I’ll admit it either you get this title or you don’t, but with the impending cancellation of Scooby Doo Team up after 50 issues and the recent revival of Marvel Team up, it felt like time to write about the Team up books.
The Team up book is easily the most underrated of all ongoing comic books. How often do you see a celebration of Marvel Two-in-One? The stories are rarely reprinted in collections and if they are, it feels more like they’ve been added to fill out the trade paperback. And with comics being written for the trade, a book thats meant to focus on one-shot stories with a different guest star on the cover each month (sometimes they would be multi-part stories but the star of the book eg. The Thing on Marvel Two-in-One would team with different heroes in each part).
While a different hero every month makes the book harder to collect in Graphic Novel form, do you wait for Spider-man and Captain Marvel to team up 6 times before you put the trade together or do you just collect the first 6 issues and only put the two most popular character on the cover? Editorial decisions must be made. But showcasing lesser known heroes is the biggest bonus it gives to the publisher, sure an A-lister and an A-lister together should get both lots of fanboys to buy the book but you put a B-lister without their own book in there and you retain the rights to the character. Which is especially important when retaining copyright on the character DC infamously lost the rights to the name Captain Marvel, leading him to be known as Shazam on the cover until eventually everyone gave up on trying to distinguish him from Marvel’s array of Kree Warriors who used the name and just called Billy Batson’s alter ego Shazam. This system also seems more effective than having all your in-between-heroes together in one team like the Champions which was formed for this exact purpose, but didn’t make sense as it really felt like a hodgepodge of random heroes (Angel, Beast, Iceman, Black Widow, Hercules and Ghost Rider). The team never found it’s audience and ended up being a punchline for years to come despite guest-starring in Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider and Godzilla’s Marvel book. DC most blatantly used this trick in DC Comics presents 77 & 78 by teaming up Superman with a team called the Forgotten Heroes (the teams line up was Cave Carson, Immortal Man, Congorilla, Rip Hunter, Animal Man, Rick Flag, Dolphin and Dane Dorrance) to battle a team called The Forgotten Villains (Mister Poseidon, Faceless Hunter, Atom-Master, Kraklow, Ultivac and Enchantress), and yes that is the same Rick Flag and Enchantress featured in the Suicide Squad and the same Animal Man Grant Morrison would make a name for himself writing for.
The Team up book is a much more efficient way to tell if the Comic-buying public wants more of this B-lister, all they have to do is check to see how well that issue sold and if it proves sufficient demand for a new Amethyst princess of Gem-World solo series, although DC may always attribute it to being a red comic book cover (yes DC believes that Red covers sell the best, then blue and nobody buys yellow).
Now the biggest flaw of the Team up book is that sometimes the Hero feels like they don’t belong in the story, the most notable instance I can think of is Marvel Team up 41-43, where Spider-man teams up with Scarlet Witch and ends up in the Salem Witch trials, the the pair need saving by Wanda’s husband the Vision in the next issue only for all 3 to team up with Doctor Doom in the last issue. At no part in that story did it need to be Spider-man, however this does allow the other characters to shine as the audience on a Spider-man book will most likely know how cool Spidey is. This problem was not found in the 2009 Deadpool Team up which pretty much lived off Deadpool breaking the fourth wall and pointing out that his co-star was a B-lister and that they hadn’t shown up in a while. But sadly the book was cut short and not reaching it’s lofty goal of 900 issues (as the series counted backwards and ended on 883).
I should probably mention Brave and the Bold the comic that inspired the Batman cartoon that referenced Silver-Age and Bronze Age stories and made Aquaman cool. That’ll do, but Mark Waid used the book in a more interesting way, removing Batman as the A-lister and having both members on a rotating door. Under Mark Waid the Brave and The Bold was an epic crossing the DC Universe with different heroes at different times (and sometimes different earths) being effected by the same by the same maguffin “The Book of Destiny”.
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