X-Men and Spider-Man


By Christos Gage & Mario Alberti with Roy Thomas, Werner Roth & Dan Adkins (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2459-7

After a shaky start in 1962 The Amazing Spider-Man quickly became a popular sensation with kids of all ages, rivalling the creative powerhouse that was Lee & Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Eventually the quirky, charming action-packed comics soap-opera became the model for an entire generation of younger heroes elbowing aside the staid, (relatively) old costumed-crimebusters of previous publications.

Since the 1970s the Astounding Arachnid and his hard-luck alter ego Peter Parker have become full-blown multi-media icons of the comics art form and survived every manner of seemingly insane reboot and upgrade to become globally real in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, Tarzan, Superman, Batman and Harry Potter.

Then in 1963 The X-Men #1 introduced Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl and the Beast: very special young students of Professor Charles Xavier, a wheelchair-bound telepath dedicated to brokering peace and achieving integration between the sprawling masses of humanity and an emergent off-shoot race of mutants ominously dubbed Homo Superior.

After nearly a decade of eccentric, mind-blowing adventures, the masked misfits disappeared at the beginning of 1970 when mystery and supernatural horror themes once again gripped the world’s entertainment fields causing a consequent sustained downturn in costumed hero comics.

Although the title was revived at the end of the year as a cheap reprint vehicle, the mutants were reduced to guest-stars and bit-players across the Marvel Universe whilst the Beast was transformed into a monster to cash in on the new boom. A few years later, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Roy Thomas green-lighted a bold one-shot as part of the company’s line of over-sized specials…

Giant Size X-Men #1 (1975) detailed how the original team had been lost in action, forcing Xavier to scour Earth for replacements. Recruiting old foes-turned-friends Banshee and Sunfire and Hulk villain Wolverine, most of the savant’s time and attention was invested in newcomers Kurt Wagner, a demonic German teleporter who would be codenamed Nightcrawler, Russian farmboy Peter Rasputin, who could transform into a living steel Colossus, embittered, disillusioned Apache superman John Proudstar who was cajoled into joining the makeshift squad as Thunderbird and a young woman who comported herself as an African weather goddess.

Intrinsic to superhero comics is the “team-up” wherein costumed heroes join forces to tackle a greater than usual threat; a sales generating tactic taken to its logical extreme at Marvel wherein most early encounters between masked mystery men were generally prompted by jurisdictional disputes resulting in usually spectacular punch-ups before the heroes finally got on with allying to confront the real menace…

Combining Marvel’s biggest franchises and most massive movie successes, this slim slick tome collects the 4-issue miniseries X-Men and Spider-Man from January-April 2008 and includes both an introductory excerpt from X-Men #27 (December 1966) as well as all of X-Men #35 (August 1967) which detailed the harried heroes’ first full team-up together.

The story starts by returning to the days of the team’s first cancellation (chronologically 1970 but canonically merely a few years ago) for ‘The Strangest Teens of All’ and sees Spider-Man’s arch foe Kraven the Hunter court controversy by publicly declaring that the Web-spinner is a mutant.

Laying low to avoid the media-fuelled hysteria, the genuinely Homo Superior X-Men then encounter the Wall-Crawler when Kraven tracks his quarry to a coffee bar where Peter, Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson are, unknown to all, hanging out with some mutants in mufti…

When Kraven attacks, backed up by evil mutant The Blob, the battle is brief but brutal. The bad guys are easily defeated and driven off but there are wheels within wheels spinning here and a mystery mastermind has in fact hired the Hunter to secretly obtain cell samples from each X-Man…

The saga continues some time later in ‘Last Hunts’ set just after the Mutant Massacre which saw the X-Men’s first battle against the malevolent Marauders and Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt (that’s 1986 on our Earth) …

When the Wall-crawler finds clues to Kraven’s erstwhile employer during that long-ago coffee shop clash amongst the dead villain’s effects, he contacts the X-Men – now mostly a bunch of strangers – and inveigles himself into their recon mission into the subterranean tunnels where the massacre occurred. Seeking clues to the enigmatic Mr. Sinister, the wary heroes are attacked by a renewed team of Marauders and during a ferocious fight unearth a hidden lab containing warped and twisted clone cadavers.

