Randoms and resting

Okay I've now reached the most recent Punisher volume. This isn't the end of this blog by any means but due in part to real life events I'll be posting sporadically in the months to come but will try to keep up with the latest releases, including guest appearances.

Watch out also for my thoughts on some of the other Essential volumes, starting with a character who first appeared on the newsstands the same day as Spider-Man. And as a bonus, here's a picture of one such newsstand from a contemporary television series called Naked City:

Thanks to Homages, Ripoffs, and Great Coincidences: Great Collaborations #1: Hold for Gloria Christmas  for highlighting this.

Welcome back, Frank

(No, sorry, this isn't about that series. That's a long way off. But it is one of my all-time favourites.)

As I previously noted, the Punisher was the first break-out character from the Spider-Man titles, having steadily grown in popularity ever since his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #129. He spent the next dozen years largely confined to guest appearances, mainly in the Spider-Man titles, but with the occasional magazine appearance or limited series. Then in 1987 he was finally granted an ongoing series of his own. It was soon a massive success and spawned not one but two additional ongoing series.

I've previously looked at Essential Punisher volume 1 which carries most of his appearance from his first dozen years. Three further volumes have been published, covering his first ongoing series. It's now time to have a look at them.

Team Titles

Spider-Man has traditionally been a loner. Or so the legend runs.

In the last decade Spider-Man has found his way onto various teams, most notably the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. Some purists reacted with outrage but these were hardly unprecedented. After all the very first issue of Amazing Spider-Man saw him trying to join the Fantastic Four. Later in the 1960s he received invitations to join both the Avengers and the X-Men. The 1970s saw him sharing adventures with most of the Marvel Universe in the pages of Marvel Team-Up. In the early 1980s he hung around with the Defenders for a brief bit, long enough to qualify him as a "member" - the "non-team" status of the Defenders makes it impossible to say for sure who was and wasn't. Marvel Team-Up may have come to a close in 1984 but Spider-Man still found time to team up with many heroes in both his and their titles and he also served as part of ad hoc teams in various Marvel events such as Secret Wars. He came close to Avengers membership a couple of times in the early 1980s, but one time stopped himself and another time was vetoed be the government. Moving into the 1990s there were more events, plus he finally achieved Avengers membership only to resign it soon afterwards and subsequently became a reserve member. The same decade saw him as part of the brief lived "New Fantastic Four", then he went on a mission with the Secret Defenders (although that was even less of a permanent team, with groups selected for individual missions) and he even formed his own brief team, the Outlaws. Spider-Man might have ducked out of the 1997 relaunch of the Avengers and subsequently formally resigned his reserve membership but he kept on teaming up all over the place. Plus there was a brief return of the dedicated team-up book, first in the form of Spider-Man Team-Up and then a revived Marvel Team-Up which Spidey headlined for the first seven issues. The early 2000s saw the format tried again for Ultimate Spider-Man with Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. And then 2004 saw another Avengers relaunch, with Spider-Man a prominent part of the New Avengers, as was the original Spider-Woman. Looking back this wasn't such a break with the character's history as it might at first seem.

Team titles are reasonably well represented amongst the Marvel Essential output, with seven or eight volumes for each of the Avengers, Fantastic Four and Defenders, a whopping fourteen volumes for the X-Men (albeit split over two series titles) and even five for the 1980s team X-Factor. However some of the shorter running and/or less well-known teams from the 1970s & 1980s haven't yet been Essentialised such as the Champions, New Mutants, Alpha Flight, Avengers West Coast, Power Pack or Excaliber (in at least the case of the New Mutants this seems to be for technical reasons as the artwork on some of the early issues just doesn't convert to black and white at all well), though there are other trade paperbacks collecting some of their adventures. Of the Essential volumes out there, they generally haven't reached Spider-Man's memberships. But it's worth a look at the first volumes of each of the team series to see how they started out, whether the teams have a workable reason for even existing and just how suitable the members are. So over the next few weeks I'll be doing just that.

Some other heroes

As another side-step, I'm going to again review some other Essential volumes. In forthcoming posts I'll be looking at a variety of series that all, in their own way, are somewhat offbeat from the superhero norm much as Spider-Man's creation was. They'll be from a variety of eras but where relevant they'll all be the first volumes from their runs. If a particular post proves especially popular I may have a look at some of the later volumes in that series' run.

So tomorrow we'll start with another 1962 hero based on a small, multi-legged creature.

Into the spin-offs

I’m waiting for the next Essential Spider-Man volumes. They may be some time. So in the meantime, following the reaction to my look at the Spider-Woman and Punisher volumes, I’ve decided to take a look at some of the similar or related series that have also been collected in the Essentials. Some were launched to seemingly capture a similar field to Spider-Man. Others initially built themselves around characters from his series, sometimes borrowing guest cast members, sometimes spinning off minor characters.

The largest collection by far is Essential Daredevil, which has so far notched up five volumes, and, in addition, several later issues have also popped up in some of the other Essential volumes (such as Essential Punisher volume 1). On top of all this ol' Hornhead's book is also the most frequent one to appear in the guest appearances posts. Daredevil was created in part as a reaction to the success of Spider-Man (as shown most obviously on the first issue’s cover) and over the years he has become one of the wallcrawler’s closest allies but not without some tension as their relationship developed, particularly due to different outlooks. The two series have shared villains, supporting cast members, creators and more, so it feels natural to take a look at Daredevil’s adventures to see how they compare.

Another character who has frequently overlapped with Spider-Man over the years is the Human Torch, who once had his own solo series in the pages of Strange Tales which lasted for nearly three years and included Spider-Man’s first significant guest appearance. In later years he would go on to be Daredevil’s sole rival as Spider-Man’s best friend amongst other superheroes. (Early in the planning stages for Marvel Team-Up the series was going to feature a regular teaming of the two, similar to the early Super-Villain Team-Up issues focusing on Doctor Doom and Namor the Sub-Mariner, rather than a rotating guest-star book. A permanent teaming of Spidey and the Torch would have made for quite an interesting series...) Both because of this and because he was Marvel’s other teenage solo hero of the early Silver Age, it’s interesting to see how differently he was handled and why he wasn’t as successful as his rival turned friend.

Moving into the 1970s we find another take on the concept of a teenager who unexpectedly gains superpowers, this time a supposedly ordinary one, which came with The Man Called Nova. Intentionally homaging Spider-Man, the first issue even proclaimed this with the wording “In the Marvelous tradition of SPIDER-MAN!” right at the top of the cover. Rather less intentionally the series’s initial set-up was also homaging DC’s Green Lantern (the Silver Age version). The book lasted nearly three years, although it went bimonthly after the first year and a half, and en route it actually included a crossover with Amazing Spider-Man midway through the series (which is also included in Essential Spider-Man volume 8). This time it’s interesting to see just how far the homages ran and whether that was a factor in the series’s ultimate failure.

A second 1970s series of interest that lasted only a couple of years was one that initially entrenched itself in Spider-Man’s world (as shown most dramatically by the characters on the cover of the first issue) even though the wallcrawler himself didn’t appear in costume. Ms. Marvel was a spin-off from Captain Marvel and represented an attempt by the company to simultaneously ride the era’s wave of feminism, secure a trademark with the company name in it (according to this comment by later Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter), and try to have a lasting series with a female superhero. But instead the series crashed within a couple of years, clocking up few issues than her (near) contemporaries Spider-Woman, She-Hulk and the Dazzler. The overlap in characters with Spider-Man strongly encourages a look.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting my opinions on the various Essential volumes as before (although the postings will be a little slower), with a particular focus on comparisons with Spider-Man and how many elements overlap. So stick around!