Siskoid and Ryan Daly’s coverage of Marvel Two-in-One continues with issue #31 (September 1977) by Marv Wolfman, Ron Wilson and Sam Grainger, starring the Thing and the Mystery Menace! It’s “My Sweetheart–my Killer!”. Plus, your feedback for a previous episode and our thoughts on the new FF movie!
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Relevant images and further credits at: FW Team-Up Supplemental
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The “mystery guest” gag hardly ever worked for team up books, because of course the reader’s imagination went places that could rarely be satisfied. Brave and the Bold tried this trick for issue #150, and the guest star teaming up with Batman was…Superman.
While I long ago gave up Disney+ and the Marvel shows, a mini series delving into what it’s actually like to work at HYDRA could be really funny, Imagine clocking in each day, not knowing if you were going to fight the Thing, Captain America, Daredevil, the Hulk, etc. “Oh lord, not Power Man again.”
I, too, really enjoyed the FF movie, even a little more than SUPERMAN, which I really liked. I agree, it’s a shame they are immediately going to get shunted into the main MCU, when I want to see more of (hell, live in) Earth 828.
It’s too bad you wanted to limit the song suggestions to releases preceding the comic. In December of 1977 (about six? months after the comic) the Rezillos released the A-side “My Baby Does Good Sculptures”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWMRosfjOxc
And as for people named Chauncey, my mind always goes back to two middle-aged men sharing a bench in nearly every Rocky and Bullwinkle arc, Chauncey and Edgar. Although I agree, that name is “something you don’t see every day”.
Marv missed a trick by not calling the other guy Edgar, here.
Here’s my idea for a team up but if I can take page from Saturday morning. I’m gonna do a Grim Family team story . I call this Story : Benji and Grim family save the day . Yes this is cross over the famous k-9 Benji . In this universe he’s a stray mutt who one ends up helping Ben and kids when there out shopping and Ben seeing who much the dog loves his kids and they love him they bring the dog home and Ben shows his kids the old Benji so they name the dog Benji Jr . And wouldn’t you know of some bad guy attacks it’s a couple members of the wrecking crew and they nock out most of the hero’s so it’s up to Ben’s wife kids and dog to save the day .
I had two other ideas either a cross over with the thing’s alternate self from Fred and Barney meet the thing or the Huntrix a group of k-pop demon hunters from the movie K-pop demon hunters the Benji the dog team came to me as I was typing plus the names Ben and Benji .
Can’t help but love the ‘mystery guest’ gag. My first one was B&B #150, bought off the rack! And what a great surprise it was there! That said, this doesn’t seem like a true version of that concept. A mutated Alicia isn’t a defined enough character to be worth the title space. But as you say, you can’t say ‘Spider-Woman’ again.
I also love how many people have been mutated into spider things over the course of Marvel comics. Why not Alicia? As Ryan said, it is interesting to turn the ‘I love this monster’ idea on its head in the Ben/Alicia relationship here. I can hear him gruffly say ‘hey baby, put your arms around me! All 8 of them!’
As for the perfect Alicia team-up, I’d team her up with Man-Bat to lean into echolocation and perhaps his hearing as a potential weakness. Have them fight Klaw (for sonics) and Dr. Spectro (for light).
Great discussion of a wonky issue!
Oh man, I must have been in a mood when I used that Word last time. the situation with Ben and Alicia
has always been kind of strange I don’t think that Stan and Jack meant anything bad with it. John Bryne had some very weird ideas about disabled people. (see Action 584) But they have had a rather unusual love life. However, If Ben were cured and Alicia could see, I don’t think they would still be together Maybe team them up wth the Doom Patrol.
Oh, the B&B 150 thing? It was one of the few times Jim Aparo drew Superman so it was still good. Though when I bought it I was hoping for Captain Marvel/Shazam!
Robotman/Thing + Jane/Alicia makes a lot of sense.