These monstrous meat puppets have been grown from those covertly obtained cell samples. In ghastly broken glassine tubes moulder the horrific remains of things that might once have been the original X-Men…

Jumping forward again, ‘Clone Sagas’ sees the web-spinner sparring with B-list baddie Slyde, as another team of X-champions narrowly missed capturing their elusive target. Gene-bending Gepetto Mr. Sinister has been a major threat for many months, and this latest inconclusive foray has yielded some useful clues which necessitate contacting Spider-Man immediately…

For the uninitiated: Peter Parker was once cloned by his old biology teacher Miles Warren (AKA the Jackal) and had to defeat an alchemical double in a grim identity-duel, resulting in the copy’s apparent death. Years later the hero discovered that he was in fact the doppelganger and a grungy nomadic biker calling himself Ben Reilly was the true, non-artificial Spider-Man.

As the convoluted drama interminably played out, Parker – who had subsequently married Mary Jane during those intervening years when he had fought the good if unappreciated fight in mask and webs – eventually surrendered the Spider-Man persona. Now Reilly swung across the city battling a host of foes, and the happy couple settled down to await the birth of their first child…

Back at the team-up, the mutants have discovered files which link Sinister to Warrenand also hint at experiments using cell samples from Symbiote Slaughterer Cletus Kasady…

When Spider-Man narrowly avoided being absorbed by his own uniform, the strange invader (see Spider-Man vs. Venom and Spider-Man: the Saga of the Alien Costume) then bonded to a deranged and disgraced reporter named Eddie Brock. Becoming a savage, shape-changing dark-side version of the Amazing Arachnid, the adversaries eventually reached a brooding détente and Venom became a Lethal Protector, dispensing a highly individualistic brand of justice everywhere butNew York City.

However at one stage the semi-sentient alien parasite went into breeding mode, spawning a junior version which merged with a deranged psycho-killer. Totally amoral, murderously twisted and addicted to both pain and excitement, Kasady became the terrifying metamorphic Carnage: a kill-crazy monster which tore a bloody swathe through the Big Apple before an army of superheroes caught him and his deadly “family” of otherworldly killers. One of the most dangerous beings on Earth, Cletus now languished in a Federal lock-up.

What the X-Men don’t realise is that the current wall-crawler has never met them, and by the time the situation has been clarified, Sinister has sprung Carnage and struck an horrific deal with the crazed creature…

The heroes arrive in time to stop Carnage but even after another blistering, catastrophic but ultimately futile clash with Spider-Man and the X-Men, Sinister escapes with the last ingredient necessary for his ultimate unholy creation…

‘The Mutant Hunter’ brings the extended epic to a cataclysmic conclusion as, following a brutal decimation of Earth’s Homo Superior population by the Scarlet Witch on “M-Day”, a new threat is ruthlessly stalking the mere handful of survivors left after the holocaust. When Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde call in Spider-Man to help, the trail leads to a diabolical creature who combines all the abilities of the X-Men, Kasady and the long-dead Kraven. Unfortunately for everybody, after battling the assembled heroes to a standstill, the thing dubbed Xraven decides it doesn’t want to be Mr. Sinister’s lab rat either…

The frantic Fights ‘n’ Tights fun concludes with the aforementioned page 12 from X-Men #27, (by Roy Thomas, Werner Roth & Dick Ayers) wherein Iceman and the Beast, on a recruitment drive and about to battle the Mimic, offered the Amazing Arachnid membership in their mutant team (and you can catch the full story in Essential Classic X-Men volume 2 among other places), whilst issue #35 (inked by Dan Adkins) found the entire team in search of the abducted Professor X in ‘Along Came A Spider…’ with everybody’s favourite wall-crawler mistaken for a flunky of insidious secret organisation Factor Three by the increasingly desperate X-Men. The Webbed Wonder had to battle hard for his very life until the truth finally came out…

Most people who read comics have a passing familiarity with Spider-Man and the ever-changing X-Men franchises so, believe-it-or-not, newcomers and occasional consumers won’t have too much trouble following the backstory in this magnificently compelling and clever puff piece of Fights ‘n’ Tights fantasy from scripter Christos Gage, rapturously rendered by the astounding Mario Alberti, whilst genned-up fans can revel in the crafty connect-the-dots secret history revealed herein…
© 1967, 2008 and 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.