Marvel Team-Up is a 1972 series by Marvel Comics.
The series featured Spider-Man teaming up with other heroes, running for a hundred and fifty issues.
Marvel Team-Up provides examples of:
- Actually a Doombot: Played with in one caper in issue #95, where a rogue SHIELD agent shows off one of their Life Model Decoys of Nick Fury. At the end of the story, it turns out it's the real Nick, disguised as an LMD because he was on to the agent.
- Ambiguous Ending: Issue #95 ends with Mockingbird getting shot up leaping in the way for bullets heading for Nick Fury, with him hoping he can get her to a doctor quick enough. Hawkeye vol. 1 would confirm he did, though it took six months for her to recover.
- As Himself: Issue #74 has Spider-Man attend the broadcast of an episode of Saturday Night Live and battling Silver Samurai alongside the cast. The SNL episode was hosted by Stan Lee who appears as well.
- Atypical Team-Up Episode: The whole premise of this comic series was about Spider-Man, a solo hero, teaming up with other Marvel heroes who, with the exception of Daredevil and Human Torch, he normally hardly interacted with or in some cases never met before.
- #74 is a "team-up" with the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players, a group of TV comedians with no super powers or fighting ability.
- Badass in Distress: One issue begins with henchmen of the Living Monolith abducting Havok from Muir Island. He spends the next two issues captive as a power source.
- Bad Future: Issue #45, appropriately titled "Future Shock", has Spidey stumble into the future of Killraven. He's horrified at the thought of this being the future in store for everyone, but the time machine wipes his memories of it when he gets back to the modern day.
- Burn the Witch!: Averted in one issue in which Spider-Man time-travels to Salem and tries to save the victims of the Witch Trials. He fails but the witches were not burned (he finds them hanged, which is historically accurate).
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Spidey has a hard time placing Misty Knight because he saves so many people.
- "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate: Many issues cashed in on these kinds of arguments. Want to know if the Hulk or Thor is stronger? There's an issue where they fight each other.
- Celebrity Paradox: Issue #74, which has Spider-Man teaming up with the cast of Saturday Night Live, has Stan Lee hosting SNL.
- Comic-Book Time: Karma's introductory story is quite heavily tied into The Vietnam War. Fine when it came out in 1980, not so much forty years on.
- Creator Cameo Stan Lee, Spider-Man's co-creator, makes an appearance as himself in issue #74, hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live.
- Cross Through: After Havok is abducted, Polaris puts in a call to the X-Men, who aren't in. Worried, she calls Beast at Avengers Mansion, and he goes to investigate, only to not be heard from again for the rest of the story, because over in X-Men he finds the team and they get abducted by Magneto.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: One issue has Spidey apparently attacked by the Fantastic Four. Groggy, he goes to seek out the Human Torch to attack him, only for the Torch to point out the obvious fact it clearly wasn't them. Just someone who happens to have all their powers, at which point he realises who's responsible - Kl'rt, the Super-Skrull.
- Fully Absorbed Finale: Issues #63 and 64 follow up from plot threads in Iron Fist, which had recently been cancelled (with Iron Fist and Team-Up's then-current writer being Chris Claremont).
- A God Am I: The Living Monolith proclaims himself the living personification of several Ancient Egyptian gods. Given the boost in power makes him able to go toe-to-toe with Thor, he can put his money where his mouth is.
- Incredibly Obvious Tail: Some rogue SHIELD agents try tracking Mockingbird, only for her to turn the tables on them the minute they try jumping her, telling them she'd noticed them following her for ages. She is a trained spy, y'know. Later on in the issue, it happens again, as she walks into a trap and scoffs to herself how painfully obvious it is everyone around her is a SHIELD agent.
- Innocuously Important Episode: Issue #79 would later prove to be very important for events in X-Men... so it's also a serious pain-in-the-ass that rights issues related to it featuring Red Sonja make reprinting it a legal quagmire.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Issue #95 has some initial ambiguity about Mockingbird and her moral alignment, since her last appearance had SHIELD suspecting her of going rogue. Given in the forty years since Bobbi's been a hero and Avenger, it's easier for readers to figure Spidey's being lied to.
- Mars Wants Chocolate: In a non-canonical, Aunt May feeds Galactus some Grosstest Twinkles, which he finds extremely fulfilling. She rescues Earth (and the rest of the universe) by finding him a cosmic baker who makes planet-sized Twinkles.
