Not only did TD passively introduce me to the X-Men and What If …?, two titles I collected obsessively and which really embody some of the things I love the most about comics, but TD actively opened the door for me into another huge aspect of my budding comic book nerddom: he brought me to my first comic convention.
OK, to be fair, it wasn’t really a convention per se, not the way we tend to think of massive events like Sand Diego Comic Con today. It was more of a dealer’s show, full stop. But even without throngs of cosplayers, panel discussions with celebrities, and massive interactive booths from the comics, toy and game companies, when I was 12 a comic book dealer show was still a big deal. They weren’t very common and they weren’t easily accessible. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up in the central New Jersey suburbs, and the New York City where the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man lived really was the world outside my window, more or less. As I’ve already pointed out in this series, I had ready access to a public library, the freedom to bike to a nearby convenience store with a spinner rack, and at least one friend with similar interests. I was not the starving man in the desolate wilderness when it came to comics, I know. But all the same, my comics sources did have their limitations:
- The library had some books which reprinted comics, but those reprints were the curated, historically significant issues like Fantastic Four #1.
- The convenience store only sold new issues.
- TD had a bunch of cool random older comics, but they were in fact random. I was happy to be able to read them, but had to take what I could get.
For the part of me that really wanted to do my own, idiosyncratic deep dives into Marvel lore and history, comic book dealer shows blew through all of those obstacles. A hotel ballroom full of dudes sitting behind folding tables completely covered in cardboard longboxes full of old comics was the freaking motherlode. The fact that said hotel was a 30 or 45 minute drive away, and that said shows only happened once or twice a year, just made the experience that much more intense.
Some day, maybe, I will parse out why I was so averse to asking my parents to do things for me as a kid. They were perfectly nice people and I feel confident, in retrospect, that they would have entertained and accommodated reasonable requests if I had made them. But I rarely rocked the boat. On weekdays one or both of my parents worked while I went to school. I played with my friends afterschool, did homework, ate dinner with my family, watched tv and went to bed. On weekends, my mom cleaned the house and went grocery shopping, my dad did yardwork and other projects around the house, and I intuited that I was supposed to leave them alone and entertain myself. Which I could do, no problem, and didn’t mind or think there was anything wrong or missing. I just kind of went along and stuck to the familiar basics. I rarely invited friends over to my house, but if one of my friends (like TD) reached out and invited me, I would go, under my own power. The thought of asking my parents to drive me to the Holiday Inn up the highway because they were having a comic book show never even occurred to me. Come to that, I think I was aware of the existence of comic book shows because sometimes they would advertise in the very comics I was reading more and more of, but (a) come on, I skipped over the ads while I was absorbed in the story and they made a subliminal impression at best, and (b) even being marginally aware was not enough for me to make the leap of looking at the details, like are they happening relatively closeby, on a date I’d have free? But credit where it’s due, TD was the kind of kid who did pay attention to things like that, and the kind of kid who had no trouble asking his mom to give him a ride up the highway on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. And lucky for me, he was the kind of kid who thought it would be more fun to go to a comic book dealer show with a friend, so he invited me and introduced me to that world. Thanks, TD!
Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe it was something subconscious, but as it happens this whole triptych I’ve been writing about my comics-based friendship with TD has some nice parallels. I still remember some of the comics I bought at those earliest shows I attended. Of course straightaway I went through the back-issue bins to find more issues of What If …?
The best thing about this issue is that it raises an interesting philosophical idea about the Fantastic Four’s powers, namely that they are physical manifestations of the characters’ inner lives. This may not have been strictly necessary, but I found the interrogation of the premise compelling. Get bitten by a radioactive spider, you get spider-powers. Get exposed to gamma radiation, you get some amount of turning green and some amount of super-strength (or a super-brain). So why did four people on the same spaceship caught in the same cosmic rays get such different powers? (Other than the Jungian elegance of reflecting the four primal elements and other such narrative necessities.) The answer must be the differences of personality that make humans unique. So Johnny the hot-headed thrill-seeker can burst into flame and fly; Ben the gruff tough guy becomes a thing of rock; Reed the explorer and scientist can stretch because he’ll go to any lengths for science (ehhh); and Sue the token girl can be completely overlooked as invisible (uhhhh). But of course people aren’t one-dimensional, so it’s possible those same cosmic rays could have unlocked other powers based on other personality-traits, right?
The worst thing about this issue is it kind of squanders that premise by basically just flipflopping the pairs. Johnny becomes Mandroid because he loves cars and machines (uh, ok) and Ben becomes Dragonfly because he’s a pilot. So Johnny is the heavy freak and Ben is the high-flyer, but he just has dragon wings, no other power like flames or something awesome. Meanwhile Sue becomes Mrs. Fantastic and can stretch because she is so accommodating of others (UHHHH) and Reed becomes Big Brain, literally a disembodied brain because he’s so smart (gah) and also now the one who’s “out of sight” because he lives in a habitrail in the Baxter Building while the other three go out on missions. Disappointing that they didn’t get more creative on the powersets, for sure, while the role-switching is interesting but doesn’t really have a lot of time to develop in a single issue. Ah well.
Also I’d note that this particular issue of What If…? doesn’t do much for my stated goal of learning obscure Marvel continuity since the whole story is a riff on the FF #1 origin story plus the first meeting with Dr. Doom. But again, What If …? had been a defunct title for three or four years at that point so it was just cool to find anything that was new to me.
But as far as my quest for Marvel history scholarship, another great find I made at those early comic shows was Marvel Team-Up, specifically this beaut from 1981:
Truly, old Marvel Team-Ups (and Marvel Two-in-One) were exactly the kind of quick primers a young fan who wanted to know more about the depth and breadth of the marvel Universe should be steered towards. MTU always featured Spider-Man, while MTIO always featured the Thing, but both titles would team up the star with some other superhero or group. It could be a heavy hitter like Captain America, or it could be somebody reasonably obscure like ... well, like Devil-Slayer. (Let the record show that if we ever get to the point in Doctor Strange 4 or something like that where Devil Slayer becomes part of the MCU, I will plotz.) And each issue was a self-contained standalone story (barring the very infrequent two-parter). So on the one hand, dig an MTU or MTIO out of the quarter bin and you will get a satisfying, comprehensible story for your trouble. You will also be introduced to a character maybe you didn’t know before, and it would be a proper introduction, as often as not Spidey/Thing was meeting this other hero in continuity for the first time so they had to go through the whole explain-your-deal bit up front. On top of that, they tended to be literally all over the map, sending the Thing to Wakanda or Spider-Man to a Roxxon plant in Mexico, so again you got to learn a little more Marvel geography and economic spheres and such. I admit I was drawn to the issue above because I was also into sword & sorcery and D&D and the like, so combining temples and gods and idols and axes and Spider-Man was a no-brainer for me. Marvel Team-Up was a well I would return to many times over the years.
Ah, I hear you ask, but what about the X-Men? Surely you went back-issue diving at these comic book dealer shows for more merry mutant adventures too, right? Indeed I did, but somehow I went from thinking this would be a short and sweet capper on the TD-themed posts to having already written 1600 words, so I will finish things out next post!
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