The Age of Team-up Books

Casual readers may underrate the impact that the team-up book, in its twenty or so years of active duty, had upon the superhero medium. But, before dismissing them altogether as disposable and insubstantial, consider these functions the team-up books served:

• Providing a showcase for second-string heroes to appear
• Providing a place to introduce new characters or concepts (such as the Justice League of America)
• Providing a place to introduce new talent (such as veterans Jim Aparo in Brave and the Bold and John Byrne in Marvel Team-Up
• Providing fill-in background for incomplete backstories and glitches in continuity important enough to annoy long-term readers but not significant enough to justify a storyline in the original titles
• Providing a place for stories that could ignore continuity (such as many of the odder Bob Haney devations from canon.

Properly handled, they also provided something modern comics certainly lack: a second place to see heroes outside their main titles in stories that didn't typically affect the ongoing storylines in the original titles. Therefore, missing an issue (or all issues) of Brave and the Bold, for instance, wouldn't make it impossible to understand subsequent lines of Batman or Detective comics.

World's Finest Comics

World's Finest Comics introduced the team-up magazine in a limited way, with stories featuring Superman and Batman teamups that would dominate the title through most of its history. Only much later, in the 1970s, would the title experiment with a rotating cast in its teamups. With its beginnings in the 1940s, this title subscribed to a Golden Age format that included its main theme story (the Superman/Batman story) and one or more tales of usually unrelated nature, involving either surviving pulp-type characters or such superheroes as could not viably carry their own titles (Green Arrow, for example).

These stories attempted little in the way of groundbreaking innovation; after the Golden Age model, stories need not fit into a larger shared universe nor do much to contribute to an overall continuity; if a writer wished, he could disregard previously-told tales and no one would show up on his doorstep with pitchforks and torches to demand he answer for it.

Brave and the Bold

Brave and the Bold really started the true team-up organ, using a variable cast (at first) and then a pairing of Batman with one or more rotating partners from mainstream titles or from characters without titles. The magazine began as a rather conventional title carrying adventure stories. Then, as the early Silver Age began to sink in and superhero comics started enjoying an increased popularity, one of the keener minds at DC decided to experiment with the notion of a team-up book, and began a long (and thus successful) stream of tales.

In a sense, this pattern resembled that of some of the first titles Marvel put out with superhero content; characters such as the Hulk and Dr. Strange took over titles originally involved with completely different content. This reflected a reversal of the process whereby the heroes of the Golden Age had died off in the first place, such as the original Green Lantern's ouster from his title by stories about a dog.

Two infrequent residents of the pages of team-up magazines, Green Arrow and the Martian Manhunter, led the title into its new format, which initially picked two characters without titles, or two characters seemingly at random, as the basis of the story. Much of this material remains lost to anthology or reprint, since the Brave and the Bold book itself, during the short-lived era of the 100-page specials, offered the only likely place for it, and today's capital and materials-intensive market does not make long books a very viable proposition commerically.

One can realize that the earliest stories in this format involved a formula that did not rely heavily upon depth or quality. Two heroes would accidentally encounter each other by some contrived coincidence. Perhaps they would enjoy some confusion until they realized who they had encountered. Then, together or separately, they would pursue a common menace or have said menace force them to fight or pretend to fight. Sometimes the risk of secret identity exposure - that fate worse than death in DC's early Silver Age - would appear, but resolve itself by the absurd laws of a comics age that would not permit this one type of information to propagate, even if fundamental laws of the universe must fall to protect the secret.

Before too long, though, DC did grasp the potential of the title and resorted less and less to the unnecessary elements of its formula. That the superheroes already knew each other from contact in the pages of Justice League of America generally provided adequate pretext for their working together, and the coincidences that brought characters together became a much rarer element in these stories. A more typical subsequent pretext involved Batman dealing with a villain from someone else's rogue's gallery; for instance, Batman fighting a Flash villain essentially guaranteed that Flash had a reason to appear in the story.

Beyond Justice League of America and its "Earth-2" crossover events, plus the occasional appearance of the older Green Lantern and Flash in the newer characters' titles, little opportunity existed for the appearance of Golden Age characters except within the covers of the team-up title. In the seventies, DC would remedy this with titles like All-Star Comics and Freedom Fighters that represented the growing interest in Golden Age characters made possible by the limited earlier appearances in other books such as team-up titles.

Once the title established its "Batman + Other" format, it really began its high period of both quality and commercial success. The occasional false start might have marred this, including stories in which Batman had to fight off the amorous attentions of both Wonder Woman and Batgirl, who, incomprehensibly, found themselves gripped by some Silver-Age imaginary need to attach themselves to the nearest costumed alpha male. In such stories, one clearly sees a legacy of Lois Lane stories, where Lois either entrapped Superman into marriage but he escaped via an elaborate cop-out or Superman somehow managed to beat off the matrimony-obsessed rival whose schemes rivalled those of Lex Luthor in persistence and cleverness.

After much rotation of talent, involving the regular stable of mid-late sixties DC writers and pencillers, Brave and the Bold enjoyed runs with art by Neal Adams, and, later, the long tenure of the underrated Jim Aparo, who both understood the necessary tone for Batman and could render the partner of the month in excellent form. For example, Aparo's Green Lantern really only fell second to Adams'; few other artists could render the Silver Age Green Lantern with such a flair after Gil Kane designed his original look.

In a sense, this title also allowed the heroes of the Silver Age to hold on to one of the lost elements of the Golden: Stories could deal with unpowered villains who did not have to reappear, and most of the action could take place on a human scale modified by the presence of superhumans or costumed heroes. Therefore, Batman might chase down Nazi war criminals armed with pistols and a lab fool of mind control drugs and apparati, rather than heal holes in the multiverse or fix an ailing time-stream.

