Spidey in Black or Red and Blue

 In late June 1985, when I was a few months away from nine years old, a very important comic was published - the Spider-Man Summer Special!

One pound twenty was an exorbitant price to pay for a comic in those days! Sure, this is a special kind of comic - 48 full-colour pages inside cardboard covers (the interior pages are numbered 3 to 50), as opposed to the standard Marvel UK comics of the time, which were 32 pages including covers, half of them monochrome and the other half in colour. But those standard comics cost 27p in 1985, a more reasonable kind of price for children with a couple of 20p coins in their pockets¹. A volume like this, costing £1.20, was something you'd only get as a special treat.

I, or maybe my brother², got this when we went to Butlin's that summer, probably. Superhero comics weren't something I was interested in at the time, and Marvel UK seemed in a big way to share my view. In earlier years, they had reprinted the American comics in a variety of British titles, but those had been dropped by this point. The long-running British Spider-Man comic was still going, but Marvel UK had emphatically retooled it to be aimed at "younger readers" - the stories inside were Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, plus some very kiddy backup strips. It was probably because British superhero fans were increasingly able to buy the American full-colour originals, and no longer purchased the UK monochrome reprints when they came out months later. I assume the "for younger readers" approach was an attempt to build up a new generation of superhero fans over here, giving up on the previous ones and leaving them to mail-order their American titles instead.

This comic was the "debut" appearance of Spider-Man's black costume! This is a good example of the lag between America and Britain in those days. By summer 1985, the black costume was old news in America! It first appeared in Spider-Man's own comic in January 1984, along with a promise that readers would learn where it came from in the all-new Secret Wars limited series, the first of the twelve issues of which went on sale at the same time. The black costume doesn't show up until the eighth issue of Secret Wars, on sale at the end of August, by which time readers of the various comics Spidey appeared in had already had months to get used to it, had learned in July that it was an alien symbiote and now were fiercely arguing about whether it was a good or bad idea to go back to the classic look.

Readers of Marvel UK's comics didn't know anything about these recent developments in the superhero world, except as revealed in the UK's Secret Wars comic, which launched at the end of April 1985, reprinting the more-than-a-year-old American title. And even then, it needed lots of editorial text pages explaining who the more recently-created superheroes in it were, and what had changed about the other ones since Marvel UK stopped reprinting their adventures. The introductory page above catches up readers of the Summer Special on what they need to know, and an ad on the back page tells them where they can read more of Spidey's advetures...

I was very confused by that picture. You really have to study it to see it's meant to be a large Spider-Man head behind a coat-hanger on which his two costumes are hanging.

It would be a while before readers of Secret Wars in Britain could "see the first appearance of Spidey's great new black costume" - the comic didn't catch up to that point until October. In June, apart from Secret Wars, Marvel UK's diminished range of titles went like this. No American reprinted superheroes except the Spider-Man comic you might want to treat your younger brother or sister to³.

We⁴ only got two of these comics - the fortnightly Transformers, and Return of the Jedi in the weeks when Transformers didn't come out. Jedi was basically unreadable rubbish, bought only because one had to buy a comic, but Transformers was something very special!

Transformers toys made their sensational appearance in Britain in 1984. Unlike a lot of American toys in those days, which wouldn't reach these shores until a year or more after their stateside release, we got Transformers at the same time as the Americans! And they were MASSIVE. Sensationally popular, and so Marvel UK naturally rushed out a comic, which kids at the time snapped up. It reprinted the brand-new American Transformers comic almost immediately after its US publication, which caused a bit of a problem when the American "four issue limited series" came to an end. Obviously, Transformers were still so hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic that the series had to continue, but the US branch of Marvel were able to wait a couple of months to create some more material before launching it as an ongoing series.

Marvel UK didn't want to do that. The Transformers comic was selling like hot cakes. So they took the step of creating their own stories, and they were brilliant! We snapped it up, even when the actual Transformer content of the comic was a bit on the minimal side - number 19, advertised in the checklist above, is a classic example. It contains five pages of Transformers comic, seven of Machine Man, seven of Planet Terry, a four page comic telling "the true story" of the Battle of Hastings, two pages of the Chromobots, and a lot of padding to fill its 32 pages. And we loved it!

But back in October 1984, when the American comic was still being reprinted in the British pages, Spider-Man made a guest appearance, complete with black costume! So for fans of the Transformers comic, like me, the black costume was already familiar!

