Marvel Team-Up #124
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMarvel Team-Up #124 is the third chapter in J.M. DeMatteis's self-contained Professor Power saga, and the one that elevates the villain from action-figure antagonist to something more psychologically unsettling — a grieving father who has literally displaced his own identity into his comatose son's body in order to wage war on mutantkind. More unusually for a team-up book of the era, the fight between Spider-Man, Beast, and Professor Power is almost secondary to a quiet emotional gut-punch: Hank McCoy's mother rejecting her own son as a 'freak' in a restaurant, only to rush to his defense moments later when his life is endangered. That maternal reversal — parental shame ceding to parental love under pressure — gives the issue a human weight that stands out sharply against the genre's typical 'hero meets hero, they fight a threat, done' formula, and marks DeMatteis as a writer already pushing Marvel Team-Up toward character-driven territory.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The issue sits squarely inside the DeMatteis/Gammill run on Marvel Team-Up, a creative partnership that editor Tom DeFalco assembled to give the series more narrative consistency than it had historically enjoyed. DeMatteis had introduced Professor Power just months earlier in issues #117–118 (May–June 1982), co-creating the character with penciler Herb Trimpe; by #124 he handed the art to Kerry Gammill, who had been his regular collaborator on the book since roughly issue #121. The cover is by Ed Hannigan and John Beatty, with inks on interiors by the long-serving Mike Esposito, and the issue shipped with a December 1982 cover date under Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter's watch. Tom Brevoort, writing decades later about this era of Marvel Team-Up, noted in passing that Professor Power's body-transfer origin concept has a structural echo in the 1954 Fighting American origin — a parallel DeMatteis may or may not have consciously drawn on.
Trivia · 8 facts
- The story is titled 'The Ties That Bind!' and was written by J.M. DeMatteis with pencils (breakdowns) by Kerry Gammill, inks by Mike Esposito, colors by Bob Sharen, and letters by Jim Novak; Tom DeFalco served as editor.
- Professor Power (Anthony Power) makes his third comic-book appearance here, having debuted in Marvel Team-Up #117 (May 1982) — created by J.M. DeMatteis and Herb Trimpe — and returned in #118 before this issue.
- The issue's central plot turn is Professor Power having transferred his own mind into the cybernetically enhanced body of his comatose son Matthew, giving him vastly superior physical power and setting up his ongoing vendetta against Charles Xavier and the X-Men.
- The Beast (Hank McCoy) co-stars, and the issue depicts a charged reunion with his parents — most notably his mother Edna, who initially recoils from her son and calls him a 'freak,' before her maternal instinct overrides her fear when she sees Hank endangered in battle.
- Spider-Man and Beast are outmatched throughout the fight; the battle only ends when Edna McCoy intervenes and appeals to Professor Power's own grief as a father who has lost his son — temporarily staying Power's hand.
- Professor Power departs without being definitively defeated, establishing him as a recurring threat; he subsequently appeared across The Defenders, Captain America, X-Factor, and Spectacular Spider-Man titles over the following decade-plus.
- The issue was later reprinted in Marvel Tales #241, confirming its place within Marvel's ongoing reprint program for notable Team-Up stories.
- The issue also advances subplots from the Spider-Man titles of the period, including Aunt May converting her Forest Hills home into a rooming house for elderly tenants — cross-pollination that was a deliberate feature of DeFalco and DeMatteis's approach to making Marvel Team-Up feel continuous with Amazing and Spectacular Spider-Man.
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Super Spider-Man TV Comic #508 (1982), Edderkoppen #10/1985 (1985), Edderkoppen #10/1985 (1985), Spindelmannen #10/1985 (1985), Spiderman #82 (1986), Spécial Strange #45 (1986), Marvel Tales #241 (1990), Die Spinne Comic - Taschenbuch #18, Kóngulóarmaðurinn #2/1985, Marvel Superhelden #28, Σπάιντερ Μαν [Spider-Man] #353
Key issues in Marvel Team-Up
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