Byrne together again. Yes, the IRON FIST team supreme sets up shop as the new MTU creative force…”

Chapter 3: Marvel Team-Up

77

Title card cel for the Scooby-Doo/Josie team-up installment of the Saturday morning series, The New Scooby-Doo Movies.

Scooby-Doo © Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. Josie and the Pussycats © Archie Comics Publications, Inc. Courtesy of Heritage.

Under other circumstances, one could never imagine a kinship between Saturday morning’s grooviest Great Dane, Scooby-Doo, and primetime’s hippest husband-and-wife pop duo, Sonny and Cher, outside of their respective series’ listings in the same edition of TV Guide. Nor would anyone ever expect cartoons’ coolest coward, Shaggy, to run into 1970s’ TV’s perkiest funny face, Sandy Duncan. But beginning on September 9, 1972, the gang from what ultimately would become Hanna-Barbera Productions’ most popular and enduring franchise starred in its own version of The Brave and the Bold, when The New Scooby-Doo Movies became the second installment in the Scooby saga, following the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, which premiered in the fall of 1969. Unlike the original half-hour series, The New Scooby-Doo Movies was one hour in length, explaining its otherwise peculiar “Movies” appellation, and ran on CBS from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Eastern.

I was in my late junior high to early high school years when The New Scooby-Doo Movies was aired, and had mostly aged out of watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. My younger brother, eight years my junior, was the perfect age for the children’s equivalent of television’s primetime. His symbiotic melding with the tube began each Saturday at 8:00 a.m. with H. R. Pufnstuf and continued for the next five hours or so, through The Jackson 5ive, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Most of those shows would be not be re-broadcast today due to their now-offensive cultural and gender stereotypes or their affiliations with later-disgraced celebrities… and then there are allegations of drug-culture references in, ahem, H. R. Pufnstuf. So, in retrospect, an hour-long “Scooby-Doo Team-Up” cartoon co-starring everyone from Speed Buggy to good ol’ boy Jerry Reed now seems like the sanest, safest thing Saturday morning TV had to offer back then.

It was the utter weirdness of the concept that lured the teenage me away from Saturday morning trombone practice and homework to the couch next to my little brother. Animators Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were famous (some might say infamous) for their audacious appropriations of classic adult sitcoms (The Honeymooners, Sgt. Bilko, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) as kid and family vid (The Flintstones, Top Cat, Scooby-Doo).

But you’ve got to give them and their talented writers and animators kudos for the originality of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, a crazy when-worlds-collide concept where classic comedians (some dead, mind you), fellow Hanna-Barbera characters, and television’s most familiar real-world faces could share adventures with a bunch of teenagers and a dog who cruised for mysteries in their van. I freely admit that the primitive comic book I wrote and drew back then, Eury Team-Up, which I described in my introduction, may have borrowed its title from Marvel Team-Up, but it was The New Scooby-Doo Movies that truly inspired me to go for such bizarre combos as Super-Redneck teaming with the animated versions of Laurel and Hardy.

The conceit of The New Scooby-Doo Movies was that the world of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby—rife with no end of haunted houses, movie sets, castles, ghost towns, and islands, as well as evil land developers with a penchant for rubber masks and horror-show theatrics—was not the exclusive domain of the meddling kids of Mystery, Inc. Mama Cass and the Harlem Globetrotters also lived in that world. So did Saturday morning’s Jeannie and Josie and the Pussycats. Batman and Robin, too—and the Joker and Penguin.

While this was a “team-up” show, make no mistake about it, it wasn’t an “equal footing” crossover concept like the DC and Marvel team-ups, or even the film version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where Disney and Warner Bros. counterparts’ Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, and Donald Duck and Daffy Duck, were contractually bound to share the exact amount of screen time, down to the nanosecond. It was a Scooby-Doo show, featuring guest-stars. A typical episode could have substituted its guest-stars with original characters and passed for new installments of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

CHAPTER 4

Those Meddling Kids and Their Celebrity Team-Ups

Marvel Two-in-One #1 (Jan. 1974) was actually the third issue of the new Thing team-up series. Cover by Gil Kane and John Romita, Sr. TM & © Marvel.

Face it—the first time you discovered The Fantastic Four, right off the bat you knew the Thing was the main attraction. Part monster, part Muppet, the anything-but-bashful Benjamin J. Grimm has always been the series’ can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him star.

The first time anyone saw the FF—issue #1 (Nov. 1961) of their title, Marvel Comics’ attempt to parrot the recent success of DC Comics’ hot, new Justice League of America by introducing a superteam all its own—the lumbering, lumpy Thing appeared on the lower left corner of the cover, where the Western eye starts its left-to-right scan when reading. Sure, the big orange walking pile of rocks’ mile-wide shoulders demanded more real estate than his teammates’, but it was as if when laying out this cover the FF’s co-creator, the prickly but lovable, cigar-chomping Jack Kirby, instinctively recognized that this prickly but lovable, cigar-chomping monster-hero was the character readers really wanted to see, no matter how flashy the airborne Human Torch’s plume of fire looked. The FF’s other co-creator, Stan “The Man” Lee, said it himself in a Fantastic Four Roundtable conducted by Peter Sanderson in Back Issue #7 (Dec. 2004): “To me, they were all equally important. But I always felt the Thing was the most colorful and the most appealing.”

The Rocky Road to Stardom

But it was Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, who was the first member of the FF to become a solo act.

The eyes of Mighty Marvel’s publisher, Martin Goodman, were distracted by the Torch’s flickering flame. Goodman’s long tenure at Marvel dated back to the Golden Age, when a different Human Torch, a combustible android with a blazing sidekick named Toro, was a Marvel headliner. The Human Torch was published throughout the 1940s, with a short-lived 1954 revival following. In an attempt to reignite that past success, it was decreed that the solo adventures of the new Human Torch oust Strange Tales’ monster-of-the-month formula, beginning with issue #101 (Oct. 1962).

Fantastic Four’s creative team of Lee and Kirby were on hand for the Torch’s earliest solo stories, with Lee’s brother Larry Lieber dialoguing Stan’s plots. The series borrowed FF bad guys like the Wizard while creating new, rather lame villains for the Torch, including Asbestos Man (insert your own mesothelioma TV lawsuit gag here). Later issues would feature the contributions of artist Dick Ayers and scripter Jerry Siegel (the latter escaping the vengeful eye of his bullying boss, Superman editor Mort Weisinger, by moonlighting under the pseudonym Joe Carter). There was no shortage of gueststars in the Torch’s tales, including Sub-Mariner (a “rematch” of sorts of the classic original Torch vs.

Subby scuffles from the Golden Age), Captain America (another Golden Age oldie revisited), and an inevitable elemental pairing with Iceman. For fans of Millie the Model and Archie comic books, the Torch’s solo series included no end of teenage romance and lightheartedness, with Johnny’s pert and pretty gal-pal Dorrie Evans involved in subplots. But the Human Torch’s solo series seemed to, excuse the pun, misfire. The frequent drop-ins by guest-stars and Johnny’s FF family showed that the Torch really couldn’t fly on his own. It was like comedian Bud Abbott doing the “Who’s on First?” routine as a solo act. The Torch needed a Lou Costello.

