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.
