{"id":8139,"date":"2021-02-12T00:00:22","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T04:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=8139"},"modified":"2020-03-09T22:32:38","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T02:32:38","slug":"mtu-132","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/02\/12\/mtu-132\/","title":{"rendered":"MTU 132"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This cover is by the great Paul Smith, who was currently wrapping up a stellar run on X-Men when this issue came out (in 4 months, he would be succeeded on the title by a certain John Romita, Jr.). Smith\u2019s crisp, clean lines were and are really striking, and I read once that he always wanted to do a Spider-Man run. I would\u2019ve loved to see it, but this is as close as we get. Inside, it\u2019s the regular MTU team except for Sal Buscema in the penciler slot. Last time Spidey teamed up with Reed, they weren\u2019t exactly getting along. Let\u2019s see how it goes this time. We begin with Reed working on a giant Kirby-esque machine, as he tends to begin a lot of his stories.
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It\u2019s\u2026 Larry! Who is Larry? Reed goes to get him a soda, and Larry immediately seems evil as soon as Reed leaves the room. Reed thinks to himself that he was there when Larry was born, and then it\u2019s time for the recap: 
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I begin to think almost all of DeMatteis\u2019 MTU issues pick up where some other comic he wrote left off. This would be yet another MTU picking up a thread from his time on Captain America. I am not familiar with \u201cEvery-Man,\u201d but I guess I\u2019m gonna be.
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Uh-oh! A clearly super strong and super fast Larry mixes it up with Reed in some expertly staged fight pages by buscema, rightly pointing out that calling yourself \u201cMr. Fantastic\u201d is pretty arrogant before zapping him with some kinda crazy ray gun he brought with him. He says it\u2019s not fair that some people are born geniuses and others aren\u2019t, and that this basic inequality is the root cause of all the misery in the world. Uh, ok. He ties this back to his dad\u2019s unfortunate past as Reed is being cooked or whatever by the ray. Seems like it\u2019s probably time to rope Spider-Man into this somehow. And so we do, as we\u2019re told 40 minutes later, Spider-Man happens to swing by The Baxter Building, hoping, he thinks, to find out how other heroes don\u2019t live under a mountain of bills (Uh, sure), when he just sees an unconscious Reed through a window.  There you have it. 
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Meanwhile, Every-Man is out on the street, trying to connect with the people by giving a speech about freeing them on the steps of a library. When a cop comes to tell him to move along, he belts said cop down to the street, causing an instant panic. He then produces his weapon, which he says is his \u201cAbsorbascann\u201d (His WHAT now???), and which \u201cdraws in the power from the hundreds of people in the immediate area\u2026 literally joining my soul to theirs!\u201d to make him all super. Then he goes on a rampage, which seems a fine way to liberate the people or whatever. 
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MY MIND! Reed quickly finds he\u2019s no longer a genius, and begins to despair. Spidey tries to talk him out of it with little success, but he at least convinces him to go after Larry together. They find him pretty quick, and Reed wraps his \u201cnephew\u201d up in his elongated body, which has to be super weird for the person being wrapped up, doesn\u2019t it? But he just busts loose, so Spider-Man dives in, covering him in webbing while telling him his cause is just, but his methods are not.\u00a0
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Oh ho. A mysterious mastermind in the background? How traditional. Back at the fight, Reed once again gets knocked down immediately, and Spider-Man\u2019s not far behind. E-M is using his \u201cAbsorbascann\u201d to drain everyone in the area, including the heroes. He rips off his mask and claims he\u2019s \u201cshown them all,\u201d but a barely conscious Reed tells him he\u2019s shown them nothing.
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Everybody gets to feeling better as Larry flees, but Reed is still not supersmart. Spidey takes him back to his lab, and working together, they begin trying to figure out how to reverse the effects of the silly ray gun.
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Aaaaalrighty. Come back next time for Spidey and the whole FF vs. whoever that evil doctor was. In the letters, for a 2nd month in a row, they re-run an old letter (This one from MTU 29) by future comics writer\/editor Jo Duffy, and then let her respond to past herself. How long can they keep this gimmick going? I don\u2019t know, but it\u2019s pretty fun, and there are definitely a lot of old letters by future pros to dig up.
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This cover is by the great Paul Smith, who was currently wrapping up a stellar run on X-Men when this issue came out (in 4 months, he would be succeeded on the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[253,838,125,71,52,247,37,2],"class_list":["post-8139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-bob-sharen","tag-every-man","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-marvel-team-up","tag-mike-esposito","tag-reed-richards","tag-sal-buscema","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139","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=8139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8149,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions\/8149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}