One of 77. A Dave Cockrum cover, but he really nailed Jim Starlin’s Warlock face. Dave Hunt swaps in to ink as Spider-Man is hallucinating all his friends and foes while being rocketed to space. We see Hulk and Woodgod wander off in separate directions and help recap before getting back to Spidey to finish the recap. He’s almost out of air, but then a comet appears outside, which turns out to actually be Warlock. And he’s huge!
Spider-Man has really done a lot of travelling since MTN Annual 1. Mantlo sure doesn’t mind sending him all through time, and now apparently space. Warlock manages to set the rocket down on the moon, but at the last minute, some outside force seems to make his Soul gem disobey him.
The six Infinity Gems, of course, tho they won’t actually be named that for awhile yet. Up until now, we hadn’t even seen them all. By now, Mantlo has a pretty fun voice for Spider-Man. Very Bugs Bunny energy.
The Stranger chucks Spider-Man into the distance. He tries to break his fall with his webbing, but he’s going too fast. He smashes into a tree and passes out. Warlock and The Stranger have a big goofy cosmic fight over Warlock’s gem, while elsewhere, Spidey awakes to find The Gardner, another of the elders of the universe (Like The Stranger, and more familiarly, The Collector). This is apparently his first appearance. He’s the one who’s grown all this plant life in the blue area of the moon, but then The Stranger showed up and started wrecking the place not long before our heroes’ arrival.
While Spidey makes another desperate but doomed attempt to fight The Stranger, The Gardner muses to himself that the big guy didn’t come here for Warlock’s gem, but for his. He decides he can’t let Warlock die for him, and begins using his gem to make his plants rise up against The Stranger. Gardner has The Power Gem, and The Stranger as The Time Gem. And, despite all things Infinity being Jim Starlin’s domain, this is their first appearances! Kind of wild to me, that such a big part of his decades-long cosmic epic was introduced by someone else. I wonder if they talked about it. Anyway, Spidey tricks Stranger into zapping Warlock’s prison, freeing him, and then…
What’s in the egg? Don’t know! What did The Stranger want on Earth? Don’t know! But at least our man is headed back there, too. I still want to know how he planned to get out of New Mexico. What luck, to run into a spaceman who can take him back to New York. This one has another letter from Fred Hembeck, who rightly critiques Mike Esposito’s inks and hopes someone else can take over. Wish granted, Fred, the whole creative team’s changed! This catches MTU up to ASM 166, so now it’s off to TAC 4, released the same month, and we’re more or less on track with all the books.