Charmingly, he also wrote that his ultimate goal was to someday have one of the "western comics" include a cutaway gag referring to the events of Octo-Girl, which has a premise that might sound pretty bonkers in its description, but is really not that big of a leap from what Slott and Marvel were doing with the characters during their storylines.
If you haven't read Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol. 1 (and I would certainly recommend you do so!) or even my review of it (you do read every single thing I wrote, don't you?), that premise is this: After backing himself into a corner during a fight with Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus attempts to transfer his consciousness from his current, seemingly-about-to-die body to a pre-prepared clone one, but due to various circumstances, his mind accidentally ends up in the body of a Japanese school girl who was in a coma.
She soon "wakes up", though, and so the mind of Doctor Octopus is now "sharing" a body with middle-schooler Otoha Okutamiya. After acquiring a spare set of metal arms from a Japanese safe house of his, cutting Otoha's unruly long hair into his signature bowl cut and trying to violently assert his dominance over her misfit school "chums", Otto and Otoha reach a sort of arrangement.
Using a high-tech device disguised as a cute octopus hairclip, the two can switch control of Otoha's body back and forth, and the person not currently in control can still communicate with the outside world. That communication is often accompanied by a hologram of one of them, being projected from one of the wondrous metal arms (And thus readers get to see plenty of Otto, even though his body, which Spidey actually saved from splattering on a New York City street, is stuck in a hospital bed in America, seemingly in a coma).
In the first volume, the pair agreed to work together to try to get Otto back in the right body, which meant stealing a particular brain scanner of his invention that was then being used at a Japanese hospital (the scanner's earlier usage on the injured Otoha was part of the circumstances that landed Otto's mind in her body).
There were, of course, complications.
First, there was the appearance of Sakura Spider, a multiversal Spider-Man variant that ended up in our world (Apparently introduced in the Deadpool: Samurai manga, according to Furuhashi's occasional behind-the-scenes info provided between chapters, as well as a page of flashbacks involving Deadpool). Then there was the fact that Otoha's classmate and estranged childhood friend seemed to be working on something high-tech and possibly nefarious in a warehouse. And some drama involving the weirdest of Otoha's classmates. And, in the first volume's cliffhanger ending, there was the appearance of another Marvel character: The Superior Octopus, which is Doctor Octopus' body in a clone composite of Peter Parker and Otto Octavius. ("It's kinda like... ..if you and Spider-Man had a kid together?" Otoha says of the clone, to which Otto replies, "Silence! Such phrasing is unseemly! Rather, I have improved upon my archrival's power.")
I haven't previously encountered this particular version of a Doctor Octopus-in-Spider-Man's-body character before personally. As you can see on the cover of this second volume, he looks a bit like a Spider-Man with Doc Ock's arms and with a white, black and green-highlighted costume. (This character, it is explained, is apparently a "past" version of Otto's consciousness, which must have been uploaded into a clone body when his system kept trying to do so after the original mix-up that led to Otto and Otoha sharing her body).
In this second volume, Furuhashi and Court give us a backstory of another of Otoha's classmates who is in on the secret, rounding out the character in the same way they did with a girl in the first volume. This also adds another player to Otto's growing Japanese girl gang.
In this volume, our heroes—or perhaps I should say "protagonists", given Doc Ock's insistence that he's not a hero—spend the better part of the book's page count in conflict with Superior Octopus.
Discovering the truth about Otto/Otoha, he captures her and takes her back to his warehouse HQ, where he plans to delete the villainous Otto consciousness (the original and up-to-date version) from Otoha, freeing her and permanently disposing of a supervillain (Superior Octopus is still in a trying-to-be-a-superior-superhero phase, which the original Otto has since gone through and gotten over).
It's up to said girl gang to help Otto get back in control of Otoha's body (and the octopus arms) so he can defeat the Superior Octopus; this he ultimately does by using Otoha's hijacked body as a sort of human shield. That is, he can beat the hell out of Superior Octopus with his metal arms, while S.O. refuses to land a blow on an innocent little girl.
The conflict ends in a draw. Though Otto is perfectly willing to kill off the Superior Octopus, he's saved by the appearance of Otoha's childhood friend, now wearing a high-tech, bird-themed super-suit that she has invented, making her look a bit like a new version of a Vulture.
