Now here’s an unusual one. Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, is an old pulp hero. Stan Lee once credited him as the forefather of superheroes. He was trained to near-superhuman strength and agility, was a scientist and detective and a bunch of other things, and fought crime with his 5 sidekicks Renny, Ham, Monk, Johnny & Long Tom. Marvel apparently had the rights to Doc Savage at this time, but they couldn’t reprint this today. Looks like it’s gonna be wild ride. Ya know, I only just realized every issue of Giant-Size came out in a month when The Torch starred in Marvel Team-Up. Maybe that’s why these features just feel like glorified issues of MTU. Gerry Conway, Ross Andru, and Mike Esposito on deck as something catches Spidey’s eye in the distance…
He says the morse code says “Spider-Man, come quickly, Desinna needs your help!” That’s too weird to ignore, so he swings on over, musing that if he’s dreaming, he can’t wait to see what he made up to be “Dessina.” When he arrives at the demolition site, the light has stopped. But then a mysterious figure whacks him from behind.
It’s Dessina, of course, as our hero learns when the thing on her hand begins translating for them. She leads Spider-Man to a cornerstone marked “1934,” and as she points her multipurpose device at it, Spider-Man has a vision of the past. This leads us to Doc Savage and his sidekicks, on hand as the building being torn down in Spidey’s time was being built in 1934. Doc’s buddies note a guy is about to try to kill the mayor, and so Doc Savage leaps into action on a page that had a wildly misaligned blue plate during the printing process:
Saving the mayor, Doc and his many pals are off in their car back to their headquarters. They were tipped off the night before to head to the construction site, but Doc doesn’t think they were sent there to stop the shooting.
As Doc tells his gang that he believes they were meant to go to the site later that night, we pull back to see Spidey and Dessina watching the scene like it’s a movie. Spidey says it’s interesting, but he’s not sure what it’s got to do with him. And then the earth starts shaking. Spidey saves Dessina from a falling wall, and then is confronted with the source of the tremors, a ghostly form that looks a lot like the guy on the cover, smashing around the demolition site, so it’s fightin’ time.
They dance around for awhile, but Spider-Man seems unable to do much more than annoy his foe.
Spidey hits the giant with an electric jackhammer, which seems to short out the transmission, and it vanishes. The monster, which Dessina calls Tarros, gone, Spidey can try to get some answers. She says she sent the message to Doc Savage & his crew 40 years ago, and then we pick the story back up with them, as they explore the construction site at night. Doc sees the same flashing blue like that Spidey did earlier, and soon he & his gang meet Dessina. She’s from a parallel dimension, which, she says, “exists in time and endures in space.” Unlike Earth, which exists in space and endures in time. It never really makes any sense, but I think she’s trying to say she exits in all times at once. Then she blows up that idea when she mentions the recent past, when her lab assistant, Tarros, sent her an urgent message. They’d been working on a “space-time device,” and Tarros slipped and fell into it right as Dessina arrived.
She studied the device until she figured out how to work it, grabbed her translator, and followed Tarros’ spirit to Earth, shocked to see it had transformed into a monster. (CUT THIS)
So Tarros shows up immediately, of course, and Doc Savage & Co. get to work trying to subdue him. Eventually, some of the gang shoots a rocket from their base to the site, which contains a device Doc thinks can save the day.
So Tarros is trapped in that stone, and Dessina thinks he’ll escape when the building is demolished. Spidey thinks so, too, except he’s into the idea, and frees Tarros on purpose. Dessina is furious, and then it becomes obvious that she’s the bad guy in this story. Tarros thanks Spidey in his way and vanishes.
And that’s that. Pretty weird one. The aliens were not too well-defined, but this sort of scenario with things happening at multiple points in time is a trope I usually enjoy. Bit of false advertising on the cover, though, as far as Tarros.
The rest of the issue is a reprint of ASM #16, which I’ll cover some other time. One of the oldest Spidey comics I know, actually, though I read it in a trade called “Mighty Marvel Team-Up Thrillers” as a kid. It’s not the only thing that’ll be on this blog that I first saw in there, either. But that’s for later.