And he had one, each and every month in the pages of The Fantastic Four… the Thing. The Thing was one of those guest heroes parading through the Torch tales, clobbering his way into Strange Tales #116 (Nov. 1963), and with issue #123 the magazine’s Torch feature now co-starred the Thing. Yet the damage from those earlier lackluster Torch adventures had been done. Even a cover-clamored cameo by the Beatles in issue #130 (Mar. 1965)—showing the Torch and the Thing

CHAPTER 5

The Thing Goes ‘Solo’… with a Little Help from His Friends

#14, Medusa in #15, the World War I flying ace Phantom in Beatles wigs!—couldn’t save the strip, and Eagle in #16, Black Knight in #17, the premiere of the Strange Tales #134 (Aug. 1965) featured original Guardians of the Galaxy in #18, Ka-Zar in the final Torch/Thing story. The boys #19, and FF foe Doctor Doom in #20. These new were sent packing back to FF, replaced adventures were backed up by Marvel reprints, in Strange Tales #135 by a new serial and beginning with issue #21, MSH shifted to an capitalizing on the spy craze that was all-reprint format. Most of MSH’s eclectic array sweeping the world: Nick Fury, Agent of tryouts sparked graduations into regular of S.H.I.E.L.D. series, although Mar-Vell’s was the only Meanwhile, Marvel was noticing what immediate continuation, MSH #13 being followed Kirby teased on his epic FF #1 cover: Audiences two months later by Captain Marvel #1. Medusa related to the Thing. A Thing vs. Hulk smackwould be seen in a new Inhumans feature beginning down—the latest in an ongoing rivalry—dominated with Amazing Adventures #1 (Aug. 1970), a split book FF #25 (Apr. 1964). In 1965, the Thing was the focal point that also featured Black Widow, and would soon fill of a three-issue story arc commencing with issue #41’s Sue Richards’ spot as a member of the Fantastic “The Brutal Betrayal of Ben Grimm.”

Four. Ka-Zar and Doctor Doom both appeared in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966) was home to a the split book Astonishing Tales beginning with #1 poignant Thing story that many fans consider to (also Aug. 1970). The Guardians’ series debut did be the all-time best FF tale: “The Man… This not occur until Marvel Presents: The Guardians Monster!” of the Galaxy #3 (Feb. 1976), but along the way The Thing continued to be the “face” of the they would receive a little help from the Thing, Fantastic Four. In the mid-1960s, as Marvelmania as you’ll read shortly. expanded beyond the four-color page into other An aggressive expansion of the Marvel line media, the Thing was there. Bashful Benjy in the early 1970s in a war with DC for newsappeared with the FF in Lancer paperback stand shelf space led to the creation of a handful of reprints, jigsaw puzzles, and a Big Little Book, tryout titles, as well as the aforementioned new and took the solo spotlight in a Ben Cooper split books. “Stan [Lee] wanted to do a bunch of Halloween costume, a Marx bicycle license plate, them: Marvel Premiere, Marvel Feature, Marvel a Topps Marvel Flyer, and a rubber figurine sold Spotlight,” Roy Thomas told Dewey Cassell in in gumball machines. Paul Frees gave him a gruff Back Issue #71 (Apr. 2014). “They were all his voice in the Hanna-Barbera–produced Fantastic ideas, all his titles.” Of the trio, Marvel Feature Four cartoons that premiered on Saturday is our focus here, as it would eventually become mornings in the fall of 1967. For the next few the home, albeit short-lived, for Thing team-ups. years it was clear that the Thing was the most The Defenders—the “non-team” of misfit Marvel popular member of the Fantastic Four, and by heroes Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and Doctor Strange— the early 1970s, when Marvel had ventured appeared in Marvel Feature #1–3 in 1971–1972 into the genre of team-up comics with the then spun off into the long-running Defenders title.

Spider-Man–starring hit Marvel Team-Up, it was Following in Marvel Feature #4 was Hank Pym, the decided that it was finally time to give the Thing Astonishing Ant-Man, who stood tall as a solo star his own feature, a team-up book of his own. from 1972–1973 through issue #10, a run that is mostly “It probably won’t surprise anybody much when I TM & © Marvel. remembered for its Herb Trimpe artwork. And then, beginning with say that launching a team-up title starring the ever-lovin’, Marvel Feature #11 (Sept. 1973), the so-called idol of millions, the blue-eyed Thing was the brainchild of Marvel publisher Stan Lee,” Thing, was tagged to become the book’s star. “At last in his own former editor-in-chief Roy Thomas wrote in his 2013 introduction smash series” touted an arrow-shaped cover blurb pointing to the to Marvel Masterworks: Marvel Two-in-One vol. 1. But Thomas Thing’s spiffy, brick-textured logo. confessed his hesitancy to the idea—from “pure selfishness,” a The problem for Bashful Benjy was, that cover blurb was hype. territorial stake in the character since he had hoped to one day True, this was now the Thing’s series, but not exactly his “own.” return to Fantastic Four as its scribe. Roy kept that to himself, With issue #11, Marvel Feature aped not DC’s Showcase, but its but did argue with Stan that he “felt the Thing functioned best as a The Brave and the Bold, by becoming a team-up title anchored by a member of the Fantastic Four. popular headliner—the Thing—joined each issue by a different, and “But Stan was not to be dissuaded.” And Roy Thomas had a new often unlikely, co-star. editorial assignment.

Marvel Team-Up, which had launched in late 1971, starred Marvel’s most popular character, Spider-Man, the web-slinging, Big Orange Creature in Marvel Feature quick-quipping Average Joe. But in Spidey’s most offbeat MTUs, The tryout format was a staple at rival DC Comics—its Showcase when his friendly neighborhood sensibilities were violated by the series launched the successful Silver Age revivals of revamped intrusion of monsters, sorcerers, or extraterrestrials, he seemed, to versions of Golden Age heroes including the Flash and Green borrow the tagline from one of his teammates, Howard the Duck, Lantern, and introduced newer characters such as the Challengers of “trapped in a world he never made.” Spider-Man uncomfortably but the Unknown and the Metal Men. heroically stood up to all manner of menaces because of his Day In late 1967, Marvel made its first attempt at a tryout series with One Dictum: “With great power comes great responsibility.” the giant-sized title Marvel Super-Heroes (MSH), a retitling of the The Thing, on the other hand, possessed the likability of former Fantasy Masterpieces reprint book. MSH #12 (Dec. 1967) Spidey, but was, appearances to the contrary, a more adaptable premiered Captain Marvel in the company’s copyright grab of the character for a team-up mag. Space stories? Ben Grimm was an character’s name, and the Kree warrior Mar-Vell became the first astronaut, for cryin’ out loud, whose vise-grip hands steered of several characters to wear that moniker. After a second Captain civilian Reed Richards’ experimental spacecraft into the cosmos— Marvel appearance in #13, MSH featured one-time-only headliners and cosmic radiation—before Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos were in all-new stories: Spider-Man (see the Marvel Team-Up chapter) in

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The Team-Up Companion

even born. Streetwise stories? Ben grew up on the rough-andtumble Yancy Street, and scrapped with gangs and other troublemakers during his youth. Sci-fi stories? Thing, like his fellow FFers, was a challenger of the unknown, exploring microverses and negative zones. Scary stories? Have you taken a good look at the Thing? His gruesome puss is a mug only his Aunt Petunia, or a blind sculptress, could love. While some of Spidey’s Marvel Team-Up partners were shoehorned into a one-issue alliance for exposure, the Thing was at home hobnobbing with everyone from super-scientists to golems, from cybernetic terminators to thunder gods. No matter his teammate or wherever their adventure might take him, one thing would never change: Ben’s personality.

Thanks to the genius of Lee and Kirby, the Thing’s response to menaces from the heavens, hell, or high waters was always the same: “It’s clobberin’ time!”

Marvel Two-in-One #0.1 and 0.2

Still, it was the Thing’s star power that made this new team-up series possible. And what better co-star for his “first issue” than his frequent sparring partner, the Incredible Hulk?

