After reading Phoenix: Endsong I wanted to read something simple. A nice done-in-one. But it looks like those days are gone forever.
Marvel Team-Up’s newest volume promises a through-line across the entire series, and the first six issues comprise the story, “Golden Child.” Oh well.
The issues aren’t bad, but they are incredibly busy—a fact that is evident right from the cover of #1, which features nearly two-dozen heroes. In the grand tradition of old-timey Marvel, most of them will have very brief cameos.
That’s always fun. And another nice touch about Kirkman’s run is that when he puts a character on the cover or on a page as a cameo, they eventually come back to do an actual team-up.
The first issue’s “official” team-up is with Wolverine, but they barely connect on screen until #2.
The writing is solid and crisp. The story itself isn’t all that complicated. It’s made better by the actual storytelling structure (it’s told in flashback, so we see glimpses of what happens and then the background gets revealed gradually).
The “Golden Child” is a fat kid named Paul Patterson who goes to Peter Parker’s school and gets picked on. But he’s a mutant so he can take a whole gang of a-holes…
Peter goes to talk to Patterson later, as Spider-Man, and the kid recognizes him—like he can see through the costume.
Meanwhile, Wolverine is also searching for Paul because he’s a mutant who can’t control his powers—and he killed his own father.
Paul Patterson goes nuts and is a very, very powerful mutant. Spidey and Wolverine finally team up (this doesn’t happen until well into issue #2) and try to take him down but during the battle he seems to blow up.
Meanwhile, some scary looking dude is watching the whole thing on monitors and shouts his own name.
Also, Dr. Doom appears in a flash of blue light during the battle but far away from it, in Latveria. Only it’s not Doom. More on that later.
Other than seeding future stories, issues #1 and 2 seem to be a full story. But it’s not.
We then get scenes with Doctor Strange and the Fantastic Four. Doom attacks the Baxter Building, but, again, he’s not Victor Von Doom. Or Kristoff. Or any alternate reality version of those characters. No, he’s an alternate reality Tony Stark.
He runs away when he realizes that “something’s wrong.” Meanwhile, Paul returns and fights Hulk until Stark-Doom flies in to rescue him.
Turns out, the Golden Boy can open portals to alternate universes—and that’s why evil Tony needs him. Evil Tony will eventually be called Iron Maniac, which is a good name.
Oh, and I said Doctor Strange was in this story as well and I wasn’t lying. He’s basically just a tracker and teleporter, so that the FF can fight Stark-Doom again.
Remember Titannus, the guy who yelled his own name? Well, he’s facing off against Sunfire and he’s a skrull under all that armor. And his got a girl in a coma in a clear tube.
Titannus attacks and appears to kill Sunfire, but no. He just really, really hurt him.
Oh, and also this is Marvel Team-Up, which means Spider-Man is supposed to be the star, right? Well, he gets to have a pointless battle against Cardiac before getting pulled into the Bad Tony Stark story (where he really doesn’t matter), along with X-23 (who also doesn’t matter to the story much)—but Spidey does get off a good line…
I’m exhausted. It’s time for the big finale to the Golden Child story, and it stars Captain America and Black Widow on the cover but, like all the other heroes here, they don’t get a lot of screen time in this crowded book. Reed Richards is now tracking Iron Maniac as the villain forces Golden Child to shoot energy bursts in an attempt to open a portal, but instead of taking on the villain himself, he tells Nick Fury, who tells Captain America and Black Widow.
They arrive in the middle of the X-23/Spider-Man/Golden Boy fight. It includes a modified fastball special, which I dig…
Lots of explosions and stuff happen before bad Tony Stark departs, saying…
OK. So he is here for Titannus.
And we’re done for now. I mean, we’re really not. It’s just we’re at the end of issue #6 and it’s billed as the Part 6 of 6 for the “Golden Child” arc.
The concept here appears to be having a “team up” book that has a half-dozen team-ups per issue, with subplots that build towards future issues. (I forgot to mention that Wendigo also appears in these issues, but only for a page, which seems to be even more teasing of future stories.) In all, we end up with an MTU that’s like X-Men: A lot of characters and a lot to keep track of, with all of it only loosely tying together. It’s easier to follow than X-Men because it mostly uses very familiar characters and because it hasn’t been creating all these subplots ever since the early 1980s, but still…This is not what I want from Marvel Team-Up. It’s pretty good, true, but it’s not what I want.