{"id":121,"date":"2019-06-26T00:00:04","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T04:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deweybass.com\/spiderman\/?p=121"},"modified":"2019-04-23T01:14:59","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T05:14:59","slug":"mtu-103","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2019\/06\/26\/mtu-103\/","title":{"rendered":"MTU 103"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I haven\u2019t even opened the book and Taskmaster\u2019s dialogue has made me uncomfortable. Future Spidey scribe David Michelinie makes another early appearance on this blog, along with artist Jerry Bingham & Mike Esposito. We begin with Scott Lang under the gun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He\u2019s trying to get his daughter, Cassie\u2019s ROM action figure fixed before she gets home, and finishes with seconds to spare (ROM, Spaceknight is a little-known toy from the era that wound up being a long-running and beloved Marvel Comic by fixture of this blog, Bill Mantlo). The relatively new hero barely gets out of his Ant-Man suit in time. 9-year old Cassie wants to make dinner, \u201cpreztels & cheese!,\u201d and Scott goes along with it. I\u2019ve never read early Scott Lang stuff, but he seems pretty much as translated to screen. Big hearted, smart, a good dad. While they\u2019re eating, an old prison buddy of Scott\u2019s drops by. He doesn\u2019t know Scott\u2019s gone legit, and wants to cut him in on a big crime ring. To his credit, when he finds out, he\u2019s not weird or evil about it, he just tells Scott to look him up if he changes his mind and is even nice to Cassie on his way out. Unfortunately\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Scott sees the news in the paper the next day, and wants justice for his friend. Downtown, JJJ is mad about the same story. He wants to know why a certain part of town\u2019s crime rate is going down even as it goes up everywhere else, and he wants Peter Parker to figure out it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pete heads down to lower Manhattan, and does find it a little too quiet, but then a particular building sets off his Spider Sense. Inside, Spider-Man finds a huge armory and barracks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spidey keeps sneaking down the halls following the \u201cstudents\u201d to an auditorium, and there he finds Taskmaster. I guess he\u2019s new on the scene at this point, Spider-Man\u2019s never heard of him, and a footnote says he\u2019s from Avengers 195-196. He helpfully explains this is his newly established Manhattan training academy for supervillain goons. Taskmaster\u2019s gimmick is \u201cphotographic reflexes.\u201d As soon as he\u2019s seen someone do something, he can do it, too. And he\u2019s recently fought The Avengers, so in spite of looking kinda silly, Taskmaster is no joke as a villain. Obviously, it\u2019s fightin\u2019 time, and T-M counters everything Spidey can throw at him with ease, using Captain America\u2019s shield-slinging, Black Knight\u2019s swordsmanship and Iron Fist\u2019s martial arts prowess. He even has a cane like Daredevil\u2019s to ricochet around the room like DD would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spidey\u2019s down, but just about then, Scott Lang shows up outside. He\u2019s come to the place his friend Gus told him about, and then he recognizes one of the goons going in, an advantage most heroes wouldn\u2019t have. So he just walks in and pretends he\u2019s taking Gus up on his offer to join. Once he gets in with the rest of the new recruits, he\u2019s in for a surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now Scott knows who his enemy is, and he needs to help Spider-Man. T-M sends the new recruits away to be prepped for a challenge, and tells his goons to kill Spider-Man. But when they decide to unmask him first, things get a little weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All these references to Avengers 196 made me look it up. Guess who\u2019s writing Avengers in this era? Also: Guess who created Scott Lang? You\u2019re right, of course, it\u2019s David Michelinie! Ant-Man catches Spidey up on his recent experiences with Taskmaster, and then they convince the guy covered in ants to tell them where the training exercise is happening. It\u2019s here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sounds appropriately dangerous! The goons attack immediately, a whole army of them, saying they get a \u201cgold star\u201d for every cop they kill. Taskmaster don\u2019t play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He\u2019s really in his element here. The heroes arrive, of course, and it\u2019s an all-out battle between an army of goons, 1 supervillain, 2 superheroes, and a colony of ants. Taskmaster orders his men to kill the guards so he can escape as our heroes stop them. They chase him down, anyway, to a plane he plans to escape in. He keeps countering Spider-Man at every turn, so Ant-Man realized he needs to do something T-M would never expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Taskmaster sets off a magnesium flare and escapes while the heroes are blinded. But they\u2019ve stopped his NY school, so at least they have that going for them. There\u2019s only time left for a bit of comedy business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s been a rough couple issues of Team-Up, but this was a fun one. I always liked Taskmaster as a villain, and I can\u2019t get over how faithful the movie Ant-Man is to this stuff. I had no idea. As you will note from the caption, the next issue of of MTU doesn\u2019t even have Spider-Man in it, and neither does the next one, so we\u2019re skipping those. I got them in my giant haul of MTU issues, and I\u2019ll read them someday, but not for this blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t even opened the book and Taskmaster\u2019s dialogue has made me uncomfortable. Future Spidey scribe David Michelinie makes another early appearance on this blog, along with artist Jerry Bingham & Mike…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[257,259,13,231,71,52,2,258],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-ant-man","tag-david-michelinie","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jerry-bingham","tag-marvel-team-up","tag-mike-esposito","tag-spider-man","tag-taskmaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4003,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/4003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}