Marvel Feature #11 (Sept. 1973)—which you might regard as Marvel Two-in-One #0.1—was a summer release, going on sale June 19, 1973. “Cry: Monster!” was its story title, and it opened with its hot-tempered headliner rampaging through the Fantastic Four’s headquarters, the Baxter Building, trashing a contraption his egghead buddy Reed Richards had built to revert Thing to his human form as Ben Grimm. FF teammates Reed and Johnny were stymied by Ben’s actions, to which the Thing replied, “Maybe I like being a big orange freak! Or maybe I just couldn’t stand the thought of another failure!”—a perfect introduction to the character in a move that suggested Marvel Feature was indeed Thing’s “own smash series” after all. Thing’s pity party, catered for the reader by scribe Len Wein, a master of superhero drama and dialogue, included a flashback to his (and the FF’s) origin.

Kurrgo, “the Master of Planet X,” an alien with a butter-hued complexion and the disposition of a boiling kettle, witnessed via remote spy video the Thing’s temper tantrum. Editor Roy Thomas’ footnote caption awarded a “geriatric No-Prize” to any reader who recalled this early rogue whose sole previous appearance dated back to Fantastic Four #7 (Oct. 1962), in the early days of FF when Lee and Kirby were still transitioning from old habits picked up during their years of creating sci-fi and monster comics. Kurrgo, in competition with the avocado-hued, big-brained Hulk foe the Leader, teleported the story’s co-stars to a ghost town in the Western U.S. for a knock-down, drag-out fight.

Like a seasoned chess master, Wein deftly arranged these players for a showdown in the Mighty Marvel manner, but it was penciler Jim Starlin who made this first issue truly special. A U.S. Navy and Vietnam War vet and graduate from a stint as a Marvel Bullpen artist, Starlin had only been producing comics for roughly a year at this time but had essentially detonated onto the scene, most notably with a few issues of Iron Man that had led to his fanJim Starlin. favorite revamping of Captain Marvel.

His early output would earn him the “Outstanding New Talent” Shazam Award for 1973, a tie with fellow newcomer Walter Simonson. “Besides drawing Ben Grimm with the right combination of drama and humor,” Roy Thomas wrote in his Masterworks intro of his choice of Starlin, “I knew Jim

would be able to handle virtually any of the Marvel heroes that Len called on him to draw.”

Starlin’s staging of the Thing vs.

Hulk battle was nothing short of superb, with Wein’s punchy dialogue providing its pulse. Editor Thomas tapped stalwart FF inker Joe Sinnott to embellish the new book (“Talk about stacking the deck!” Roy wrote in Masterworks), seasoning Starlin’s pencils with a Marvel flavor that some appreciated and others disliked. Nonetheless, the results were a powerful premiere for the new Thing team-up book. “…I gave him really light breakdowns, and he did what he wanted on them,” Starlin said in an interview in Comic Book Artist #1 of Sinnott’s

Joe Sinnott.

Big-Screen Monster Mash-Up

Readers of Marvel Feature #11 weren’t the only fans to “Cry: Monster!”: at the box office in 1973, it was clobberin’ time for Godzilla, the King of Monsters, and his super-sized sparring partner, Megalon. © Toho Co., Ltd. Courtesy of Heritage.

Chapter 5: Marvel Two -in-One

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Orange Is the New Black

Our hero with the orange hide found himself in jail in MTIO #38 (inset). Since the Golden Age, comic books have occasionally slapped their stars into the slammer, with Batman, Captain America, Green Lantern, She-Hulk, Flash, H.A.R.D. Corps, Lois Lane, Spider-Man, Batgirl, Vampirella, and the characters shown here being among them.

Thing © Marvel. Superman, Batman, and World’s Finest © DC Comics. Jon Sable, Freelance © Mike Grell. Zorro © Zorro Properties, Inc.

had left behind unresolved storylines involving Warlock and Captain Marvel’s nemesis Thanos, and Goodwin proposed he write and draw both summer-published Annuals, pitching, as Starlin recalled, “You left all this stuff dangling. Don’t you want to finish it?”

Not having any other assignments at the time, Starlin took on the labor-intensive projects, both with expanded page counts, but approached them with no game plan. “I used to work spontaneously,” Starlin said. “I would have a plot in my head and halfway through a story it might change.”

In addition to writing and penciling Avengers Annual #7, which led into Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2, Starlin also began inking the project… until deadline management forced the recruitment of help, in the form of inker-finisher Joe Rubinstein.

“The Avengers Annual was all tight pencils, and I inked a lot of that,” Starlin recalled in Back Issue #48. “Joe inked about the last five pages or something. Then I did the layouts for the Twoin-One Annual for him to tighten up.”

Rubinstein, relatively new to the comics business at the time, recalled in a November 12, 2021 email, “I barely knew Jim, so when he asked me at a party if I was interested in inking/finishing his Avengers Annual, I was thrilled and overjoyed, because while I had been working at DC for the past two years, I would now have the door opened to potentially inking greats like Buscema, Colan, Kane, etc.—and Starlin, of course. Later, when I was informed that there was second Annual finishing the story arc, I knew I had hit the jackpot at the ‘mature’ age of 19.”

Jailhouse Rock

Back in the regular series, in MTIO #37 the regular creative team of Wolfman, Wilson, and Marcos co-starred the Thing, on trial for destruction to property he caused during a battle, and his defense attorney, Matt Murdock, known to Marvel readers as the alter ego of Daredevil, who did not appear in costume in the issue. The cover’s Thing/Matt Murdock co-star logos were accompanied by a blurb that, when considering Murdock’s blindness, was an inappropriate play on words: “The team-up you never thought you’d see!”

Murdock lost the trial and the Thing was put behind bars. There he was befriended by a streetwise, wisecracking African-American youth named Eugene “The Kid” Everett, similar to the rough-andtumble teen characters for which Jack Kirby was famous. For the next few issues Eugene shadowed his new pal he called “Rocky.” Issue #37 read more like a Thing solo story with a guest-star than a traditional team-up, and in the lettercol an editorial poll was launched asking readers if they would prefer more Thing team-ups or Thing solo stories—a prescient query considering that MTIO’s 100-issue run would ultimately be followed by the solo adventures of The Thing. But despite the editorial poll, for the immediate future fans wanted to see a Thing team-up mag.

In the following issue, #38, a Thing/Daredevil team-up, Murdock at last donned his crimson togs to investigate his suspicions behind the charges against his client, which revealed the involvement of the Mad Thinker. MTIO #38 was Wolfman’s final issue (sort of), a story he co-plotted with scripter Roger Slifer.

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113

Slifer was the solo-writer of issue #39, a Thing/Vision team-up, where the Mad Thinker manipulated Ben and carryover guest Daredevil into snaring the Avengers’ resident android so that the Thinker could duplicate Vision’s density powers into an army of Vision robots.

Young Eugene, while snooping around after his orange-skinned buddy, uttered a phrase that Marvelites thought was the exclusive domain of Luke Cage: “Sweet Christmas!” The issue also featured an uncharacteristic extended battle sequence with Yellowjacket in combat wearing only his mask and underwear.

Marvel Two-in-One #40 (June 1978) was released at the time of a milestone in Mighty Marvel history, as Jim Shooter was promoted from associate editor to editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, taking over from Archie Goodwin, who stepped down from the position. Shooter edited #40’s Thing/Black Panther team-up, which was plotted by Roger Slifer for the Wilson/ Marcos art team. “While they were waiting for the artwork to come in on those jobs, they ran into a deadline thing with the Two-in-One job and asked me if I could dialogue it,” remembered Tom DeFalco, new to Marvel at the time, in Back Issue #66. “Ben Grimm has always been one of my favorite characters, so I leaped at the opportunity.”