The rest of the volume tells us more about Otoha and her friend's childhood, the tragedies they experienced, and their falling out. Takoyaki, the Japanese snack made from octopus tentacles, is involved, as I suppose was inevitable in a manga featuring octopus-themed superhero characters. The friend now wants to use her super-suit to gain vengeance against a corporation she holds responsible for the death of her father.
Spider-Man also appears, albeit in a single, brief scene set in New York, wherein he fights and defeats the streaming super-villain Screwball. This seems to suggest that we haven't yet seen the last of Spidey in this series, and that he will eventually interact with our protagonists again.
The pleasures of the series first encountered in the first volume remain the same here in the second. A megalomaniac and genius who thinks he knows better than everyone, Otto Octavius is a fun character, and it's especially fun to see him dealing with problems he himself finds trivial, like those faced by a middle-schooler, problems he can't help himself from trying to solve, even while protesting how ultimately unimportant they are to a man of his stature.
And Court's depiction of the lead is great, as her expressions and demeanor so drastically shift, depending on whether Otoha or Otto are in the driver's seat of her diminutive body.
Court is also great at the action, of which there is a great deal, choreographing the often-inventive uses of the various characters' metal tentacles. (As spectacular as the various fights are, and as dramatic as the scenes of the Octopuses looming menacingly on a pair of their arms might be, I think my favorite images in this volume are those of Superior Octopus in "disguise", in which he wears a wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat over his extremely conspicuous-looking costume. I find it especially funny as, earlier in the book, we see him out-of-costume on the streets of Japan, where it is of course easy enough for him to blend in.)
The situation obviously lends itself towards humor, of which there is also a lot, but the story sort of covers similar ground to the Slott and Marvel stories it is inspired by. That is, Doctor Octopus repeatedly sliding into regular acts of heroism. Even this version of the character, who has already attempted to be a superhero and found that it brought him nothing but suffering and that has thus re-embraced villainy, seems to have an innately heroic side that can be coaxed out in the right circumstances.
This volume ends with Superior Octopus and the Vulture-like girl going to storm a corporate headquarters together, Otoha declaring that she will eventually make-up with her friend, even if it seems like the next step will be to have Doc Ock fight to stop her.
******************
Interestingly, this volume includes and eight-page "mini-comic" at the end, which was a tie-in to the 2023 movie The Marvels. Furuhashi introduces it by saying it was meant to be less of an ad and more of a primer on the characters and, amusingly (at least to me), he writes, "Doing the necessary research took quite a bit of time"...
Yeah, I imagine tracking Marvel's "Marvel" characters over the course of some 55 years of characters changing codenames and costumes took a while, let alone then trying to reduce, say, the history of Carol Danvers into a single splash page and some 25 words of text.
Sure, it's fun to see Betten Court drawing Carol, Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan, Movie Nick Fury and, on the opening page, seemingly all of the Captains Marvels ever. But, as someone who has written so much about super-comics continuity over the years, here on my comics blog as well as in articles intended for "civilian" readers, I found some of Furuhashi's statements fun to read.
For example, here is the first of two pages devoted to Captain Marvel Carol Danvers:
This is Carol Danvers.
Formerly Ms. Marvel......Now Captain Marvel.
After a complicated sequence of events...she inherited the title... ...and the weighty responsibility that comes with it.
Yes, "a complicated sequence of events" is a nice simplification of the typically byzantine history of a superhero, and can be applied to like, just about any of 'em at this point.
I also liked the page devoted to Monica's history:
And this is Monica Rambeau. She's gone by a number of code names... ...which is plenty common for heroes with long careers.Again, true. And it is certainly a gentle way of saying that writers, editors and publishers often flail about with what to do with some characters, especially one-time legacy characters that aren't successful enough to hold that legacy name forever, but are popular enough to keep around, so the publisher has to keep trying to find something that works for them...
If you're wondering what "Kizuna" means, well, join the club. The Internet tells me it is Japanese for "bond", which certainly makes sense in the context of this particular story. It is also, incidentally, part of the name of a superhero that protagonist 10-year-old Yu Yamato draws: Kizuna-Man.
The story, written by Setta Kobayahsi and drawn by Hachi Mizuno, is set in the fictional of Ohakama City in Japan...on Earth -8989, according to a caption. Yu is new to town, and he's so quiet and shy that he has trouble making friends. In fact, he hasn't made a single friend yet, and he is so unnoticeable that he's practically invisible to others, not unlike a ghost.
Also new in town? New York City-based superhero Spider-Man. What takes the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man so far from his neighborhood? Well, he discovered the Green Goblin has formulated a plan to attack and terrorize Japan, a plan the villain is apparently in the middle of executing when we first meet Yu and Spidey.
