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Today, we look at the comic book that kickstarted Sandman’s road to redemption.
This is “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
We go back to December 1971 for “Have Yourself a Sandman Little Christmas” by Roy Thomas, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito in the first issue of Marvel Team-Up.
This was the very first ongoing Spider-Man spinoff series and it is interesting that it was a Christmas issue, as there were not a whole lot of Marvel Comics at the time that were Christmas-themed. It just didn’t seem to be something that Stan Lee was into. I asked Roy Thomas about it, and he nicely gave me the lowdown:
I think it just wasn’t something that interested Stan… perhaps because such stories tended to become all warm and cuddly, and Stan wanted to stay away from much of what comics had heretofore been. I don’t recall asking him if it was okay if I turned the first issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP into a Christmas story; I think that I simply saw when that first issue would come on sale and I decided to do it. Stan was very happy with it, as I recall. But neither he nor I ever pushed Christmas stories per se.
The issue opened with Peter Parker covering one of those “Polar Bear” swims, where people go swimming in the freezing ocean. But then Sandman comes out of the sand! He had been decorporealized for a while and had finally put himself back together. Peter turns into Spider-Man and fights his old enemy, but during the fight, Sandman is shocked to learn that it was now Christmas Eve. He quickly escapes, as he seems like he has some place to be.
Spider-Man turns to the Human Torch, who had also become a Sandman rival. Johnny is rocking some garish duds…
The two heroes go to check out the neighborhood that they think Sandman was headed and along the way, they see a black woman getting attacked. They save her and go on their way…
You might ask, “Why are you even bothering featuring such a minor scene?” And the reason why is because Chris Claremont would later reveal that this woman was Misty Knight. It’s more than a bit of a stretch seemingly based on her hairstyle, but, well, it’s interesting enough to note it.
Okay, so Spidey and Torch find Sandman, but he knocks them out and puts them into a death trap, where they look like they’ll be drowned, but before he leaves them, he tells Torch to “keep his chin up.” Spidey realizes that that was a clue that they should keep Torch’s chin above water so that he could flame on his face and burn their way out of the restraints…
My issue with that scene has always been the fact that “He gave us a tricky out of that death trap” really isn’t THAT nice of a move by the Sandman, right? He still put them in a death trap! A true nice move would have been to NOT put them into a death trap or, in the alternative, put them into a “death trap” that would never have actually killed them. This death trap could have EASILY killed them.
Anyhow, they track him down and see that he is visiting his sickly mother and he just wants to see her before they arrest him. They agree and Peter even gives Sandman a present that Peter had purchased for Gwen Stacy…
Naturally, Sandman takes advantage of their generosity to escape, but he WAS telling the truth about wanting to see his mom, so Spidey and Torch chalk it up to an understandable loss and head out, wishing each other a Merry Christmas…
Supervillains had obviously reformed before this, but typically when they did so, they were ones who were initially conflicted (for instance, Hawkeye intended to be a superhero at first and Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were constantly at odds with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants). It was very rare for a character who had been a villain for nearly a decade like Sandman to suggest that maybe he’s not “all the way bad.” It was a concept that later writers really picked up on and the slow but steady redemption of the Sandman was a fun thing to follow in the 1980s and 1990s (he even became an AVENGER!). And all based on this one Roy Thomas tale.
If you folks have any suggestions for January (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
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