Slifer’s involvement with the next issue’s continuation of his storyline was demoted to a “Special thanks to: Roger Slifer for the spiffy scenario” acknowledgment at the end of #41’s credits, with David Anthony Kraft picking up the scripter’s baton, at the direction of editor Shooter. The eerie dum-dum-dum sound of drumbeats unnerved the normally imperturbable Thing as Jericho Drumm, the shaman known as Brother Voodoo, materialized in a preternatural mist to enlist Ben’s aid in tracking down the mastermind behind the previous issue’s abduction of prominent people of color—a villain whose creation was inspired by a night at the movies.

Both Slifer and Kraft “went to see the movie Idi Amin Dada and were kinda freaked out by it, and we talked about doing something about it,” Kraft said in Back Issue #66. Amin, the tyrannical president of the nation of Uganda from 1971 through 1979, dominated news headlines during the decade and was the subject of French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, released to U.S. theaters in August 1976. And thus Slifer and Kraft fictionalized the David Anthony Kraft. real-world despot into the role of Marvel Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. villain in MTIO #41. “I think I even kidded that we might get in trouble over this, because [Amin] was still in power, killing people left and right,” Kraft recalled. “When we were doing the story I was thinking, ‘Boy, I hope he doesn’t have a long arm.’ You take that risk when you take living people who are merciless and put them in stories.”

The fact that issues #40 and 41 featured back-to-back black co-stars was not lost upon artist Ron Wilson, who is African American. “Any time you had ethnic characters, I loved it,” he said in Back Issue #28.

“Basically, it was good to have them, but [ultimately] they were just another superhero.”

MTIO #41 marked the temporary departure of Wilson from the title, as the artist shifted to Marvel’s new color Hulk magazine, a slick upgrade of its black-and-white Rampaging Hulk.

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This documentary film inspired a “comic masterpiece” of sorts as writer David Anthony Kraft made real-world dictator Idi Amin a villain in MTIO #41’s Thing/Brother Voodoo story.

Idi Amin Dada © Tinc Productions Corp. Poster courtesy of Heritage Marvel Two-in-One TM & © Marvel.

Marvel Done-in-One

Ralph Macchio made an impressive debut as a Marvel writer with Marvel Two-in-One #42 (Aug. 1978), with editor-in-chief Jim Shooter assigning MTIO to a new editor, Roger Stern. Macchio would soon graduate to writing Doctor Strange and before long become one of Marvel’s most influential editors, being involved with many of the publisher’s most important storylines in an impressive 35-year stint at the House of Ideas.

Stern, who had started working in Marvel’s editorial department in 1976, similarly anchored himself to Marvel for many years as both editor and scribe, his writing stints on Roger Stern.

Captain America, both Spectacular © and courtesy of Eliot R. Brown. and Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers being among his many, many credits there, with Superman, Power of the Atom, and Starman following at DC. Macchio’s Thing/Captain America team-up in issue #42 introduced an important component of Marvel lore: the high-tech research facility Project Pegasus (or P.E.G.A.S.U.S., for Potential Energy Group/Alternate Sources/United States), sequestered in the Adirondacks. There, the Thing was reunited with Wundarr, and joined Cap in pursuit of the Cosmic Cube, which was pilfered by former Ka-Zar foe Victorius, the rogue scientist enhanced by a Super-Soldier Serum replication.

In an August 30, 2021 email, Macchio reflected upon his creation of what would become an integral facility in Marvel lore.

“I recall when Roger Stern asked me to come up with an idea or two over the weekend for the Two-in-One title he was editing.

At first I was just thinking of a filler issue or two. Then it occurred to me that I could create something that would leave my footprint in the Marvel Universe; a place characters could go in the future and have adventures there.

I was a big fan of Kirby’s DNA Project from his run on Jimmy Olsen and I thought along those Ralph Macchio. lines, but not in terms of genetics. © and courtesy of Eliot R. Brown.

1979 was a time of energy shortages and gasoline lines, so I conceived of a place that would investigate alternative energy sources. I recalled the underground nature of Project Wildfire from The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton and based the design of the place roughly on that. And I liked the image of the winged steed Pegasus denoting movement, energy, etc., as the visual trademark. So I called my creation Project: Pegasus. I wrote up a two-part story synopsis over the weekend and presented it to Roger on Monday. He was enthusiastic about it and asked me for a full plot, and we were off to the races. What had been just a fill-in assignment turned out to be something much more, and I’m very proud to say the Project is still being used to this day in various Marvel titles, exactly as I’d hoped.”

This story carried over into issue #43, with Man-Thing’s involvement, in the first MTIO drawn by Marvel’s latest superstar, John Byrne.

Editor Roger Stern and artist John Byrne’s relationship stretched back several years, to their fandom roots. They first met in person during “the July 4th weekend of 1974,” at a gathering related to the ’74 Phil Seuling Comic-Con in New York City, Stern told Jon B. Cooke in a 2001 interview for Comic Book Artist #12. “John and I had corresponded prior to that, and I think we might have even chatted on the phone once or twice, but that was our first face-to-face meeting.” The duo had already formed a working relationship, however, on the Rog-2000 (a.k.a. ROG-2000) comic strip starring a plucky robot created by Byrne, in CPL (Contemporary Pictorial Fanzine), a fan publication Stern and pal Bob Layton started in Indiana in the early 1970s. A number of soon-to-be comics pros cut their teeth on CPL features and became known as the CPL Gang—including the aforementioned Roger Slifer, a “Rog,” along with Stern, who inspired Rog-2000’s name. Connections made at that convention led to Byrne finding Charlton Comics assignments before quickly segueing to Marvel. By the time he illustrated the Thing/Man-Thing/Captain America team-up in MTIO #43, Byrne had already made his mark at Marvel on Iron Fist, Marvel Team-Up, and Champions, and was early into his X-Men collaboration with writer Chris Claremont. Although Byrne’s first stab at drawing the Thing in MTIO #43 seemed a bit rushed, with the art credit attributed to “John Byrne and Friends” (those “friends” unidentified), he would return to MTIO with the celebrated #50, and later make history as the writer-artist of Fantastic Four on a long run of stories that many rate as second only to the original Lee/Kirby efforts.

Macchio’s two-issue outing showed great promise, but was cut short after #43. “Nothing would have pleased the Reliable One more than to have been able to stay with TWO-IN-ONE for the long haul from #42 onward,” it was reported in MTIO #48’s lettercol, which explained Ralph’s commitments to Marvel’s new Special Projects Department as the reason he abruptly left the title. The lettercol further teased, “Ralph had intended Project Pegasus for far greater things”—and promised that Project Pegasus, and Macchio, would return to the book as of issue #51.

With Ralph Macchio’s temporary departure, Marvel Two-in-One briefly teetered into a phase of rotating creative teams and quickie stories that provided entertaining diversions but little substance.

Marv Wolfman had a couple more Thing team-ups in him, released one week apart in early July 1978.

First, he was the writer-editor of 1978’s Marvel Two-in-One Annual #3, a 34-page, Sal Buscema–drawn tale co-starring Marv’s teen-hero creation, Nova. Annual #3 concerned a stoic, skyscraper-sized extraterrestrial invader of New York City that “ignores the panicking humans as if they were insects not worth noticing,” pursued by a formidable, benevolent alien who stood in opposition. When read today, one cannot ignore the parallels between Wolfman’s Thing/Nova team-up and his 1985–1986 DC Comics opus, Crisis on Infinite Earths. The towering interloper from another world is one of the Monitors, a race whose “self-proclaimed mission,” in the words of Milandra, an armored amazon in hot pursuit, “is to seek out worlds—to test these worlds… and to judge if these worlds are fit to survive!”

