Rich's Gulag

Marvel Team-Up was one of those comics that I grew up with, and was one of the books that helped me fall face first into the Marvel Universe. I remember Marvel Team-Up #5 being one of the very first Marvel books I ever bought, and the #9-11 was one of the first multi-issue story arcs I ever followed, reading them over the course of several months while I was hospitalized as a kid. This Marvel Essentials volume is fairly good, featuring the first 24 issues of the series, and has a lot of Marvel stalwarts, like Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the X-Men and three members of the Fantastic Four, as well as some of the newer characters Marvel introduced in the seventies, such as Ghost Rider, Werewolf By Night, Brother Voodoo and the Cat. It is definitely a good look at the seventies output of the company, and features Roy Thomas, Len Wein and Gerry Conway scripting and Ross Andru, Gil Kane, Sal Buscema, and Jim Mooney (among others) handling the artwork. The one real fault in this book, and this series, was that the issues of Giant-Size Spider-Man, which was a team-up title, aren't included in this Essentials series, but instead in Essential Spider-Man. Since the Human Torch took over the title whenever Spidey appeared in GSSM, there seems to be something missing, especially with the first issue and MTU #23.If you can't afford to get the Marvel Team-Up Masterworks books, and I know I can't, this is a good substitute to over-paying for the original issues.