This Green Goblin seems pretty crazy, and Kobayashi has him start sentences with the words "Gob" or "Gobby"; for example, he cackles "Gobby Hee Hee Hee" while flying over Ohakama City and hurling pumpkin bombs.
Spidey comes to the rescue, outfitted in a slightly off-model costume (note the white armbands on the cover, and though you can't see it, the spider emblem on his chest has googly eyes here). During the melee, he is caught in the blast of a pumpkin bomb, and, in probably the book's funniest moment, Yu turns to the hero to ask if he's okay, and we see this:
Eh, probably. Lots of stuff like this happens to heroes.
Like when my body was taken over by an extraterrestrial life form.
"So casual!!" Yu responds. (To be fair, the story does hedge a bit on whether he's dead-dead or just in a ghost-like form, as the particular bomb that caused the transformation wasn't a regular pumpkin bomb, but a "molecular disintegration bomb".)
In the meantime, there's the matter of the Green Goblin. So, ghost Spider-Man swoops into Yu, fusing the pair (here's where the word "bond" makes sense), which gives Yu Spidey's powers, and both minds seem to share some control of this new composite hero.
It also unlocks a new power, one apparently based on Yu's powerful imagination and artistic ability, as he can uses Spidey's webbing to essentially 3-D print objects and costumes to use in battle. This starts fairly simply, with the hero/es creating a baseball bat to knock a pumpkin bomb back at the Goblin, but gets increasingly elaborate as the manga goes on, with "Spider-Man Kizuna" creating a new costume (it looks mostly white in the manga, and, on the back cover, the parts that aren't white appear to be red; the Kizuna costume is on the cover of the next volume, solicited for December), various one-off costumes that are mostly visual gags, weapons, vehicles, a mech and so on.
That's the first chapter. As for the next four, they follow Yu and ghost Spider (who only Yu can see and hear) as they go to school, Spidey encouraging Yu to make new friends. He does, at the rate of one per chapter, but only after the Green Goblin gives one of Yu's classmates a coin-like "villain badge" infused with the essence of a Spider-Man villain, transforming them into kid versions of that villain for the new Spider-Man to confront and ultimately rescue. And so, in addition to the Green Goblin, Spider-Man Kizuna also deals with Little Vulture, Electro Boy, Petit Sandman and Black Kitty Cat.
Mizuno's art, as you have no doubt already noticed, is very distinct...especially for a Spider-Man comic. Most of the characters are 10-year-olds, but the adults all have the same small proportions. The figures all look a little like an "8", their big heads just about half of their squat, round bodies. Essentially, the entire book is drawn in a cute, "chibi" style.
I suppose this may take some getting used to for some readers, especially those used to a more on-model Spider-Man, but I personally was fine with it after the first pages, and it certainly fits the relatively lower-stakes adventure and the episodic cartoon show, game-like nature of the narrative.
It's also fun to see the traditional Marvel villains appear in this style. While Green Goblin is the only villain we see in-story, there are images of many other Spider-Man villains throughout. Like, for example, when Spider-Man recognizes the villain whose powers one of Yu's classmates has come into possession of, we might see an image of, say, the real Vulture or real Electro, and there's one panel where we see a huge swathe of Spidey's rogues gallery.
Indeed, Mizuna draws a complex spider web in the panel, between its strands drawing headshots of some 20 villains, and beyond all of those you might expect to see, like Venom, The Kingpin and Kraven, there's also The Shocker, The Spot, The White Rabbit, The Grizzly and...is that The Armadillo...? And The Walrus...?
That certainly suggests this could go on for at least a few more volumes. It's repetitive enough that I would hope it doesn't go on too long, but, after reading the first volume, I'm certainly curious to see how things are resolved, especially regarding bring Spider-Man back to life/getting him a physical body again.
By 1997, Nolan had already had a healthy run on Detective Comics (a chunk of which was finally collected in 2020's Batman: Knight Out) and penciled the original graphic novel The Joker: Devil Advocate, working with writer Chuck Dixon on both. He had also, again with Dixon, co-created the villain Bane in the pages of 1993's one-shot special Batman: Vengeance of Bane.
Teenage Caleb held great esteem for Nolan's work, particularly that during the Tec run, as Nolan's take on the Batman character and his world seemed to strike a precise, perfect balance between the sturdy realism of Jim Aparo and the dynamic, expressionism of Norm Breyfogle.