Crisis, DC’s 50th anniversary crossover “housecleaning” event, featured a cosmic spectator—the Monitor—who observed DC’s parallel Earths and an impending disaster that was obliterating them and their inhabitants. Furthermore, the blonde Milandra, who later revived her dormant sisters Kalara and Askare for assistance, can be viewed as an analog for Harbinger, a similarly garbed blonde who worked alongside, not against, DC’s Monitor.

When asked by Jamie Ewbank in Back Issue #66 if he was

Chapter 5: Marvel Two -in-One

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The first—and only—“fast-shooting issue” of Western Team-Up, #1 (Nov. 1973).

Cover by Larry Lieber (with a John Romita, Sr. facial alteration on the Dakota Kid).

TM & © Marvel.

The wild, wild West was never wilder than it was at Marvel Comics! The publisher’s posse of Western comic books prospered in the 1950s, filled with gunslingers that were throwbacks to the cowboy shoot-’em-ups from the movie houses and radio airwaves of the 1930s and 1940s. With pure hearts and lightning-fast trigger fingers, these Old West heroes—a few of whom were masked—often found themselves wrongly accused of crimes and wanted, dead or alive: Kid Colt Outlaw, the Rawhide Kid, the Two-Gun Kid, the Outlaw Kid, the Ringo Kid, the Western Kid… even the Apache Kid (“Indian or White Man?” asked its covers). No, I’m not done yet. Marvel also had the Prairie Kid, the Gunsmoke Kid, the Texas Kid, the Arizona Kid, the Yahoo Kid, and—no kidding—the Hair-Trigger Kid. And when Mighty Marvel wasn’t “Kid”ding around, they published the adventures of the Black Rider, Gunhawk, Arrowhead, Matt Slade, the coonskin-capped Davy Crocket rip-off Billy Buckskin, and Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley, too.

In the 1960s, with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby producing many of Marvel’s Western tales while simultaneously building their superhero universe, some of the tropes of the emerging Marvel Age could be spied in the pages of books like Kid Colt Outlaw and The Rawhide Kid. Thanks to the monster mania of the late 1950s and early 1960s, creatures were on the loose in Mighty Marvel’s Westerns. Ghosts scared up trouble in its towns and valleys (although despite terrifying depictions on the covers they were usually bedsheet-draped malcontents trying to spook someone away from their territory, prescient of a Scooby-Doo villain), and badlands beasts like Warroo the Witch Doctor and the Terrible Totem trudged forth. The bank robbers, bounty hunters, stagecoach bandits, bushwhackers, fast-draw wannabes, and cattle rustlers that routinely blasted at Marvel’s cowboys were soon joined by Western-era Marvel supervillains, disguised desperados like the Doctor Doom–ish Iron Mask, the Bat, the Fat Man, the Rattler, Doctor Danger, the Invisible Gunman, the Purple Phantom, and felons with well-traveled Marvel appellations such as the Circus of Crime, the Panther, Goliath, and the Scorpion. There was even a flying, winged Red Raven and a super-gorilla, the Ape! A few of Marvel’s cowboys, mainly the tall, scrappy, blond-locked Kid Colt Outlaw and the short, scrappy, red-headed Rawhide Kid, would occasionally unite, establishing that Marvel’s Old West was a shared universe like its modern world of the Fantastic Four and Iron Man. And when the rights lapsed to a Golden Age character originally published by Magazine Enterprises, Marvel added to its stable Ghost Rider #1 (Feb. 1967). “The World’s Most Mysterious Western Hero,” this ghostly gunslinger blended its Old West setting with supernatural superheroics in the spirit of DC’s the Spectre.

The Old West Becomes the New West

As the 1960s ended, Westerns fell out of favor among the American public. Cowboy movies were becoming rare, and the ones that were produced reflected the changing mores of contemporary culture, with conflicted antiheroes (Clint Eastwood’s grizzled “The Man with No Name” in director Sergio Leone’s Italian-produced “spaghetti Westerns”; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and ultra-violence (The Wild Bunch) supplanting the interchangeable, white-hatted good guy and bloodless gun battles of the traditional “oater.” Television, which had once embraced the Old West, now aimed its sights on hip, metropolitan-set programming, with only the long-running Gunsmoke and Bonanza surviving, and the occasional modern-tinged newbie like Alias Smith and Jones and Kung Fu galloping in for short runs.

CHAPTER 6

Two Kids are Better Than One

Network execs even turned tail and skedaddled away from any non-urban show with a cast member in dungarees, with CBS axing its spate of popular rural-set comedies (The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry R.F.D., etc.) in its infamous “Great Rural Purge.” For the young’uns, superheroes, martial arts, and science fiction now captured their imaginations, and hardly any boy played “Cowboys and Indians” any more.

Marvel’s Western line endured throughout the early 1970s, although its titles were neutered to reprint books—Kid Colt Outlaw, The Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, The Outlaw Kid, The Ringo Kid, the anthologies The Mighty Marvel Western and Western Gunfighters, and a few other flash-in-the-pans—that were shelf-fillers in the publisher’s high-noon market showdown with DC Comics and other competitors to crowd the racks with as much product as possible.

These comics often merely reprinted the original source’s 1950s or 1960s cover art, albeit newly recolored. Some of the duller cover images from yesteryear were jazzed up under the art direction of John Romita, Sr., who commissioned dynamic new cover art more

With trailblazers like Dell’s Lobo, Marvel’s Gunhawks, DC’s gritty Jonah Hex, and Charlton’s Kung Fu–contemporary Yang, comic books of the late Silver and early Bronze Ages began to reimagine the traditional Western story.

Gunhawks TM & © Marvel. Jonah Hex and Weird Western Tales TM & © DC Comics.

Western Team-Up TM & © Marvel. Original art courtesy of Heritage.

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in tune with the company’s superhero line, from seasoned superhero artists like Herb Trimpe and Gil Kane. Further blurring the demarcation between Marvel’s superhero comics and its cowboy comics was the “In the Style of a Western SPIDER-MAN” blurb plastered beside the logo of 1972 issues of The Outlaw Kid, which had recently been revived as a reprint title.

Despite Marvel’s repackaging of yesterday’s pistol-packers, there were attempts to contemporize the genre. The aforementioned Western Gunfighters—which reused a 1950s Marvel series’ name—started as a 25-cent, 64-page book, its first issue cover-dated August 1970, that mixed new and reprinted tales.

The new features in issue #1 took risks with subject matter uncommon to the standard stories found in Marvel’s other cowboy books: the eerie frontier-fighter Ghost Rider; Gunhawk, a no-nonsense, ebon-clad hired gun billed as “a new breed of Western hero from Mighty Marvel”; “Tales of Fort Rango,” post–Civil War U.S. Cavalry shoot-’em-ups; and the Renegades, a quartet of cutthroats and losers branded as traitors but secretly working for the government to defend the Alamo. Reprints promptly began to edge out the new stories, and issue #7 (Jan. 1972) was the last to include new tales of Ghost Rider and Gunhawk, the book switching entirely to reprints with issue #8 until the end of its run, #33 (Nov. 1975). After issue #7’s appearance of Ghost Rider, incidentally, Marvel would appropriate that character’s name for its new monster-hero, the fiery-skulled, motorcycling Spirit of Vengeance, who blazed into print in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug. 1972) and soon spun off into his own popular book. The Western Ghost Rider would be renamed Night Rider.

