See my initial post for the context. Suffice to say that I will be sharing my entries to the Classic Comics Forum tradition, “Twelve Days of Classic Comics Christmas“. This is a cross-post of my first entry, representing #12 on my list of favorite comic book Crossovers.
12. Transformers and Spider-Man
“Prisoner of War”
from Transformers #3 (Marvel, 1985)
by Jim Salicrup, Frank Springer, Kim DeMulder and Mike Esposito
I’ll start the countdown with a comic of purely personal significance. To the best of my fading memory, this is the first crossover comic I ever read. It is also the first Spider-Man comic I ever read. To learn how much I like Spider-Man, I recommend just looking at the rest of my coming Christmas list. Transformers was the first series I ever sat down to seriously collect as a new comic reader. By “seriously”, I think I tracked down issues #2-5 in back issues over the course of several months… I would get much better at collecting when I got older.
Side note: That I got #5 confused the heck out of young me given that it’s a 4-issue limited series. It confuses the heck out of old me, too.
Anyways, in this issue, after Peter Parker is sent on assignment to Photograph the Transformers, Spider-Man and the Autobot Gears team up to rescue a human from Megatron.
Speaking of confusing things, this comic came out during Secret Wars. So Spider-Man’s costume was not only different from the one I knew from episodes of the old ’60s cartoon I’d seen on VHS, but it seemed to be somewhat alive. I think I briefly thought this Spider-Man and the other one might be two different characters.
Was marketing the motivation for this crossover? Probably. Isn’t it usually?
But this comic formed a bridge of childhood hobbies. In my earlier years, I watched cartoons like Transformers. Entering the second decade of my life, I would get really into superhero comic books, with Spider-Man being easily my favorite.
This was also certainly my first encounter with Nick Fury and SHIELD. But since the comic only called him “Nicholas”, it would probably be a little later before I learned his name.
A little extra detail from a Transformers fan who just found this blog (sorry if you know all this stuff already!): Supposedly, the reason Spider-Man wears his black costume in this issue is because Mattel were producing Spider-Man toys at the time. Hasbro weren’t keen on promoting a rival company’s toys in the book that was supposed to promote their toys, so Marvel appeased them by dressing Spider-Man in a costume Mattel had yet to produce a toy of.
Also, around the same time, Steve Ditko drew a few Transformers colouring books for Marvel. They’re not his best work, but one of them does prominently feature Gears, of all characters. Funny how things work out.
Thanks for the insights!