By the end of the decade, though, Nolan's work with DC, which included a Bane vs. Ra's al Ghul limited series and the extremely weird JLA Versus Predator, seemed to peter out. I had often wondered what had happened to him (it turns out he turned his attention to drawing a couple of legacy newspaper strips) and was quite happy to get new work from him when he and Dixon reunited for the 12-part series Bane: Conquest in 2017.
A few years later, I looked him up on what was then still Twitter, found him and followed him...and then quickly realized one of the reasons he doesn't seem to be getting much high-profile work in the modern comics industry equivalent to his level of talent. In rapid succession he posted a couple of tweets that I found politically objectionable, including ones hash-tagging or seemingly speaking positively of Comicsgate, of all things. (Nolan is also on an "unofficial listing" of creators who support Comicsgate on comicsgate.org.)
And then I saw his name listed here among comics professionals who participated in a livestream reacting negatively to Superman's son Jonathan Kent coming out as bisexual and DC updating Superman's World War II-era slogan of "Truth, Justice and the American Way" to "Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow." (For what it's worth, I like the original just fine and always imagined it to refer to the ideals America as a nation supposedly represented and strove to embody, not an endorsement of the country's often reprehensible actions like, you know, invading Iraq or electing Donald Trump...twice).
Now obviously Comicsgate is...not company a responsible professional should be keeping, regardless of their political views. But reprehensible views are, I guess, something else that Nolan has in common with his frequent collaborator Dixon, and so I suppose it's unsurprising we're not seeing him drawing Batman or Superman these days. (He seems to be keeping himself busy self-publishing crowd-funded books through his Compass Comics, which he claims are free of the "moralizing and political messages so prevalent at the 'big two' publishers.")
While it is understandable why publishers and other professionals wouldn't want to work with anyone in the Comicsgate orbit, and it is understandable why readers wouldn't want to support creators who hold intolerant beliefs (I know I wouldn't want to buy, say, a new Dixon/Nolan comic today), it doesn't change the fact that Graham Nolan is a hell of an artist, a fact attested to by this very story.
In it, he not only does his usual fine job of drawing Batman and the Dark Knight's perennial foes Ra's al Ghul and Talia, Nolan also gives us a great Spider-Man, one who looks and moves like a classic iteration, evoking the work of John Romita Sr, one of the probably two artists who defined the character's look (The other, of course, being his creator Steve Ditko).
Nolan also draws the Kingpin, who is the Spider-Man villain used in the story. And DeMatteis makes pretty great use out of him here, too. What seems to unite the villains in this particular crossover is their nature as master schemers and plotters, each seeming to exert an impressive degree of control over their particular kingdoms, only really differing in the scale of their ambitions.
Kingpin, of course, wants to—and sometimes does—rule over all crime in New York City, if not the entire city itself. Ra's' criminal enterprise is global in scale, and he has his sights set on ruling the entire world.
This similarity, and this difference, is at the core of DeMatteis' story, which, more so than anything else, is a great character study of the Kingpin: The lengths he will go to save the woman he loves, the way his mind works and where he draws the line when it comes to his own super-villainy.
You may remember—if you have a particularly good memory, anyway—that when I was writing about these two heroes during my discussion of their first pairing, I noted the similarity in the types of stories told about each, as they tended to spend the issues of their comic book series defending their home cities from the machinations of their big and colorful rogues galleries.
I even explicitly said they don't generally engage in globe-trotting adventures, or those in which the fate of the whole world is at stake.
Well, guess what?
This story, entitled "New Age Dawning" is an exception. Parts of the story are set in Gotham, New York City, Paris and Tibet, our heroes ultimately travelling to the distant roof of the world just in time to stop Ra's and Kingpin from pressing the button on a doomsday machine that will wipe NYC off the map and ready the world for Ra's' assumption of its complete control.
As I said, while it reads like a character portrait of Kingpin Wilson Fisk, it also scans an awful lot like a Batman story, particularly one of the many in which he faces Ra's al Ghul and the villain's plans to save the world and its environment by drastically, violently reducing its population.
Although instead of Robin and/or Nightwing around to give Batman someone to banter with, here it's Spidey.