Roy Thomas introduced Red Wolf, an American-Indian “superhero,” into The Avengers #80 (Sept. 1970), with artists John Buscema and Tom Palmer. “Native Americans’ rights and protests were in the news, so I thought it was time,” Thomas recalled to John Schwirian in Back Issue #42 (Aug. 2010). Red Wolf, sporting a ceremonial wolf headdress, was a Native-American twist on the Phantom, with different Red Wolfs appearing throughout history.

An Old West version was soon introduced in Marvel Spotlight #1 (Nov. 1971), followed by a Red Wolf solo series.

Then there was Marvel’s new title Gunhawks (no relation to the Gunhawk from Western Gunfighters). Writer Gary Friedrich’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-meets-Brian’s Song mash-up co-starred Kid Cassidy, a white cowboy, and Reno Jones, an AfricanAmerican range-rider and freed slave, “two young orphans of the War Between the States.” With its final issue, #7 (Oct. 1973), Kid Cassidy got the boot and the title became Reno Jones, Gunhawk, making it an early comic book with a headliner of color, filling the spurred boots vacated by Dell Comics’ ambitious 1965–1966 Western Lobo, by D. J. Arneson and Tony Tallarico, historically noted as the first comic to solo-star a black hero (biographical adaptations aside).

Similarly, competitor DC Comics was reinventing its Westerns.

Its late-1960s entry Bat Lash, featuring extraordinary art by Nick Cardy, starred a nuanced trouble-prone protagonist. It was followed in the early 1970s by a reimagined All-Star Western series, which premiered the features “El Diablo,” an eerie take on Zorro, and “Outlaw,” a bandit son pursued by a lawman father. With its tenth issue, All-Star Western debuted John Albano and Tony DeZuniga’s brutal bounty hunter Jonah Hex, a scarred, sympathetic character cut more from the cloth of director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch than the 1952 classic High Noon. Jonah Hex would go on to become a long-running hit. Even also-ran publisher Charlton Comics, known more for its cookie-cutter–produced rip-offs than for its originality, added two innovative new Westerns—Geronimo Jones, starring a vengeful nomad, and Yang, an inventive martial-arts Western— alongside its old-time cowboy books Billy the Kid and The Cheyenne Kid.

Rescue from Inventory Gulch

It was into this climate in comics’ early Bronze Age that Marvel introduced Western Team-Up (WTU) #1 (Nov. 1973). Instead of parroting the emerging trend of realistic, gritty cowboys, WTU instead hitched a ride on the superhero wagon. An unabashed Marvel Team-Up clone, even down to its logo design, WTU #1 premiered in the same month that saw the releases of Marvel Team-Up #15 and the second installment of the new Thing team-up series in Marvel Feature #12. The Brave and the Bold was also performing very well for Marvel’s top competitor, DC. Team-up comic books were hot.

“I’m afraid I have no memory whatever of Western Team-Up,” the comic’s editor, Roy Thomas, also Marvel’s editor-in-chief at the time, admitted in a September 6, 2021 email. “It was almost certainly a comic Stan put on the schedule after he became publisher-president, a way of hopefully generating just a little bit of coin to help pay for the new ‘infrastructure’ Marvel would need as it became a separate company from Magazine Management.”

Western Team-Up #1 paired the longtime headliner Rawhide Kid with a newcomer called the Dakota Kid (real name: Cliff Morgan), no relation to Dakota Thompson, from a Stan Lee/Dick Ayers story in Two-Gun Kid #74 (Mar. 1965) that had recently been reprinted in Two-Gun Kid #107 (Nov. 1972). This latest of Marvel’s revolvingsaloon-door of “Kids” was a brand-new gunslinger with the roughshod look of an 1870s frontiersman but the brash attitude of a 1970s protestor. On the Larry Lieber/Vince Colletta cover, the Dakota Kid stood side-by-side—although a good head size taller—with the plucky Rawhide Kid as pistol-blazing pursuers encircled them. Both characters were dynamically posed in shots that could have easily been lifted for reuse on a 7-Eleven Slurpee cup. But Dakota’s pessimistic word balloon belied his confident posture and the stoic, chisel-jawed features of a face unmistakably redrawn by Marvel art director John Romita, Sr.: “We’re surrounded, Kid! We’ve had it!”

The Dakota Kid was right—this Larry Lieber. was the end of the line for him. No © Marvel. (spoiler alert!), Dakota wasn’t shot to pieces in the scene depicted on the cover, but his tryout as the co-star of one of Mighty Marvel’s most popular Western stars went nowhere. WTU #1’s “Ride the Lawless Land,” written and penciled by Lieber and inked by Colletta, was a routine tale, one you had read or seen a hundred times, about a young hothead who got into trouble when trying to avenge his brother’s murder. It was only 14 pages long, with a reprint fleshing out the rest of the book—a lackluster launch by superhero-comic readers’ standards.

The Dakota Kid never really had a chance. Neither did Western Team-Up, which was quickly cancelled after its first—and only— issue. “Stan must’ve decided very quickly, though, that, based on projected sales of other Westerns, the comic wouldn’t work, so he killed it,” according to Roy Thomas.

The first thing working against Western Team-Up was that Marvel basically snuck the first issue onto the stands with zero fanfare, outside of a “FIRST Fast-Shooting Issue!” cover blurb. There was no house ad or teaser in other Marvel books. Marvel’s sole announcement for it appeared in the Mighty Marvel Checklist on the “Bullpen Bulletins” page in the company’s November 1973 cover-dated releases. There, buried within a tightly squeezed list of upcoming books, was “WESTERN TEAM-UP #1 (a newie co-starring the Rawhide Kid and—guess who!).” (It might be argued that the “guess

TV Western Team-Up

In the late 1950s–early 1960s, crossovers were common between Warner Bros.’ Western television series, prompting this promotional shot of the studio’s popular gunslingers. (left to right) Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot), Peter Brown (Lawman), Jack Kelly (Maverick), Ty Hardin (Bronco), James Garner (Maverick), Wayde Preston (Colt .45), and John Russell (Lawman). © Warner Bros.

who” quip backfired, since it implied that Rawhide Kid would team with a previously established Western character… so how could a Marvel maniac “guess” a character that had never before been seen??)

There were precious few fanzines during the day, and among them appeared the sole mention of WTU #1 outside of the easy-tomiss Mighty Marvel Checklist item. “There wasn’t much there,” according to comics historian John Wells, who kindly perused his collection of 1973 fanzines for The Team-Up Companion in search of Western Team-Up notices. “Comixscene and (surprisingly) Marvel’s own FOOM didn’t discuss Westerns at all!” But Wells found the following report in June 1973’s The Comic Reader #98: “Western Team-Up will feature the Rawhide Kid and rotating partners. The Gunhawk mess will be solved in this one. #1 features Rawhide and the Dakota Kid… it’s an inventory story from before RK went all-reprint. Larry Lieber script & art.” This blurb was penned by future DC Comics head honcho and writer Paul Levitz, at the time a teenaged fanzine editor who routinely received information on upcoming comic releases direct from the publishers themselves.

Levitz’s 1973 discovery of what was then one of numerous news items for the approximate 3,000 readers of The Comic Reader today provides valuable insight into the rapid premiere of Western Team-Up. At the time of WTU #1’s release, The Rawhide Kid had recently switched to an all-reprint format, having previously featured an all-new lead story and reprint backups—the new tales being 14 pages, like WTU #1’s “Ride the Lawless Land.” George Roussos was the regular inker of writer-penciler Lieber’s new tales in The Rawhide Kid #115 (Sept. 1973), which was not quite two months old when Western Team-Up #1 arrived (issue #115 featured the book’s last new story, appropriately titled “The Last Gunfight”).

