No Place To Run

 I should write more about old comics I like but that my readers might not have heard of. It's all part of my plan to get people who read my blog hoping I'll share some kind of memory secret reading comics and watching cartoons too. I won't rest until everyone reading this blog is fully conversant in all my weird hobbies and interests!

So I was just re-reading Marvel Team Up Annual #7, from the summer of 1984. It's an extra-long story in which Spider-Man teams up with five members of Alpha Flight to try to escape the clutches of The Collector. It's great. But tucked away in the back pages, there's a little five-page backup strip, and I'd forgotten just how cool it is!

"No Place To Run", written by Bob de Natale (who wrote a handful of backups and fillers for Marvel around this time; this one was his first) and drawn by David Mazzucchelli (who was drawing Daredevil at the time, and was probably used to having his name spelt wrongly, like in the credits box here) is a story about the ordinary people who live in the mad world of the Marvel Universe.

It's a long-established law of superhero comics that the presence of people with godlike powers waging constant war with each other somehow doesn't prevent the normal human world from existing. Readers just have to ignore the logical inconsistency. But around this time, people started to write about what it's like to be a normal human in this crazy universe. It was a central theme of the definitive text Watchmen in 1986, and reached its pinnacle with Astro City in the nineties - but this five-pager filling up the space at the end of a Marvel annual predates those, and captures the feel perfectly!

There's an ad for war games between pages 1 and 2, and an ad for comic subscriptions between 2 and 3. The reader isn't really encouraged to stick with this story. But please do read it here, and enjoy!