Team-up Books

Last time out, I rambled on about my love of "partner" comics, such as Captain America and the Falcon. A couple of times while writing that post, I accidentally wrote "team-up" to discuss the style of sub-genre.

Team-up books are different. And glorious in their own right.


The Team-up comics of the seventies and eighties were headlined by one major hero, and had one 'guest star'. The major books were Brave and the Bold with Batman, DC Comics Presents with Superman, Marvel Team-Up with Spider-Man, and Marvel Two-in-One with the Thing.








I had several of these books growing up. And in my case, they usually served to introduce me to characters I didn't know. Which is kinda what they were all about.

This is how I learned about the Metal Men:


I got this comic as part of the long car trip in the summer of 1977. We moved from Texas to upstate New York and made several summer vacation style stops along the way. My mother had a huge bag of comics and I would get a couple of new ones every day. I read the heck out of this comic. Studied every, glorious page of Jim Aparo artwork. Committed the Metal Men to memory. And practiced how to read Tin's dialogue.

The Metal Men character Tin stutters. It's his character trait.

And when we arrived at my Grandmother Lomax's house in North Carolina, I was excited to show her how well I could read by reading the page with the most Tin dialogue.

Tin stutters.


I can still picture her face, a complete mask of stress and worry, as I looked up having completed my read through of the page. I wasn't sure what was upsetting her so much. And it took me several days to figure out what had gone wrong.

Sigh. I had just assumed she knew all about Tin, the Metal Men, and the character's stuttering speech impediment. I made similar mistakes frequently.


The Jim Aparo artwork of those Brave and Bold comics ingrained itself into my brain, I loved it so. I could tell the difference between artists starting at a very early age, and Aparo's work ranked up there with Dick Dillin and Mike Grell in my seventies-influenced childhood. Jack Kirby... Kirby's just in a different category.


Today, there are almost no team-up books. The reason is quite simple. Modern comics rely on 'decompression'. They tell stories over the span of six or more issues, instead of the done-in-one comics I grew up on. This is in order to sell more comics, keep readers coming back, and be able to provide content for trade paperbacks to be sold in bookstores. The done-in-one team-up book, with a new guest star every month, is difficult to pull off and still meet this guideline.

There are a few exceptions, writers who have proved it can be done. But nothing like the team-up books I grew up with.

Thanks,
DCD