The story opens with a narration-heavy sequence in which a wild-eyed, wild-haired television evangelist preaches about the sorry state of the world—earthquake, flood, a bombing in Jerusalem—as signs that we are entering the end times. And though he plays the role of a Christian evangelist, he doesn't really evoke Christianity, but an unnamed, secular savior of some sort. "There's only one hope for us," he says. "Only one man who can save us from the firestorm that's coming. Look up, children of sin! Look up-- --and see the savior."
Jesus?
No.
The scene then shifts to that would-be savior, dwelling in a hidden, paradisical city nestled in the mountains of Tibet. He is shown praying before an altar filled with candles and the icons of several different religions (a crucifix among them), while his concerned daughter looks on, unseen.
This is, of course, Ra's al Ghul.
Meanwhile, our other villain, Wilson Fisk, is introduced in Paris, where he confronts his apparently estranged love, Vanessa, and embraces her in a kiss.
And as for our heroes?
Well, Spidey is introduced suiting up and leaving his wife Mary Jane to study while he goes out crime-fighting. (Nolan somewhat surprisingly draws her remarkably less busty than the bombshell version of the character that was more prevalent in the '90s; here her design more closely resembles that of Mark Bagley's Ultimate Mary Jane). Spidey busts up an arms deal that he assumes must be Fisk's work, although readers will note the demon's head symbol tattooed on one of the gunmen's palms.
And as for Batman, he swings through a rainy Gotham sky to meet his kinda sorta lover/mortal enemy Talia, who tells him she has business in America, but wanted to drop by and see him. Then she sics a bunch of ninjas on him. ("You knew those men would never stand a chance against me," Batman tells her. "I...had to at least go through the motions of an assassination attempt," she replies.)
With all of the players introduced, it is now time to commence with the crossing-over. Talia and Fisk talk business in his penthouse office. Apparently, Fisk has been working for her and her mysterious employer for some months now, and though he suspects them of being a terrorist organization, as long as they leave their "madness" out of his country and his city, he doesn't mind. Talia pointedly corrects him that the real aim of her organization is not terror, but "resurrection", a word that briefly stops Fisk and elicits a shocked expression from him, given what his wife is going through.
As will soon be revealed, Vanessa is apparently dying of cancer—I obviously have no idea how this squares with the events of the regular Spider-Man and Daredevil comics of the time. Fisk is uninterested in Ra's al Ghul's plans, laid out in a few pages of dialogue that jumps from a conversation between Talia and Fisk to another of Batman and Spider-Man.
This time around those plans involve using special devices that control the weather and tectonic plates to sink the island of Manhattan and cause other such disasters until Ra's emerges from the apocalyptic chaos to "offer redemption to a sick and dying world."
Again, Fisk is uninterested, but Talia has a very strong closing offer for tailored to him.
"My father has the power to cure your wife's cancer," she tells him.
During their meetings, Batman has been spying on the pair, and he is eventually interrupted by the arrival of Spider-Man ("I wondered when you'd show up," he says to Spidey over his shoulder without looking at him.)
Batman is just as reluctant to work with Spider-Man this time as he was last time, and when the web-slinger puts his hand on Batman's shoulder while talking to him, the Dark Knight snatches him by the wrist and twists it. Spidey throws him across the rooftop, Batman landing on his feet and striking a cool, Mazzucchelli-inspired pose in the mist.
This is the only real fighting the two do, ultimately shaking hands again and deciding to work together. Nolan does a particularly good job of contrasting the two heroes, two characters whose basic designs are so far apart from one another, with the sleek, colorful Spider-Man a head or so shorter than the big, black triangularly shaped Batman.
Faced with the inevitability of Vanessa's death, Fisk eventually makes a deal with Ra's, and Talia delivers he and his ailing wife to the Tibetan stronghold. There, Ra's makes clear his plans for the world and Fisk's place in them, holding the cure for Vanessa's cancer—in actuality, a cancer-like disease that Ra's engineered in his laboratories specifically to infect her—over him as irresistible leverage.
In order to make him prove his loyalty, Ra's insists that Fisk be the one to push the button that will destroy New York.
That is, of course, where Spider-Man and Batman come in. They have chased the villains to Tibet in some rather charmingly silly disguises and, after they are waylaid by Ra's forces along the way, they must travel the snowy wastes with parkas over their costumes, with Batman at one point riding piggy-back as Spidey climbs the sheer face of a mountain cliff.
To say much at all about the ending would risk spoiling a clever and effective twist, but it's safe to say that New York City is not destroyed and Ra's does not take over the world. Even Vanessa's life is saved.