WTU #1’s “Ride the Lawless Land” was fetched from its dusty shelf

Chapter 6: Western Team-Up

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END NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

And thus ends our journey through the titanic team-up tales of the Silver and Bronze Ages.

Almost.

In the pages following you will find an issue-by-issue index of each and every comic book chronicled in the preceding chapters (except for the Harvey series, which largely contained reprint material). It’s an exhaustive reference guide that I hope will be a valuable resource for years to come.

Your ever-lovin’, blue-eyed author-editor could not have produced this book without the kind assistance of others.

First, my gratitude to TwoMorrows publisher John Morrow for allowing me to indulge my inner fanboy by viewing through the lens of historical and intellectual curiosity the comic books that so defined my childhood and adolescence and continue to entertain me these decades hence.

Our front cover, reminiscent of the DC Comics 100-Page Super Spectaculars that so many of us adored, features a Curt Swan– commissioned illustration from the early 1990s that hails from the collection of Swan biographer Eddy Zeno. It was inked and customized into “Braveman” and “Boldman” in 2021 by Josef Rubinstein, and colored by Glenn Whitmore. Our book logo and the design of the front and back covers are the handiwork of my Batcave Companion co-conspirator, Michael Kronenberg. And the interior pages, all 256 of ’em, were laid out by the talented Rich J. Fowlks, the designer of the TwoMorrows magazine I edit, Back Issue.

Thanks to my wife, Rose Rummel-Eury, for her unofficial grammatical review of my manuscript and for her support as I’ve forfeited sleep and leisure time during my wonderful but demanding eight-month journey into researching and writing this tome. Thanks also to my brother, John S. Eury, for listening to me ramble on for months about this book… and for being a part of my original discovery of these team-up comics.

John Wells, the E. Nelson Bridwell of our generation, was The Team-Up Companion’s patron saint. John provided fanzine information that shed light on team-ups published and unrealized, and his 11th

hour vetting of my manuscript offered a handful of vital suggestions and spared me the embarrassment of a couple of errors.

Thank you, Mark Teichman, winner of the DC Comics Presents name-the-lettercol contest, for answering the query of a complete stranger and granting an interview.

I must acknowledge the creators, past and present, of the team-up comics explored herein—your stories continue to engage and inspire me, as they do many others. Most of the voices “heard” in this volume are culled from previous interviews from sources cited throughout the text. Special thanks are extended to the following, who provided either in-depth recollections or prompt email responses to queries specifically for The Team-Up Companion: Mike W. Barr, Eliot R. Brown, Gerry Conway, Kerry Gammill, Steven Grant, Jenette Kahn, Todd Klein, Paul Levitz, Ralph Macchio, Josef Rubinstein, Roy Thomas, and Marv Wolfman.

A thank-you to the comic-book historians whose earlier interviews with the aforementioned creators, previously published in Back Issue and other cited sources, preserved their oral histories that I am honored to share in The Team-Up Companion: Jim Amash, Mark Arnold, Michael Aushenker, Spencer Beck, Jonathan Rickard Brown, Bruce Buchanan, Marc Buxton, Dewey Cassell, Michael Catron, Shaun Clancy, Jon B. Cooke, Jamie Ewbank, Dan Johnson, R. A. Jones, Rob Kelly, John Kirk, Michael Kronenberg, Andy Mangels, Franck Martini, Jonathan Miller, Brian K. Morris, Mike Pigott, Peter Sanderson, John Schwirian, Jerry Smith, Bryan D. Stroud, Lex Carson Suite, John Trumbull, Michael Uslan, Don Vaughan, and the ever-helpful John Wells.

My gratitude must also be extended to Ross Pearsall, John Joshua, and Bambos Georgiou, for their kind provision of specialty images, and to Heritage Comics Auctions for many of the scans of original art used herein.

And lastly, thanks to you, dear reader, for buying this book.

There is no dearth of projects out there clamoring for your attention and your hard-earned dollars, and your decision to support The Team-Up Companion is most sincerely appreciated.

End Notes and Acknowledgements

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Artists’ credits: (p): penciler, (i): inker Notes: Headlining characters’ supporting casts (Alfred, Lois Lane, Mary Jane Watson, Alicia Masters, etc.) are not included in guest-star listings. Also excluded is detailed information about backup or filler reprints. Synopses provided are not full summaries, but teasers or brief story descriptions, to keep this oft-reprinted library fresh for new readers.

Team-Up Trivia: Villain(s): Nazis Charles Paris (i) • The first Batman B&B team-up; Guest-star(s): Mlle. Marie Editor(s): George Kashdan TM & © DC Comics.

Batman would take over the title Team-Up Trivia: Synopsis: The Atom answers a beginning with #74.

• The three co-stars are promoted for mayday from Dr. Will Magnus, THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #50 “conspicuous gallantry in action” who’s held hostage by the vengeful (Oct.–Nov. 1963) THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #60 at story’s end. automaton Uranium, and helps the GREEN ARROW AND THE (June–July 1965) • While this issue’s cover accurately scientist restore the Metal Men, MANHUNTER FROM MARS THE TEEN TITANS (ROBIN, bills its co-stars as “together for whom the rogue robot had destroyed.

Cover: George Roussos WONDER GIRL, AQUALAD, the first time,” it wasn’t DC war Villain(s): Uranium, Agantha Story Title: “Wanted—The Capsule AND KID FLASH) writer-editor Robert Kanigher’s first Master” character crossover. Mlle. Marie THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #56 Cover: Nick Cardy Writer(s): Bob Haney Story Title: “The Astounding previously met Sgt. Rock in Our (Oct.–Nov. 1964) Artist(s): George Roussos Separated Man” Army At War #115 (Feb. 1962) and THE FLASH AND THE Editor(s): Murray Boltinoff and Writer(s): Bob Haney Rock briefly worked with Johnny MANHUNTER FROM MARS George Kashdan Artist(s): Bruno Premiani Cloud in All-American Men of War Cover: Bernard Baily Synopsis: Star City’s protectors, Editor(s): George Kashdan #96 (Mar.–Apr. 1963).

Story Title: “Raid of the Mutant Green Arrow and his sidekick Synopsis: Midville’s “Teen • Jeb Stuart references this B&B Marauders” Speedy, enlist the aid of J’onn J’onzz, Government Day” is disrupted by story when he next encounters Writer(s): Bob Haney the Martian Manhunter, to tackle a attacks on the town by the random Sgt. Rock in G.I. Combat #108 Artist(s): Bernard Baily mysterious Martian mastermind who giant body parts of the astounding (Oct.–Nov. 1964).

Editor(s): George Kashdan is assembling a horrific weapon that Synopsis: The Flash and J’onn J’onzz Separated Man, prompting the threatens both Earth and Mars. youths to summon the Teen Titans THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #53 unite to fight a superpowered hybrid Villain(s): Vulkor, Martian criminal for help.

(Apr.–May 1964) of themselves, a mutant from another gang Villain(s): The Separated Man THE ATOM AND THE FLASH world that can also replicate the Guest-star(s): Speedy Guest-star(s): Batman; the Flash; Cover: Bob Brown powers of other JLA members—and Team-Up Trivia: Aquaman; Wonder Woman, Queen Story Title: “The Challenge of the only Hawkgirl can help the heroes • First team-up issue of B&B and Hippolyta Expanding World” save the day! the first official superhero team-up Team-Up Trivia: Writer(s): Bob Haney Villain(s): Unnamed mutant comic book.

