CBR Live! Archive
John Seavey's Storytelling Engines: Marvel Team-Up
Here's the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented. Including this one, Storytelling Engines: Marvel Horror, that we missed a week or so ago.
Storytelling Engines: Marvel Team-Up
(or "This Is A Bit, Right?")
Looking at Marvel's venerable title, 'Marvel Team-Up', from the perspective of the 'Storytelling Engines' series is almost a bit cruel on the face of it. After all, the concept of this series of columns is to ask, "What ways does this particular set of ideas, characters, and settings make it easier for a writer to come up with new story ideas?" If you look at 'Marvel Team-Up' from that perspective, it's a nightmare that should send any writer screaming for the hills.
For starters, the central concept is neatly encapsulated in the title. "Team-Up." Every issue of 'Marvel Team-Up' must feature two characters who do not regularly team up with each other, meeting and fighting a villain of some sort. An unwritten rule of the series is that the team-up can't be the same from one issue to the next--only in the very beginning of the series did it feature the same two heroes from issue to issue (Spider-Man and the Human Torch). So if a writer wants to do multi-part stories, he or she has to add a new super-hero to the "rolling team-up" each issue. (One four-part story featured the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Doctor Doom, and Moondragon, for example.) Oh, and with a few exceptions, most every issue featured Spider-Man as the anchor of the book. So, to sum up the storytelling engine:
Spider-Man, a notoriously anti-social, lone wolf superhero, must every issue find some excuse to meet another superhero, team up with him/her to fight a villain, and either wrap up the story within one issue or involve another superhero by the beginning of the next issue. And it's all "in continuity", so it must dovetail with the events in his own series (plural, by the time 'Marvel Team-Up' wrapped up.) As well, of course, as dovetailing with whatever's going on in the continuity of his guest star.
At this point, the perverse unworkability of the concept becomes the storytelling engine; as readers, we're essentially spectators as much to the writer's attempts to meet the challenge above as we are to the story he or she eventually comes up with. Part of reading each issue of 'Marvel Team-Up' is seeing the pairing on the cover and wondering, "How are they going to pull this one off?" From simple team-ups like the Human Torch or Daredevil to complicated ones like the Black Panther or Killraven to absolutely absurd ones like the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players (sadly not reprinted yet, but I await it with bated breath), we the audience are almost participating in a bet with the writer.
Which doesn't make it an easy storytelling engine to write for, but certainly an entertaining one to read.
- Posted on April 18, 2007 @ 06:55 PM
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9 Comments
stephen cade
April 18, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I have that Not Ready for Prime Time Players team up--it's one of my favorites.
For hockey fans of that era there's a character named Ken Morrow in it as well, not the hockey player, but the same name.
John
April 18, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Damn shame that John Belushi never got to meet the Marvel Universe's Speedball.
Punch
April 19, 2007 at 1:00 am
Is it really that hard to come up with a way for two heroes to meet? I always thought that MTU was a no-brainer, especially back then.
Also I'd say that describing Spider-Man as "notoriously anti-social" is inaccurate. Lone wolf maybe, but I'd say he's one the most "sociable" of the Marvel heroes.Didn't he try to join the Fantastic Four?
That description sounds closer to Daredevil, or the Punisher even.
John Seavey
April 19, 2007 at 5:05 am
It's not a question of coming up with "a" way, it's a question of coming up with one every month for 150 months, even when the heroes you're teaming Spidey up with are guys like Killraven, Deathlok, the Black Panther, Ka-Zar...guys who don't tread in Spidey's usual Big Apple stomping grounds.
And he did try to join the FF--just read that yesterday, in fact--but he was only in it for the money, and when they told him it wasn't a paying job, he essentially flipped 'em the bird and stomped off. I'm up to issue 17 now, and he's still getting into fistfights with the Torch every time they meet.
I am MODOK
April 19, 2007 at 6:42 am
Marvel Team Up remains one of my favorite comics ever. I'm only missing about 5 or 6 issues at this point, all expensive early ones. Almost every storyline in MTU kicked butt, and it is a ton of fun seeing so many random villains pop up to get taken out.
John Seavey
April 19, 2007 at 6:44 am
It is amazingly fun, innit? For my money, the best team was Spidey and the Beast--I felt like I could read a whole series of those two together, they fitted so well. It's amazing that more writers don't pair those two up.
Zarathos
April 19, 2007 at 3:17 pm
This post seems to treat early-80s Marvel continuity as having the same all-event clusterf- mentality that it did in the 90s and does today that requires reading a hundred books to know a character's backstory and current position within a complex, intricate cosmology. Is there any evidence that MTU was actually difficult to write? As in, from the writers of MTU? I really doubt Chris Claremont (to pick the only MTU writer I'm aware of) sweated as much over his stories as if they were, say, From Hell, but who knows.
MarkAndrew
April 20, 2007 at 2:29 am
Probably less difficult than From Hell.
Probably MORE difficult than, say, solo Spider-man. Solo Spider-man... You take the character's status quo, you add intrusive elements. You have a story.
Marvel Team-up. You take Spider-man's status quo. You have a guest star, and you have to EXPLAIN their status quo, introduce outside elements that would logically effect (affect? I always forget) both their status quo, and then give the two characters a reason to meet. It's a bit of a challenge, yeah. Some people had SERIOUS trouble with it -- See the Conway written issues of Marvel team-up, produced at the same time as his pretty dang good Spider-man run.
I really like the Beast as a co-star, too, although his appearance in 38 was a little weaker than his subsequent showings.
John Seavey
April 20, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Affect=change.
Effect=bring about.
So to "effect" a status quo would be to bring it into being, to "affect" a status quo would be to change it. I'm guessing you mean the latter, from context. (I try not to nit-pick spelling, as it usually is clear from context, but since you asked, here's the answer. Hope that helps!)