DeMatteis does a fine job of portraying all of the various and varied characters, including their at-times complex roles, like Spider-Man working to save Vanessa even if it means helping the Kingpin, and Talia's moral ambiguity, as she vacillates between working for and against her father...and against but sometimes with Batman.
The last panel, a half-page splash of the two heroes in a moon-filled big city night sky together, is the very stuff these crossovers are made for, as both look perfectly like themselves and perfectly strange appearing side by side like this, but also, under Nolan and Kesel's pens and Gloria Vasquez's colors, also seeming to belong together.
This would be the final crossover in which this particular pair would appear together, and, in fact, this was Spidey's last standalone DC/Marvel crossover. Both Batman and Kingpin would appear one more time in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus collection though, in 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, by Alan Grant and Eduardo Barreto.
Next: 1999's Superman/Fantastic Four #1
Reading it in 2024, and immediately after reading its predecessor, I think it suffers somewhat in comparison with the original. Certainly, some of that may be due to the fact that this is the second go-round, and it therefore doesn't feel as special as the first, but that can't entirely account for what seems like an overall dip in quality.
As previously mentioned, the second Superman/Spider-Man crossover wasn't as painfully, painstakingly produced as the first, with the two publishers negotiating over every decision and every panel. Instead, by the time of its publication in 1981 (and one does wonder why it took them five years for a follow-up), DC and Marvel decided to take turns producing their crossovers, with each publishing a crossover in-house (Marvel would handle this one, while DC would be responsible for the Batman/Hulk crossover published later that same year).
Thus the story was published in what was technically Marvel Treasury Edition #28, although the painted John Romita Sr. and Bob Larkin cover simply blares "Superman and Spider-Man". Marvel Treasury Edition, which launched in 1971 and ended with this very issue, consisted of Marvel comics printed in the "Treasury" format, meaning they were over-sized 10-inch-by-14-inch tabloids...so, as with the original crossover, this one would have been in a bigger format than those of most comics at the time.
This time the creative team would consist of writer Jim Shooter, who had previously written plenty of Superman comics for DC at the start of his career and was, at the time, the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel, and pencil artist John Buscema. The artist would be inked by a whole cadre of inkers; the credit box gives Joe Sinnnott a "figures inked by" credit, while nine different inkers are listed under "Backgrounds inked by" (These are all name artists that most modern readers would recognize and include the likes of Walt Simonson and Klaus Janson).
The villains our heroes would be facing off against this time are both rather odd choices, at least compared to the original crossover, which featured their respective archenemies Lex Luthor and Doctor Octopus.
Here the Marvel villain is Dr. Doom, who had, of course, crossed paths with Spider-Man (as well as most Marvel heroes) over the years, but is nevertheless more of a Fantastic Four villain or a Marvel Universe-in-general villain, rather than a Spidey-specific one (Although I do recall him being prominently featured in the opening sequence of 1981 Saturday morning cartoon Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, one of my first introductions to Spider-Man). Of course, putting Superman and Doctor Doom in the same comic was probably a great temptation, so I don't suppose one can blame Shooter for taking this extremely rare opportunity to do so.
As for the Superman villain, it's The Parasite, who is such a relatively minor member of the Man of Steel's rogues' gallery that he seems rather out of place here, especially considering that the previous crossover featured Luthor. Using Parasite in such a high-profile Superman story seems somewhat random, like using, I don't know, Terra-Man. In Marv Wolfman's introduction, which originally ran in 1991 collection Crossover Classics and is collected in the omnibus, he points out that Shooter had created The Parasite, which may explain the villain's presence here.
Also somewhat odd for a Superman/Spider-Man crossover? The book has guest-stars. Both Marvel's The Incredible Hulk and DC's Wonder Woman appear rather prominently in the book, particularly the former, who is rather central to the plot (As for the latter, she seems almost shoehorned in, present mainly to offer a DC counterweight to the Hulk's appearance). Referring to Wolfman's introduction again, the reason for the pair's appearances in this book was apparently simply because both were on TV at the time, and so the publishers had requested they appear in the story as well.
As for that story, it is driven by Doom's latest ambitious plan to conquer the world. This, which isn't thoroughly explained until fairly late into the 62-page story, involves controlling The Hulk with a sonic device, freeing Parasite from his special underground prison, a series of underground bases hidden under construction sites all over the world, destroying all of the world's fossil fuels, plunging the world into chaos and, finally, swooping in to reveal his new energy source, which he claims in equivalent to a small star, after which point he will be declared king of the world.