- Multi-Bodied-Morph Panel: In Issue #31, Spider-Man and Iron Fist are pitted against Drom the Backwards Man, and in the finale, they get around Drom's energy-draining touch by breaking his precious mirror over his head. Without this ego-affirming talisman, Drom loses his grip on reality and is "swept away on the chromal stream": in a single panel close-up of his horrified face, he regresses to adolescence, childhood, and finally infancy in four depicted stages. The next panel reveals that Drom has vanished out of existence, leaving behind only empty clothes.
- Narrating the Obvious: Happens whenever Chris Claremont is writing. Characters will outline their every action as they're doing it, no matter how obvious it is.
- Never Trust a Title: Downplayed. It is very much a team-up series featuring Marvel characters, but the generic title implies a lot more diversity in said team-ups, suggesting an Anthology Comic. In truth, the series could be more accurately titled "Spider-Man Team-Up", since with a scant few exceptions, it was always him and another hero.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: In volume 3, the heroes confront the powerful mutated Skrull Titannus, who is powerful enough to wrestle the Hulk and has such a potent Healing Factor that he can regrow his own head after crushing it. However, when some of the heroes question an alternate version of Iron Man who had previously mentioned "the Titannus War", they determine that in the reality of this other Iron Man, the Avengers were never disbanded, and therefore immediately responded when Titannus came to Earth and were lured into a trap that started a decade-long war with another alien civilisation. Since the Avengers weren't a team in this reality, they didn't detect Titannus until after he had come to Earth and proven himself untrustworthy, which led to him being dealt with and the war averted.
- No Body Left Behind:
- Living Monolith's fight with Thor ends with him disappearing from too much power.
- Issue #62 ends with the Super-Skrull being caught in a massive explosion which seemingly disintegrates him. He got better.
- Steel Serpent suffers a case of power overload and explodes, leaving behind only a smouldering crater. He also got better.
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: Issue #125 has a story where a bunch of magicians summon a monster which goes on a rampage through New York. Dr. Strange and the Scarlet Witch team up to stop it, only to find it's not malevolent; it's just panicking because it was dragged out of its home dimension and dropped in a strange place.
- People Puppets: Both Karma and her brother have this power, able to perfectly control the minds of anyone in reach. Xuan hates using it. Her brother... not so much. Tran's also much more powerful than his sister, able to control all four of the Fantastic Four at once without any effort.
- Police Are Useless: If they're not pointing their guns at Spidey, they're still not much help. But then, what exactly are the NYPD's finest meant to do against an alien super-soldier?
- Retroactive Legacy:
- The very first issue had a scene where Spider-Man saved a young woman from being mugged on Christmas Eve. A much later issue by Chris Claremont established that the woman was actually Misty Knight.
- Issue #100 revealed that as a young man, T'Challa had been close friends with Ororo Munroe, and that they both harbored lingering romantic feelings for one another. Decades later, this would be used as the basis for their marriage.
- Salem Is Witch Country: A strange Story Arc involves Spider-Man, the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Moondragon, and Doctor Doom time-traveling to Salem to fight a warlock who was involved in the Salem Witch Trials. Unfortunately, the heroes defeat the Warlock, but could not stop innocent people from being hanged.
- Samus Is a Girl: Issue #100 has Spidey possessed by a mysterious person known as Karma. It's only after he's found her that Spidey discovers Karma is a teenaged girl.
- Smelly Feet Gag: In issue #64, Colleen Wing insists Spider-Man takes his boots off in her house. He refuses on the ground that his feet smell awful, but finds a workaround of sticking to the ceiling.
- Something Person: Lampshaded in Volume 3 #14, where Spider-Man meets Image Comics superhero Invincible (2003) who ribs him for his unimaginative name. Later, Invincible meets the Avengers and tries to guess their names:Invincible: "Don't say anything—let me guess. Okay, using "Spider-Man" as an indication of how you guys name yourselves—Let's see here...Robot-Man (Iron Man). Claw-Man (Wolverine). Flag-Man (Captain America). Fabio-Man (Sentry). Bat-Woman (Spider-Woman). And, uh...Black-Man (Luke Cage)?"
- Special Aesop Victim: One arc introduced fledgling hero Freedom Ring, who was brutally killed off at the end of the arc for no other purpose than to drive home a lesson about what happens when someone with very little training fails to take being a superhero seriously.
- Spoiler Cover: The title of issue #100's main story manages to give away one of the main reveals, namely the villain is a "she".
- Team-Up Series: Spider-Man and someone else, almost every time. Of the 157 issues from Volume 1, only 11 didn't feature the wall-crawler as one of the team-ees. Of those 11, the Fantastic Four's Human Torch or the Hulk usually got top billing.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The first thing Tran did on his mutant powers awakening? Make a nearby soldier smash his own head against a post.