Since I binged thru all of these stories at once, the “Mystery Guest” was no mystery at all. It was blatantly obvious from the previous issue, so it’s a pretty bleah gag. It really would have been fine for this issue to be “and Spider-Woman” just like the previous one. It was done in Marvel Team-Up at least once, like the Captain Britain two-parter. Although, that’s a good point, why didn’t they use Captain Britain? My extensive research of asking Google shows he debuted the year before this issue, so he could have popped in. Makes as much sense as the other characters that have been in this storyline.
So for an Alicia team-up, I was thinking sculptures and here’s where it ended up. She’s in the Baxter Building while the FF are on a mission, and the Impossible Man pops in, gets up to shenanigans with the time platform, and it snatches Quislet from the Legion of Super-Heroes’ time bubble. Quislet and Impy have a wild romp around the building, and Quis keeps animating Alicia’s statues which frustrates her to no end, until she’s had enough when she realizes they disintegrate afterwards. She gives them both a stern talking to about respecting art and other’s property, and they agree to go home. But first, Quis admits to admiring her sculptures and wishing he could create things as beautiful. Later, the Legion marvels as Quislet attempts to make lifelike figures, and Alicia creates a familiar looking craft for her latest piece.
As to why not use Captain Britain for a story taking place in England? When this arc started (about a year and a half ago) I speculated as to why there would be such a strange combination of characters (Namor, Deathlok, Shang Chi, etc.) :
If you aren’t a Bronze Age obsessive, you might want to track down the last year of Marvel Spotlight [vol. 1] to make sense of the choice of characters in this extra-long arc. The last three issues, especially, which feature Nick Fury, Spider-Woman and Deathlok. It’s important to remember that Marv Wolfman was primarily a horror writer until just a few years before this story. Yeah, he and Len Wein famously got their start working on Teen Titans in the ’60’s because they were nearly the same age as the characters, but until the mid-70’s most of Wolfman’s super-hero stories were fill-ins and even then they often had a supernatural angle (“The House That Haunted Batman”). That might be why he was editing the B&W magazines when he moved to Marvel in the early 70’s– so many of them were horror-oriented. When most of that line was cancelled in 1975 he was suddenly editing tons of color comics, many of them taken over from Wein. These included Marvel Spotlight and Marvel Premiere. The first thing he did was bring them back to their original purpose as Showcase-style try-out books so that each feature only lasted one or two issues. That enabled him to continue interrupted horror storylines from the B&W magazines and comics. It also provided him (and Archie Goodwin) with unaffiliated characters to populate the increasing number of team and team-up books of the mid-70’s. Ever wonder how Moon Knight wound up in a Defenders arc? Or how Hercules teamed with Ghost Rider in Champions? Follow the changes in edit credits.
The writer on those early Captain Britain stories was Chris Claremont, who, like Marv, started out writing mostly B&W horror mgagzines. When he did super-hero stories, they were usually fillins for editor Roy Thomas, then Len Wein. Wolfman took over for Wein, editing Claremont on X-Men, Black Goliath and Iron Fist. He left Marvel Team-Up and Archie Goodwin took it over. Goodwin then took over X-Men and replaced Bill Mantlo with Claremont on MTU. Then, Black Goliath and Iron Fist were canceled.If Claremont was going to work out an American debut for CB in the spring of 1977 so that it could be published by fall, he would probably have done that with Goodwin. And where did that debut happen? MTU #’s 65-66, edited by…
MTIO has actually done the ‘same cover guest star logo’, with Thor in both #22 and #23.
As for the comic story, bar the sexy new look for Alicia it was a bit dull.
Siskoid, I don’t think Chauncey is a nickname or diminutive. From Google Ai: ‘The name Chauncey is of French and British origin, derived from the Old French word cheance, meaning “chance” or “fortune”. It originally functioned as a surname and was introduced to England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, later evolving into a given name. The name can also refer to the Latin title “chancellor” or a French place name, associated with high status or good luck.’
As for food, hardly anyone eats kidney – sweetmeats are very, very unpopular outside of palaces .
All thoughts expressed on the Fantastic Four movie were correct!
Funnily enough, we have had a comic about a day in the life of a Hydra agent, in 2015. Hank Johnson, Agent of Hydra #1 is on Marvel Unlimited and it is a hoot.