On Ragged Universes, Team-Ups, and Supers Gaming

I know I've commented on edges of this before, but here goes: at the flea market this weekend I scored a couple of my current targets - pre Crisis/pre-1988 team up comics - in the form of a DC Comics Presents #39 and Marvel Two-In-One #65. As I get older I have a deeper nostalgia for these sorts of tales.

George Perez on one, Ross Andru on the other

But more important is Plastic Man artist extraordinaire Joe Staton doing the interiors for DC

The thing i love most about these stories, moreso on on the Marvel side, is how disconnected they are, but aren't really. Let me unpack that. These books are designed for one popular hero and a rotating cast of second heroes. These should all be stand alone stories because the team up hero changes. 

On the Superman side the feel of each issue is determined by who he's teamed up with, so this really feels like a Plastic Man story more than a Superman one. And my sense is that DC editorial would pitch "we need to boost this character or complete this unfinished story" because DC always, always cared about that continuity hole stuff. DC feels like cleaning up untidy bits. 

But often in Marvel they aren't just one off stories. They are these weird things like Marvel Two-in-One where the Thing teams up with people. Here the FF are approached by the aquatic hero Stingray to assist someone who needs to meet the Inhumans, and Thing volunteers to take him, and they get attacked on the way. That was last issue. This issue Stingray is unconscious and Thing has to save them from a deathtrap but is helped by the Inhuman aquatic hero Triton. They beat up most of the bad guys, but said bad guys got away with the MacGuffin that had NOTHING to do with Stingray's mission. So Thing has to take off after it and teams up next issue with Scarlet Witch to get the MacGuffen back, and then lock in in Project Pegasus, which turns up in MTiO a lot. 

Now, this is kinda crazy. Stingray to Triton to... Scarlet Witch? 

More importantly, next time we see the MacGuffen, er, Serpent Crown, is in Marvel Team-Up, Spider Man's team up book. where he team up with Thing and Scarlet Witch, but also Dr. Strange and Quasar. This issue is 2 years later. These are all Mark Grunewald picking up and running with a story threat that Steve Engleheart started five years before that, where Engleheart being Engleheart had the villains be an evil Oil Company because it was the 1970s and he had just had the head of the Secret Empire be Richard Goddamn Nixon. 

That's quite the crew

What I'm getting at here is not just the ragged and unplanned nature of the comics in general, but the free-wheeling nature of the team-up books in specific. Marvel had a small stable of writers and a lot of experimental books that lasted a year or two, or characters that rotated through their Marvel Premier, or Monsters on the Loose or any other weird book they were running. And for these the book would end, and the writer would of their own accord carry the plots to the next book they were working on. And these would often be the team up books that were popular for the central character and kind of muddle along. And led to these sorts of ragged, organic stories where heroes bump into each other and we accept the strangeness of it because comics. 

So much of this got lost when comics started organizing more - the next time we see the Serpent Crown it's in a 14 Annual crossover for the whole Marvel line - and I think it's to the genre's detriment. Ron Edwards goes into the the blessing of this making it up as you go unfinished story style in Champions Now, which for all it's issues is audacious as hell. He really wants you as GM to lean hard into this feel. 

I'm going to chew on this a bit along with the Weird Tales game frame and more on the New Salem setting, and more on module design. I swear this stuff is coalescing.