Tag: ccf

Second Day of Classic Comics Christmas 2019

Spider-Man and The Man-Thing

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 second entry representing #12 on my list of favorite comic book Crossovers.

11. Spider-Man and The Man-Thing
from Giant-Size Spider-Man #5 (1975)

by Gerry Conway, Ross Andru, and Mike Esposito

Second Spidey entry. I really could have filled my list with Spider-Man. And a decent chunk of it with this stellar series. But I decided one from this series would have to do. Apologies to the excellent earlier issues where Spider-Man meets Shang-Chi, Doc Savage and Punisher. All contenders.

What do we have here. A lot of focus on character work. Conway uses his page count to shine a spotlight on everybody. It’s during the Clone Saga, so Gwen has mysteriously returned, and everybody is dealing with that. Gwen, Peter, Betty, MJ… we get the first hint of a characterization they will later go all in on for Mary Jane, for better or for worse. We see her on the edge of tears, but then quickly correcting when her Aunt comes in, and putting on a smile and talking about wanting to party. Defalco will later reveal that that’s all she was ever doing, and it will ring untrue.

Conway was more subtle in his treatment of MJ. Maturing her and bringing her and Peter together, while preserving her character.

We also get Curt Connors again turned into the Lizard and see this struggle through the eyes of his wife better than we have before.

We even get solid character work on one random character, a bankrupt chemist on the verge of suicide, whose fate is changed by an encounter with Man-Thing, and who emerges as the hero in the battle against the Lizard.

Not sure if we get good character work on the Man-Thing. You’d have to look closely into his eyes to see what he thinks of these events. All we know is he hears the Lizard’s call with other swamp creatures, and that he seems to respond to intense emotion.

First Day of Classic Comics Christmas 2019

Transformers and Spider-Man

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.

The CCF Classic Comics Christmas

My favorite community for the discussion of comic books online is the Classic Comics Forum.

And my favorite tradition housed there is the Twelve Days of Classic Comics Christmas. Which has just begun, as the 12 Days of Christmas have begun.

The forum has been around since 2014, but the tradition goes back to 2005. I’ve been a participant since 2006. Every year, there is a comic-related theme. And you choose your 12 favorite entries in that theme.

The theme this year is Your Twelve Favorite Comic Book Crossovers. The thread I linked to has all the fine print for the rules. In particular, this is not for big crossovers with teams or many characters. We’re focused especially on two-way crossovers between comic book titles or between comic book characters and external franchises.

As I am making my entries there, I will cross-post to this blog. So stay tuned to discover my Twelve Favorite Comic Book Crossovers.

In the meantime, consider registering an account and joining the community as CCF yourself. Then tell us what your favorite crossovers are.