Marvel Team-Up in the 2000s
As I’ve said in past primers, the 2000s were a decade of experimentation. Marvel was pulling itself out of financial problems of the late 90s by taking risks and handing over titles and characters to creators that were making waves on the indie scene. When Marvel revived Marvel Team-Up for a third volume, they tapped Robert Kirkman to be the lead writer on the title. Kirkman, at the time, was getting a lot of hype for the then-relatively-new comic book you may have heard of called The Walking Dead, as well as his superhero book Invincible. Kirkman would primarily work with Scott Kolins, but also worked with Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco, Cory Walker, and Andy Kuhn
Where past series mostly focused on Spider-Man teaming up with a different hero each issue for mostly stand-alone stories, Kirkman broke from the mold to give his own spin to the title. While every issue did feature a team-up, it didn’t necessarily feature Spider-Man as the lead character. The title, like virtually every Marvel book of the time, featured multi-issue story arcs. Kirkman took this editorial mandate and created a series of seemingly self-contained story arcs that all tied in together to the final arc that lasted until the title was wrapped up after 25 issues. Each story arc was a fun story that strayed away from the ongoing story lines that were going on in other titles. However, even though these stories were fun, they didn’t really have that big of an impact on the Marvel Universe.
As such, the title doesn’t really have a whole lot of milestones, but there are a couple worth mentioning here…
Issue #14 is interesting in that the guest star is Kirkman’s own creation, Invincible. It’s one of the last times an Image Comics character has a crossover with those of Marvel (the final crossover would happen when Marvel and Image’s Top Cow imprint did a crossover). It’s also one of the last inter-company crossovers that Marvel has done, the final one being the Avengers/Attack on Titan crossover that happened in 2014. It seems like these days, Marvel doesn’t have crossovers with other companies, Disney buys the rights and then there’ll be a crossover (as we’ve seen with the 20th Century Fox aquesition and the recent announcement that Aliens/Predator will be having cross over with Marvel characters), but I digress.
The other interesting story arc happened in issues #19 through 24, which introduces a new character named Freedom Ring. Freedom Ring was a controvercial character. He was one of the few openly gay characters in mainstream comics in a time when most homosexual characters were usualy lesbians who were drawn like supermodels. Needless to say, the LGTBQ+ community was not very well represented in comics. What makes Freedom Ring such a controvercial character is not his being a gay character, but how he was summarily killed off at the end of his story arc for no real reason. Recently Robert Kirkham did an interview with the YouTube channel Comic Tropes where he went into some details why he wasn’t happy working with Marvel. He didn’t get into any particular details, but I’m wondering if this was one of those contentious issues he had while working for them, because killing off a gay character within a few issues of introducing him sounds like the kind of an editorial-interference kind of thing.
Anyway, Kirkham’s run on Marvel Team-Up is not a game changing series (but then again, what volume of Marvel Team-Up ever is?) but it is definatly a fun read. Also, check out Comic Tropes on YouTube. I usually don’t watch comic book YouTube channels because they are usually run by entitled shitbags. However, Chris at Comic Tropes does a wonderful job balancing commentary and comic book history. He’s a very talented artist and he knows his shit. Much more than the fevered egos who post videos about how Brain Michael Bendis is “ruining” comics, or complaining about Marvel becoming “SJW” (Newsflash idiots: Marvel has also stood for social justice, if you actually read the comic books you claim to love, but I digress)
