Marvel Team-Up #19 - Marvel Comics

MARVEL TEAM-UP No. 19, March 1974

For those Marvelites lucky enough to witness Len Wein’s “villain-event of the year” in March 1974, it was probably abundantly clear straight from this publication’s opening, that the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Famer wasn’t going to worry too much about his action-packed adventure’s preamble. Indeed, just as soon as Issue Nineteen of “Marvel Team-Up” starts, its audience is immediately launched into an adrenaline-driven jump off of a S.H.I.E.L.D. transport plane flying over “the seemingly endless expanse of ice that is Antarctica” and then a subsequent web-slinging battle with “a denizen of the Triassic Age.”

Of course, such pulse-pounding exploits are momentarily interrupted by a brief collection of flashback panels depicting Doctor Curt Connors' desperately urgent request for Spider-Man “to go to the Savage Land -- And find Vincent Stegron!” But this somewhat ominous interlude is arguably as concise as the one-armed scientist’s engineered explanation behind just how his laboratory assistant happened to acquire a dinosaur extract capable of rewriting the man’s DNA, will be familiar to fans of the Lizard’s origin story; “We were conducting experiments in cell-regeneration… experiments similar in nature to those I’d attempted many years ago --”

Disappointingly though, despite the highly enjoyable appearance of both Ka-Zar and Zabu, such contrivances continue to plague an otherwise sense-shattering script, following the lead protagonists falling foul of a Swamp-Men raiding party. Outnumbered, netted and unexpectedly easily clubbed from behind, the Lord of the Hidden Jungle, the “last of the raging sabretooths” and Peter Parker’s alter-ego, are taken to face the judgement of a mutated Stegron in the savages’ village. However, having ridiculously freed themselves from their bonds, courtesy of a sharp spear-tip coming a little too close to Kevin Plunder’s ropes, the trio somehow manage to defeat an entire settlement full of warriors, having been bested by less than a dozen just a few moments before…

To make matters worse, Wein then reveals that the Dinosaur Man has somehow learnt the location from “they” of a technologically advanced ark which just happens to be capable of flying him and a herd of giant lizards back to the civilised world. Prodigiously pencilled by legend Gil Kane, Spider-Man’s brief battle with Stegron as the huge vessel lifts off from the Savage Land is probably only rivalled by the Latvian’s double-splash of a Tyrannosaurus Rex leading a charge against the Swamp-Men’s thatched huts. Yet it’s hard to shake the ‘happy happenstance’ of Vincent discovering the whereabouts of such a preposterously useful aircraft within the sheer wilderness of the hidden prehistoric reserve.

Writer: Len Wein, Artist: Gil Kane, and Inker: Frank Giacoia