As for Parasite's role, it seems mainly manufactured to include him in the proceedings; Doom needs his powers to ultimately operate his new fuel source, but he strings Parasite along, promising to feed him the captured superheroes Doom collects throughout the story.
The book opens with two parallel columns on the inside cover just as the previous crossover did, although here instead of introductions by that project's editors Stan Lee and Carmine Infantino, they are short prose pieces with seven tiny inset illustrations, dedicated to recapping the two heroes' origins.
After we're briefly introduced to the Spider-Man on the title page—the tale is officially called "The Heroes and the Holocaust!", although the holocaust in question refers to the dictionary definition of the word, not the historical one that immediately comes to mid—and a brief action sequence, we get two rather interminable pages of Doom talking to himself in his underground lair. It's so overdone as to almost be funny. Certainly, the point where Doom commands a lackey to make sure he's recording his "every utterance" and to produce a transcript he can review later on, is genuinely funny, but man, it just goes on and on.
I should here pause to note that I've never actually read anything Shooter has written before (at least, not to my knowledge, anyway), his time at DC and Marvel preceding my interest in comics by a decade or more, and I was rather surprised to find out just how wordy he is. Panels that could use a word balloon or two might get seven, and some panels where words aren't even necessary will get four paragraphs.
I've always associated this sort of over-writing with early Marvel, and its founding writer/editor Stan Lee's efforts to contribute something of his own to the clear storytelling of his collaborators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, so I'm not sure how much of this is Shooter, and how much of it is simply Marvel's house style at the time, but there is a ton of verbiage in this comic, far more than in the crossover that preceded it.
Anyway, in the tenth straight panel of Doom's monologuing, he reveals "Operation H!", which is to send The Hulk to Metropolis. Also on the way to Metropolis? Down on his luck Daily Bugle photog Peter Parker, who needs to make money to take girls to Elvis Costello concerts and pay his aunt's hospital bills; his editor, J. Jonah Jameson, points to a poster of Superman on his office wall (Funny we never see that in any other Marvel comics!) and tells Parker he would certainly pay for photos of a Hulk/Superman fight, which seems to be brewing.
The fight does indeed take place, in an eight-page sequence in which the Man of Steel tries to talk the Hulk down to no effect, and blows are traded. Somewhat surprisingly, though the Hulk tackles Superman and gets in a devastating sucker punch, he's really no match for Superman, the fight ending with Superman planting his feet and letting Hulk strike him repeatedly, to no visible effect.
Superman: "Not this time, Hulk! You caught me by surprise--once! This time, I'm ready! And when I'm ready...and I don't want to be moved, no power on Earth-- --can move me!"
Hulk: "RRRRAH!"
Having read other Superman/Hulk fights (in the pages of 1996's DC Versus Marvel, which will be collected in the upcoming DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, and in Roger Stern and Steve Rude's 1999 The Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman #1, collected in this very volume), and having seen Superman beaten to death by the Hulk-like Doomsday in 1993, the one-sidedness of the fight seemed off, especially given the fact that this was a Marvel produced book, but then I suppose this is the pre-Crisis Superman, whose power levels were of the planet-juggling variety, and not even the strongest one there is can knock him on his heels.
After several panels of the Hulk trying to do just that, Superman's vision powers diagnose the problem: "A micro-miniature drone...emitting an ultrasonic screech at a frequency that drives the Hulk wild!" With that destroyed, Hulk loses interest in the fight—"Cape-Man talks stupid! Cape-Man is stupid! Hulk should smash anyway-- --but Hulk is tired!"—and reverts to a shirtless Bruce Banner and is taken away to S.T.A.R. Labs. (Peter Parker, who was there to take pictures of the fight, briefly suits up as Spider-Man, but Superman waves him off.)
What was the point of all that, other than to get the Hulk in the comic? Well, apparently Doom planned it so that at one point the Hulk would strike the ground in a specific spot with a powerful enough blow to free the Parasite from his prison.
While in town, Parker runs into Jimmy Olsen, who recognizes him and buys him a cup of coffee. They get to talking, and ultimately Parker sells his photos to the much-more-generous-than-Jameson Perry White, and he decides to stick around Metropolis for a while, freelancing for the Daily Planet. (And asking out Lana Lang and falling prey to one of Steve Lombard's practical jokes; at this point in his history, Parker was apparently single).
