{"id":7297,"date":"2020-03-05T13:00:08","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T17:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=7297"},"modified":"2020-01-11T14:56:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-11T18:56:00","slug":"mtu-annual-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/03\/05\/mtu-annual-5\/","title":{"rendered":"MTU Annual 5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

That\u2019s a lot of heroes. And snakes! And I think Quasar is wearing The Serpent Crown up there, so that\u2019s not good. This one\u2019s the brainchild of the great Mark Gruenwald, who provides the story, script and pencil breakdowns. Jim Mooney handles finishes. They get the ball rolling letting us know something weird is going on at super science research spot Project PEGASUS, and Quasar, their security chief, is looking into it.
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Not wasting time getting into this one. Did something go wrong in that last panel? Why\u2019s the crown colored in black? At The Baxter Building, we find The Thing expositing that he\u2019s home alone tonight and getting ready to watch \u201cThe best fight o\u2019 the season\u201d on TV: K.D. McKeyo Vs. Jocko Squidelli! What names! Unfortunately for him, the phone rings, and out of the receiver pops what looks like a ghost of Quasar, which vanishes without a word. Understandably freaked out, Ben contacts Project PEGASUS, and a curt and weird \u201cnothing is amiss\u201d fro Quasar doesn\u2019t make Ben feel any better, so he decides to go pay Quasar a visit. Meanwhile, a somewhat sick Spider-Man foils a robbery, but is confused when he sees what looks like a giant snake slither out of the alley he\u2019s in. 
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Dr. Strange gives Spidey a mystical once over, and is surprised to find his aura is being coiled up in a giant snake. I, too, am surprised! This apparently stems from a Spidey\/Dr. Strange team-up we\u2019ve not covered yet that happened a few months prior to this issue.
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The lady yelling during Indiana Jones is The Scarlet Witch. In a previous adventure, The Serpent Crown tried to possess her, too, and now she\u2019s somewhat tied to it. She knows it\u2019s active again, and leaves The Vision to go see what\u2019s up. So now all the heroes are converging on Project PEGASUS, though not as a team. And things are getting weird where our hero is concerned.
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Everyone\u2019s pretty casual about Doc Strange knowing Spidey\u2019s identity. While Spider-Man drives, Strange sends his astral form traveling through the timestream to learn more about the snake situation, and when he returns, he tells the story of Set, an ancient snake god almost as old as the Earth itself. How Set fathered a race of snake men who were later fought by Kull,  Robert E. Howard\u2019s precursor to Conan, which led them to make a deal with The Deviant Lemurians of Jack Kirby\u2019s Eternals, creating The Serpent Crown. Some of this was probably covered when we talked about Atlantis Attacks, I don\u2019t remember. Set imbued the Crown with his mind, Lord of the Rings style, but then the cataclysm that sunk Lemuria and Atlantis happened, so the Crown was lost for awhile. Conan himself killed the last of the snake men, and things were seeming pretty good. Centuries passed, the aquatic Atlanteans like Namor came on the scene, a renegade tribe of them found The Crown and gave it to the ruler of the now also aquatic Lemurians, but then it was stolen. A bad guy from Sub-Mariner comics wound up with it, but killed himself, eventually Atlantean villain Warlord Krang got it.
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Mark Gruenwald lllloved continuity, and here he is, putting together almost certainly the first timeline of this storied Marvel artifact. Strange says The Thing took The Crown to Project PEGASUS, and now here we are. Speaking of Ben, he\u2019s just broken into PP, and is looking for trouble, and he finds it in the form of a now-scaly Quasar. They get to fightin\u2019, but Ben\u2019s no match for Quasar\u2019s power coupled with that of The Crown. He snares Ben in an energy trap and says he\u2019ll be let out once he\u2019s joined the cause. Hours later, Spidey & Strange arrive at the site. Strange astral projects inside to look around, and Spidey is soon busy protecting his body from Project PEGASUS security.
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The gang\u2019s finally all here. And things are bananas. The big brains at Project PEGASUS, now entirely in the service of Set, have used \u201cdimensional cannons\u201d to find Serpent Crowns from all across the multiverse and steal them. Almost everyone in the facility is now wearing this evil mind control hat, including Quasar, The Thing and Doc Strange. The head of PP says they need 777 Crowns to then instantly summon all remaining Crowns, and then they can ressurect Set, and then they\u2019ll revert the planet to its primordial environment for him, and they\u2019re only 3 Crowns short. So, you know, no pressure, Spidey & Wanda.
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Spidey takes off, feeling bad about it, and Scarlet Witch is soon brought down by the psychic power of The Serpent Crown multiplied. As the boss man mentions \u201cThe Thing and the cloaked man\u201d somehow rejected the influence of The Crowns, Quasar heads out to find Spider-Man, flying into a web tripwire and nearly garroting himself. Spidey whacks him in the head with a web ball for good measure. Then he goes back to hiding, not sure what else to do. Meanwhile, the snake dudes find Wanda rejecting The Crown as well, and decide to just put her in stasis. Then we learn Dr. Strange has been casting spells on the heroes to keep The Crown from effecting them, but hasn\u2019t worked out much of a plan beyond that.
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The pile of Crowns merges into one giant Crown (Hey, ok, that\u2019s what it looked like later in Atlantis Attacks, I\u2019m pretty sure), and Strange takes the chance to revive and free Ben, who falls right onto the big Crown.
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Uh-oh! Meanwhile, traveling through the air ducts, Spidey stumbles on a room meant to hold The Cosmic Cube, which Marvel movie fans will know better as The Tesseract. Spidey remembers Captain America talking about it one time, and thinks he could use it, but it\u2019s not there. He seems to recall seeing it in the mechanism back in the big room, and takes off again. He runs past Quasar\u2019s still unconscious form and notes he has no Crown now, then runs into the big room just in time to see Dr. Strange failing to stop The Crown from eating Wanda.
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Spider-Man! Wielder of The Cosmic Cube! Now he\u2019s one of the most powerful beings in the universe! But The Crown just eats him immediately, anyway. Strange begins to despair, his attacks still having no effect on the thing. But, come on\u2026
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Take that! But the evil presence of Set isn\u2019t gone yet, so the heroes combine their wills into The Cube again and Dr. Strange throws in some magic for good measure, so they can banish Set\u2019s consciousness from this plane of reality. Hey, be thorough, I always say.
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Why is Spidey the only one whose outfit got ruined? Ah, well. The day has been saved. But of course, neither Set nor The Cosmic Cube can be kept down for long. Even as I type this (In January of 2020), Marvel is running a Serpent Crown crossover. Nothing is ever over in The Marvel Universe.
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That\u2019s a lot of heroes. And snakes! And I think Quasar is wearing The Serpent Crown up there, so that\u2019s not good. This one\u2019s the brainchild of the great Mark Gruenwald, who…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[225,49,18,686,71,685,105,789,2,663],"class_list":["post-7297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-annual","tag-doctor-strange","tag-jim-mooney","tag-mark-gruenwald","tag-marvel-team-up","tag-quasar","tag-scarlet-witch","tag-set","tag-spider-man","tag-the-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7311,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7297\/revisions\/7311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}