But let's return to the 1985 Summer Special. The Spider-Man stories in it weren't the first I'd ever seen - that honour might go to the Spider-Man Annual published in 1980, which had been around Grandma's house since time immemorial.⁵ That annual contains one particularly wonderful story, reprinted from Spectacular Spider-Man #21, written by Bill Mantlo and exploring very much the same kind of themes I'm going to be talking about at length when I finally start talking about the Summer Special, but perhaps I was just too young at the time to really appreciate it. There had been other stories here and there, I'm sure, but I'd never read the comics with any kind of regularity or even interest. Spidey was, of course, a part of popular culture who everyone knew about, and I'm sure I was more than familiar with him by osmosis even before the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon appeared on TV in 1983. But my idea of what Spider-Man, and general superhero, comics were like was only very vague. I certainly didn't think of them as being as mature or intelligent as the kind of real literature you might find in the Transformers comic or an actual book!

And then came this Summer Special. And my mind was blown like never before. The first story, with Spider-Man facing Jack O'Lantern (from the American Spider-Man comic #254), was all right. It didn't make much impact on me, but it was pretty cool. But the second story, which originated in Marvel Team-Up #145, was something else. It wasn't a superhero story.

It was written by Tony Isabella, who I always list among the comic creators I admire the most, solely because of this story and the effect it had on my eight-year-old self. Perhaps it was just the right place and the right time, and I didn't really get into superhero comics until years later, but it might very possibly never have happened at all if I hadn't always had this example in mind. It does things that I had no idea you could do with the medium of costumed hero stories! Seriously, it blew my mind, like I've said before.

Tony Isabella, like all the best people, has a long-running Blogspot blog⁶. The artist, meanwhile, was Greg LaRocque, who again I don't particularly know outside this one important comic, but in those days Marvel had a healthy stable of very good artists who could deliver the right kind of action adventure in the house style. And of course we start with Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York, because that kind of splash page is essential in a Spidey story. But the narrative captions make it clear that this isn't a superhero story...

It is, of course, an issue of "Marvel Team-Up", which means it's required to contain both Spider-Man and one other superhero. In this case, the co-star is Iron Man. And this is the problem with the whole Marvel Team-Up arrangement - it tended to feel a bit contrived. If Spidey's in New York, happens to meet one of the many other superheroes who hang around there, and they solve a problem together, that's okay. When the plot requires Spider-Man, Iron Man and Blacklash all to go to Cleveland for separate reasons, it's a bit less plausible. Especially since Iron Man was based in California at this point, and the story was clearly written in the belief he was still living in NY. The writer or editor slip a bit of dialogue into this page to justify his boarding a plane in New York.

This was almost certainly my first encounter with Iron Man (maybe a passing reference here and there in other comics I'd seen, but nothing more), and it's from the period when Jim Rhodes was wearing the Iron Man armour. Not knowing any of the back story, I just assumed Iron Man had always been Jim Rhodes, accompanied by his sidekick Morley Erwin. The multiple lines in this comic implying otherwise entirely passed me by. I was very confused and baffled when what felt like years later (but could actually only have been a few months - when you're 8/9 years old, you pack a lot of life experience into that period) I saw an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends in which Iron Man is a different guy called Tony Stark. It didn't make any sense to me. How can a superhero be two different people? Boy, I hope someone got fired for that blunder. Luckily, in January 1986, the Marvel UK Transformers comic reprinted an Iron Man story ("Night of the Octopus") with Tony as the hero and included a potted history of Iron Man, explaining the difference between Tony Stark, Jim Rhodes, and Arno Stark, who had just appeared in the Machine Man backup strip as the man who would become Iron Man in the far-flung distant future world of the year 2020. My bewilderment was finally at an end. But back in summer 1985, Jim Rhodes was the only Iron Man I knew, and I still think he's the best to this day!

But this comic isn't about him, either. It's about the super-villain.

Spider-Man and Iron Man have both come to an electronics convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Tony Isabella lived in Cleveland, as did Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster back in 1938. It's an important town for superheroes! And, as it turns out, villains too. Because Mark Scarlotti, the super-villain Blacklash, is a Cleveland native. He's come to the convention hoping to get some leads to a job in engineering, but nobody will give him the time of day. He really is a scientific genius, but after his previous defeats by Iron Man, his identity as Blacklash has become public knowledge, and he can't get even people who don't know him to talk to him about work, perhaps because he just comes across as a little strange.