Marvel Team-Up

Marvel took considerably shorter time, all things considered, to experiment with a team-up book with rotating cast. Partially this reflects the conservatism of DC, whose main character, Superman, entered his twenty-fifth year of continuous publication just as Marvel's creation Spider-Man began appearing in print. DC had already demonstrated the possiblities inherent in a rotating team-up title before Marvel took its current name; Marvel (Atlas) printed no superhero titles yet in those days.

Until the late sixties, furthermore, Marvel had to limit its titles as part of the distributor agreement that put its comics on the stands; as if suffering a housing shortage, two or more superheroes had to make due with single titles until new distribution allowed Marvel to shake the bondage inherent in this agreement, whereupon they expanded their line considerably. Marvel's move to create a team-up title using Spider-Man represented something of a risk in its day, since it first appeared after the first big slump in Marvel sales; but the chemistry evidently sufficed to propel the title through 150 issues in its first incarnation, an enviable run by the standards of today's market.

The late days of the title involved a long run of third-rate villains, indifferent writing, and uncompelling artwork. From the likes of Romita, Buscema, Kane, and Byrne, the penciling tasks fell to a number of unremarkable souls. Marvel suffered in those days from at least two major exoduses of talent and did its best to burn out what remained; Marvel Team-Up therefore had enjoyed its best days by 1976, but continued until the mid-eighties with only periodic upturns in quality.

Such sporadic investment in the title must have helped kill it. Furthermore, when Marvel attempted to recreate the title in the brave new market of the 1990s, comics titles generally sold a thousand or two more copies than the break-even cost for production and distribution costs; such a market does not reward risk-taking.

The things that would ultimately bring the entire industry to the brink of ruin had already caused a late-seventies slump for both major superhero comics producers; some titles remained more vulnerible to this, including spinoff titles, and Spider-Man appeared in Spider-Man, Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up, and the reprint title Marvel Tales when this slump hit. That these titles endured into the eighties attests to a loyal readership that has since moved on.

Marvel Two-in-One

A rare inspiration must have brought about Marvel's decision to give its curmudgeonly character Ben Grimm a team-up magazine. If Spider-Man's playfulness could play well on a variety of characters, Grimm's mixture of surliness and innocence provided a seemingly endless opportunity to use him and Marvel's second-stringers in a complex interplay of protagonist and foil.

This title would enjoy some remarkable talent, including excellent work by George Perez that would justify some kind of anthology (along the lines of the Neal Adams X-Men Collection). Occasional memorable stories would grace its pages, including Marvel Team-Up #50, in which the Thing attempted to cure his condition by travelling into the past and beating his earlier self unconscious so he could administer a cure Mister Fantastic verified would have worked in the early days of Ben's career as the Thing. This issue might represent John Byrne's earliest Fantastic Four work; it certainly demonstrates a number of elements that would appear in his run on the title of the same name, including the original "lumpy" version of the Thing.

In its last days, however, this title would suffer from the same type of indifference that killed off Marvel Team-Up, though it would acknowledge its greater days in its last story, where the thing visits the alternate world he created by curing the early Thing in issue #50. The title would acknowledge its own demise with a cover that showed a devastated planet and Ben Grimm admitting "the end" had come.

DC Comics Presents

Considering the many successful years Brave and the Bold enjoyed as a Batman team-up title, it seems odd that DC waited until the turn of the eighties to experiment with a similar title for Superman. Superman had appeared in the occasional World's Finest when it dabbled with a Superman team-up format that absented Batman from his normal appearence within that title.

Superman, however, had Superman, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superman Family, Justice League, and World's Finest carrying stories about him; had enjoyed such a popularity at one time that his supporting cast sustained titles Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen; spun off Supergirl from Adventure Comics into her own title; had enjoyed success on the large and small screens, and had appeared in several cartoons, some still ongoing, before DC ventured to allow a Superman team-up title.

On one hand, Superman enjoyed a popularity that would, during one era, allow him to sell just about anything from dolls to movies to novels to comics in which he appeared as a co-star or supporting character; this suggests that DC waited too long before trying the experiment. On the other hand, Superman still very much represented a hero in the iconic Silver Age DC model; a perfect male specimen invested with every virtue and no vice and endowed with more power than he needed for heroics among human beings. As such, he lacked the quirks of personality that make him an entertaining participant in a team- up story. Marvel had no such problem with Spider-Man or the Thing in their team-up titles, but the blandness of Superman meant the title could not use his character flaws as a source of interaction.

Cautiosly and self-referentially, DC Comics Presents began with the last of the Superman/Flash races that perennially recurred in the 1960s. This title did not long endure, nor did it reach the creative peaks demonstrated by the Haney/Aparo Brave and the Bold, perhaps due to the structural imbalance inherent in pairing the Supermaan of that era with anyone; back when he might still routinely play billiards with planets, DC possessed few players who could compete in his league, much to the detriment of possible development of the concept.

Perhaps DC Comics Presents could have achieved more if DC had knuckled down and revised the character as they had planned to but didn't in 1968; or if they had supported Dennis O'Neil when they brought him in to fix Superman in 1971; or if the magazine had enjoyed John Byrne's revision just a few years earlier.

Today's Void

All of these titles have passed on, and the market has changed to something that probably could not support such a concept. However, in the age of rapid cancellations and miniseries, the future industry may reconsider it; as the number of titles shrinks amid imploding circulation numbers, the big guns may require some title in which they can appease reader demand with occasional portrayals of characters whose titles have failed. So we may, someday, see new team-up titles. All it would take is the right convergence of editors, managers, and readers (and, perhaps, a few planets in the right conjunction).