Meanwhile, Clark Kent relocates to New York City and goes to the Daily Bugle to look for some work while he's there. He suspects Doom is behind the Hulk rampage/Parasite prison escape business ("Only two men alive could have engineered something like that...and I happen to know that one of them, Lex Luthor, is safely locked away!"), so he wants to keep an eye on him, as well as maintain a high profile as Clark Kent in NYC, in an attempt to "draw fire" away from his friends in Metropolis.
But mainly it's just fun to see the two trade cities and supporting casts for a while.
Eventually, Spider-Man infiltrates one of Doom's underground bases, where he finds Wonder Woman rather randomly in the process of fighting off a horde of the villain's soldiers. She's eventually captured, and put into a stasis tube alongside the Hulk, who Doom had captured off-panel.
After hearing Doom's master plan as laid out to Parasite—a 12-panel sequence—Spidey goes for help and finds Superman. Together, the pair storm the base, battle the villains and, at the climax, team-up to stop Doom's malfunctioning experimental star-like power source, which threatens to destroy the entire world. To do this, Superman rushes into the reactor and hugs it, apparently keeping it from exploding with his bare hands, while he tells Spider-Man to figure out how to shut the thing off (Doom has long since retreated to a pre-readied rocket ship, having assumed the Earth was toast and planning to escape the planet.)
As impossible as their tasks may seem, the two heroes manage to save the day and, afterwards, return to their respective cities, jobs and supporting casts.
Having already met one another once and gotten along, there is no need for the fight-then-team-up ritual here, and so the most exciting action sequences involve Superman vs. The Hulk and Spidey vs. The Parasite, who borrows his spider-powers from him (Though she initially tries to lasso him, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man never actually fight one another).
So that aspect of a crossover is out, but, somewhat oddly, Superman and Spider-Man aren't really together throughout most of the book.
During the Hulk battle, for example, when Spider-Man is about to confront the Hulk, taking over for the punched-out-of-the-panel Superman, the Man of Steel suddenly returns and shoos Spidey away: "Step aside, son! This is a job for Superman!" (Spidey responds with, "Hey! Hold on, big shot! What am I--? The water boy?" and then, after Superman has crushed the drone driving Hulk and solved the problem, the wall-crawler slinks back into an alley, saying "Now I know what a fifth wheel feels like!")
It's only at the climax that the two really work together, and even then, they don't share all that many panels with one another, as they divide up their world-saving duties.
As with Shooter, I'm not terribly familiar with the work of artist John Buscema, although consulting his list of credits on Wikipedia, I see that I definitely read at least one book he drew (2001's Just Imagine Stan Lee and John Buscema Creating Superman), although given the number of comics he's drawn over the years for Marvel, I'm sure I've encountered his work at least a few times, likely in the pages of Conan collections or those phonebook-like Essential volumes.
He does a fine job on the art here, although it's notable that at no point does he seem to be given the sorts of showcases afforded Ross Andru in the first Superman/Spider-Man team-up, which featured multiple splashes and double-page splashes. The closest he gets is a single splash page, the title page, wherein most of the visual real estate is eaten up by the title and credits and the figure of Spider-Man swinging into action that appears is relatively small and seen from behind.
Later, when Superman first appears, he gets something of a splash page, although two inset panels also eat into it.
The rest of the pages are fairly panel-packed, which, when coupled-with all of Shooter's dialogue bubbles and narration boxes, gives the book a cramped, crowded feel. I do wonder how it would have read in the bigger size it was originally published in, but Marvel doesn't seem to have taken special advantage of that size to really show off its heroes, their crossing paths or Buscema's art.
The real pleasure of the book—aside from seeing the two heroes' secret identities working at one another's newspapers, which is obviously a lot of fun—is probably Shooter and Buscema pitting the world's greatest hero (That would be Superman, obviously) against the comic books' greatest villain (Doctor Doom). It's little surprise, then, that the strongest scene is that in which Superman visits the Latverian embassy and the two characters trade dialogue and worldviews before Doom tries to kill Superman, fails and then simply crosses his arms and says "Bah!" when Superman foils him, as his diplomatic immunity spares him of facing any real consequences.
Overall though, this isn't a particularly strong comic, which is quite disappointing given the relative rarity of DC and Marvel characters sharing space and, of course, that the previous effort was so much stronger. But, as mentioned earlier, this wasn't 1981's only DC/Marvel crossover and, thankfully, the other one turned out pretty great.
Next: 1981's DC Special Series #27, featuring Batman and The Hulk