Which is the thing that's so great about this story. It's very clear and explicit that Mark is mentally ill. He's manic-depressive⁷ and suffers from violent mood-swings. We follow his thought bubbles as a brief burst of anger is enough even to set off Peter Parker's spider-sense - quite an impressive feat - before he lapses back into despondency. Seeing Iron Man at the convention, he thinks about attacking and defeating him to get back in the good books of his former bosses in the Maggia (Marvel's unsubtle Mafia equivalent), but then gives up on the whole idea and gets the bus home.

He goes to see his mother, who tells him to just leave because his father wants nothing to do with him, and then goes for a drink to try to calm down. Which doesn't work out very well. These next two pages have an interesting side-story to themselves...

That's followed by an ad for the 1985 summer special line-up...

...And then we're back into the action, and a transition from the previous story page that always felt a little abrupt to me.

And that's because there's a page missing from the story as presented by the Summer Special! Despite the claim on the first page that it contains "two lengthy and spectacular complete tales", this second one is incomplete! Between Mark leaving the bar and bursting back in, the original comic has this page:

It doesn't look like Marvel UK had to cut a page out to fit the story into the special. There are two pages of puzzles in the middle of the comic that are obviously just there to take up space. I think it must just be that this page has Mark contemplating suicide, and someone decided that goes too far for a kids' comic. But taking out the whole page seems excessive - it's phrased very euphemistically in the original and could have been made even more vague and acceptable by just rewriting a few words. After all, they did have to rewrite the dialogue in the bottom panel of the previous page to paper over the cracks - in the original version of the story, it went like this:

(Both versions come back together with "...THIS!" as Blacklash smashes the counter to pieces with his electric nunchakas)

But Blacklash has got a job from the Maggia (who needed someone on the spot quickly and their first choice was unavailable) to kill a scientist at the convention, and his mood is now on a big upswing! He's back at the convention, all fired up, but still comes close to giving it up before revealing himself when he sees his friend Rusty is on guard there. But he's drawn into action when another security guard spots him, and it all leads to the big super-hero dust-up!

Our hero (villain) acquits himself very impressively. I always loved this manoeuvre (note the UK publication has altered the spelling into British English) against Spidey. It's a clever action sequence, and the art really makes it work!

But it's still two against one, or even three, because Morley is able to spot that Blacklash's gauntlets are giving off sparks (earlier in the story, Mark contemplated checking that his costume and equipment were all in order, but decided not to bother) and Iron Man is able to overload the suit. The scientist has got away, and Spidey strips off Mark's costume, which is enough to make him break down completely. The superheroes only need to wait around until the authorities come to take him away.

And THAT is why I love superhero comics. This is what made me realise you can tell any kind of story - genuine quality, intelligent literature - wrapped up in the genre conventions. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it blew my mind. Opened up whole new worlds. And all thanks to Tony Isabella and the Spectacular All-Colour Summer Special!⁸

¹ Remember when 20p coins were new and exciting? The novelty still hadn't worn off in 1985.

² We shared our comics and toys and things perfectly amicably, the question of ownership never came up, but it was nonetheless important to keep mental track of whom they had been bought for. I feel bad about not remebering "whose" comic this one was. He'll remember, no doubt.

³ I never treated my younger brother to a comic in those days. To be fair, our parents just bought the things for us. And I'm giving him this Summer Special as a birthday present now I've acquired a copy of it, so it's okay.

⁴ My brother owned these comics. I got the Beano. This fact is mildly embarrassing in these modern times.

⁵ Immemorial unless you've got some kind of super memory like I haven't, anyway. It maybe came from the boy who lived next door to Grandma after he'd got bored with it. His name was Elliot, apparently, which must have been a bit annoying in the days when ET was the new big thing.

⁶ I thought I was the only one! This is so cool!

⁷ It had already been renamed bipolar disorder by 1984, but only very recently, and you can forgive this story using the older term that readers would recognise.

⁸ I'm glad I didn't see this story under its original American cover, or read the original solicitation text, both of which are sadly lacking the subtlety of the story itself...

"Blacklash is back! He's the most dangerous psychotic ever to undertake a life of crime! Fighting sane villains is bad enough — how can Spider-Man and Iron Man defeat a totally unpredictable super-powered madman? They better find a way — or die!"

... That's just bad writing. British readers had a lucky escape!