• Sequel to B&B #54 and first use of Artist(s): Alex Toth super-hybrid, Queen Tatania • J’onn J’onzz is commonly called the “Teen Titans” logo and name, Editor(s): Murray Boltinoff and Guest-star(s): Justice League of “Manhunter” by Green Arrow and plus first appearance of Wonder Girl George Kashdan America (depicted as a fair exhibit other characters. with the team.

Synopsis: A subatomic planet’s and figurines); Hawkgirl, Carter • The cover is artist Nick Cardy’s first uncontrollable enlargement threatens (Hawkman) Hall THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #51 both the microscopic world and Titans art. He would become the Team-Up Trivia: (Dec. 1963–Jan. 1964) feature’s regular artist with its next Earth, leading the Tiny Titan and • Prior to this story, Amazo, an AQUAMAN AND HAWKMAN installment.

Fastest Man Alive to join forces to android that could also duplicate the Cover: Howard Purcell • Beatles music is referenced as the vanquish the threat.

Justice League’s powers, premiered Story Title: “Fury of the Exiled teens blast “I Want to Hold Your Villain(s): Attila-5 in B&B #30, the JLA’s third tryout Creature” Hand” from their transistor radios appearance.

Writer(s): Bob Haney to vanquish the Separated Man’s THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #54 • Queen Tatania of planet Argon is an Artist(s): Howard Purcell eavesdropping ear.

(June–July 1964) accidental villain, since her creation, Editor(s): Murray Boltinoff and • The Titans would receive one more KID FLASH, AQUALAD, AND the mutant menace, was intended to George Kashdan tryout, in Showcase #59 (Nov.–Dec. ROBIN be a hero.

Synopsis: An Atlantean pariah who 1965), before being rewarded their Cover: Bruno Premiani • In addition to the cover-featured had previously attempted to overown series.

Story Title: “The Thousand-and-One Flash/Manhunter hybrid, in the story throw the domed undersea kingdom’s Dooms of Mr. Twister” the mutant becomes Green Arrow/ government magically mutates into “a Writer(s): Bob Haney THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #61 Hawkman, Hawkman/Aquaman, mighty menace from the sea and the (Aug.–Sept. 1965) Artist(s): Bruno Premiani Flash/Green Lantern, and Batman/ sky” to wreak havoc on Aquaman’s STARMAN AND BLACK Editor(s): Murray Boltinoff and Green Arrow hybrids. realm, requiring the aid of Hawkman.

CANARY George Kashdan • The tale’s International Fair 1964 is Villain(s): Tyros, Hawkgirl-harpy Cover: Murphy Anderson Synopsis: Three superhero sidekicks writer Haney’s nod to the then-cur(temporary transformation) join forces to liberate the captured rent New York World’s Fair of 1964. Story Title: “Mastermind of Team-Up Trivia: Menaces!” teenagers of Hatton Corners and • Aquaman and Aqualad consult the Writer(s): Gardner Fox tackle a cyclone-creating criminal THE BRAVE AND BOLD #57–58 wizard Shazam-like Old Man of the Artist(s): Murphy Anderson with a long-standing grudge against premiere Metamorpho the Element Oceans for advice.

Editor(s): Julius Schwartz the community.

Man in solo adventures.

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION examines team-up comic Synopsis: Florist Dinah (Black Villain(s): Mr. Twister THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #52 Guest-star(s): Batman, the Flash, BOLD #59THE Canary) Drake Lance is an unwitting books of theTHE Silver BRAVE and BronzeAND AgesTHE of Comics—DC’s (Feb.–Mar. 1964) accomplice in the Mist’s ploy to Aquaman 1965) BRAVE AND(Apr.–May THE BOLD and DC COMICS PRESENTS, 3 BATTLE STARS (SGT. ROCK, Team-Up Trivia: BATMAN AND Marvel’s MARVEL TEAM-UP andGREEN MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, hypnotically command affluent LT. CLOUD, AND TANKMAN • First appearance of the Teen Titans, LANTERN plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly customers to give away their wealth, STUART) although that name would notillustrated be Cover:ofGil Kane essays, special features, attracting the attention of Starman. selection informative Cover: Joe Kubert Villain(s): The Mist coined until their next appearance, Storyissue-by-issue Title: “Theindexes.

Tick-Tock Traps the of and trivia-loaded Go behind Story Title: “Suicide Mission!”

Team-Up Trivia: in B&B #60. thefavorite Time Commander” scenes of your team-up comic books with speWriter(s): Robert Kanigher Haney cially curatedWriter(s): and all-newBob creator recollections from NEAL • Editor Julie Schwartz’s revival of the Artist(s): Joe Kubert THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #55 JIMArtist(s): Ramona Fradon (p) R. and ADAMS, APARO, MIKE W. BARR, ELIOT BROWN, Golden Age characters, following Editor(s): Robert Kanigher his similar team-up revivals of (Aug.–Sept. 1964) Charles (i) NICK CARDY, CHRIS Paris CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, Synopsis: Aerial ace Johnny Cloud’s Doctor Fate and Hourman in METAL MEN AND THE ATOM Editor(s): George Kashdan STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE GERBER, STEVEN GRANT, assignment to escort to safety the Cover: Ramona Fradon (p) andBOB HANEY,Synopsis: BatmanPAUL and KUPPERBERG, Green LanternPAUL Showcase #55–56.

TONY ISABELLA, “Allies’ most valuable agent,” an • Story is set on Earth-Two. Charles Paris (i) discover that “fugitive scientist” John LEVITZ, RALPH MACCHIO, DENNIS O’NEIL, MARTIN armor-clad operative codenamed • Winner of theand 1965 Alley Award Story Title: “Revenge of the Robot a.k.a. the Time Commander, PASKO, JOEStarr, RUBINSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, many other all-starfor “Martin,” becomes a tag-team mission Reject” “Best Comic Book Cover.” may not as innocent as he has writers and artists whobe produced the team-up tales that so captivated readers during the 1960s, 1970s, involving the Haunted Tank’s Jeb Writer(s): Bob Haney publicly proclaimed. and early 1980s. By BACK ISSUE and RETROFAN editor MICHAEL EURY. Stuart and Easy Company’s Sgt. Rock. Artist(s): Ramona Fradon (p) and Villain(s): Time Commander

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The Team-Up Companion

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Sometimes, a hero can’t go it alone.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SILVER & BRONZE AGE TEAM-UP COMICS

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION

Go behind the scenes of your favorite teamup comic books with specially curated and all-new creator recollections from: ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-112-7 ISBN-10: 1-60549-112-8

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Neal Adams • Jim Aparo • Mike W. Barr Eliot R. Brown • Nick Cardy • Chris Claremont • Gerry Conway • Steve Englehart • Kerry Gammill • Steve Gerber • Steven Grant • Bob Haney Tony Isabella • Paul Kupperberg • Paul Levitz • Ralph Macchio • Dennis O’Neil Martin Pasko • Joe Rubinstein • Roy Thomas • Len Wein • Marv Wolfman and many other all-star writers and artists who produced the team-up tales that so captivated comics readers during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina 978-1-60549-112-7 $39.95 in the US

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The Team-Up Companion examines team-up comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics—DC’s The Brave and the Bold and DC Comics Presents, Marvel’s Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Twoin-One, plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly illustrated selection of informative essays, special features, and trivia-loaded issue-by-issue indexes.

TEAM-UP CREATORS

MICHAEL EURY

He needs a brave ally, a bold companion.

Side-by-side, two-in-one, they become an unbeatable team.

TEAM-UP INDEXES

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TEAM-UP trivia

PLU

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BOB HANEY, COMICS’ MOST OUTRAGEOUS WRITER! AND MEET THE FAN WHO TEAMED WITH THE MAN OF STEEL!