‘Four Color Memories’ by K. Patrick Glover – Installment The First, In Which Parameters Are Set

‘Four Color Memories’ by K. Patrick Glover

Hypergeek would like to welcome K. Patrick Glover as a new contributing writer.

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the upcoming webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is being illustrated by Amanda Hayes, and the first chapter of the story is set to appear on the web on December 14th.

‘Four Color Memories’ is a column about the comics of our youth, full of nostalgia for the days when heroes were heroes and villains were villains, before the Avengers were DARK and before the Lanterns were BLACK.

Get ready to take a ride back in time, as today we look back at the days of the original Marvel Team-Up books!

I am haunted by great ghosts.

This is the closest I will probably ever come to journalism. There is no news involved, no breaking stories or insightful commentary on current affairs. I won’t be meeting shadowy informers in parking garages or shouting out, “Hold the press!” The tales I have to tell are nostalgic, not earth-shattering, and they should evoke only memory, not anger or righteous indignation.

And yet the ghosts remain. Visions in my head of the great men, real or imagined, who sat down to write of important things. Men in rumpled clothing, a cigarette in their hand, and a glass of whiskey on the desk in front of them. Without a coaster, journalists don’t use coasters. Great men like Hunter S. Thompson, Woodward & Bernstein (or is that Redford & Hoffman?), Spider Jerusalem…

I have no whiskey in front of me. I don’t drink like I once did. I’ve never been a smoker, so that’s out. I do have a glass of Pepsi and it’s not on a coaster. Some traditions must be maintained. Comic book action figures peek out of cubbyholes on my desk as I write. I can’t imagine Hunter Thompson with an action figure. Well, maybe the one of Uncle Duke. That would have struck his sense of whimsy.

Beside my desk is a rather large bookcase full of trade paperbacks, collections of comic stories, some new, some old. It’s my favorite bookcase, full of memories as well as stories, each book a treasure trove in its own, unique way. It’s a place where Stan Lee sits side by side with Warren Ellis, where John Byrne leans awkwardly against Brian Michael Bendis. It’s a place full of magic.

I can still clearly remember the first comic I ever owned. Marvel Team-Up # 16, featuring Spider-Man and Captain Marvel (see here). The first of a two part story by Len Wein and Gil Kane, although I didn’t know it at the time. It was 1973, I was five years old and that comic opened gateways in my mind (until it was lost to another kind of ghost, which I’ll get to in a bit).

It wasn’t my first exposure to Spider-Man. That honor belongs to Ralph Bakshi’s wonderful animated series which ran every Saturday morning on a local, independent TV station. (Remember those? Back in the days before Fox and UPN and the WB, there were actual broadcast TV stations that weren’t affiliated with a network, and they use to run… well, that’s for another column.)

What that issue of Marvel Team-Up did was introduce me to the concept of shared universes. That Spider-Man existed in the same New York as other super-heroes and sometimes he interacted with them. At five, this was a staggering thought. The possibilities were endless.

Of course I was an instant fan. I started begging my mother for more comics. Now this was in the days before comic stores became commonplace and we had to get our comics from the local grocery or convenience store. They had these cool, spinning wire racks full of four color adventures at what seems a ridiculously low price when viewed by today’s standards. Were they twenty cents that year? Or twenty five?

My mother brought home anything that said Spider-Man on the front, which at the time meant ‘Amazing’ and ‘Team-Up’, we were still a couple years away from the launch of ‘Spectacular’. I read them both voraciously, but it was Team-Up that really sparked my imagination, as each issue revealed another corner of the Marvel universe to me.

I saw Spider-Man join forces with the Human Torch and Captain America. He met Iron Man and Doctor Strange, fought alongside the Sons of The Tiger and the Incredible Hulk. In one staggering epic he teamed with the Vision, Scarlet Witch, Moondragon, and Dr. Doom!

Those stories all sit on my bookcase, reprinted in Marvel’s wonderful ‘Essential’ series. I pull them down regularly and flip back through the memories of my childhood. I always feel like I should be a bit put off by the reprints being in black and white, but then I remembered the lyrics of Roger Daltrey’s After The Fire:

I saw Matt Dillon in black and white, there ain’t no colour in memories…

So perhaps it’s for the best. Perhaps memories are destined to be in black and white, or perhaps, like me, Roger was haunted by great ghosts. What else is a memory, but a ghost of our own pasts?

And what happened to that long ago copy of Marvel Team-Up #16? At the time, my parents had a king-sized bed that was perfect for lounging around on a Sunday afternoon and reading comics. The bed had a big wooden headboard, with cupboard doors on either side and an inset shelf in the center. And in just the right light, as the sun was dropping from the sky, the pattern in the wood grain at the back of that shelf looked like a particularly malevolent face. A face which scared the shit out of five year old me.

On one Sunday afternoon, just as the sun was starting to set, I dropped that issue of Marvel Team-Up, in the thin gap between the headboard and the mattress. Down it went. I thought of climbing under the bed to get it, but the face was there, grinning and waiting.

I never got that book back. A couple years later we moved from that house and I can remember standing as they carried the bed out, looking underneath, hoping that the comic was still there. It wasn’t. The face in the bed had long ago digested that memory.

But it’s a memory I can revisit, courtesy of Essential Marvel Team-Up Volume 1 In fact, I think I’ll pull that from the shelf now and fall back into those memories. Maybe you should find a memory of your own and spend some time in black and white.

Until next week,

KPG

Ancillary matters – As I write this, Amanda Hayes is hard at work, drawing the first storyline of a new web comic written by yours truly. If you’d like to look at some of the promotional art, you can find it at http://www.theinvisibleskein.com. The comic itself begins on December 14th.

And like all true entrepreneurs, we have set up a store where we have shamelessly slapped our logo over all sorts of merchandise in an attempt to cash in. If you feel inclined to support our endeavor or simply have a love of merchandise with cool logos slapped on them, hop over to our online store at http://www.cafepress.com/invisibleskein.