Monday 20 August 2012

Amazing Spider-Man #92, Marvel Team-Up #4

Amazing Spider-Man #92 (from January 1971) randomly features Bobby as Iceman. He spots Spider-Man dragging Gwen Stacey cross-city. What Bobby doesn't know is that Spider-Man is only doing this to try and cover for his Peter Parker identity. Bobby goes to Gwen's rescue and chases Spider-Man off, and then gets co-opted by shady DA candidate Sam Bullit. We don't like Bullit for several reasons, but mostly his racism towards Joe Robertson and use of dog-whistle politics (before that term was invented). No particular information relevant to the X-Men is revealed.

Marvel Team-Up started in 1972 as a second Spider-Man title, dedicated to the webslinger, well, teaming up, with other Marvel superheroes. Issue #4 features our first proper appearance of the X-Men as a team since their cancellation (well, Bobby, Scott, Jean and Warren, anyway). Beast we'll see more of tomorrow. They team up (after a brief misunderstanding and fight) to take down Michael Morbius, who is stealing life force from other people to remain alive... That's about it.

Both of these are reprinted in Essential Classic X-Men vol 3, and are fairly generic guest appearances of the X-Men in other people's comics, much as had been happening before 1970. Neither stand to be analysed as X-Men stories disguised by being in someone else's title.

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