Follow the Leaders

Previously:

My Spidey Sense in Jingling  - -  The X-Men Visit the State Fair 

Houston Heroes  - -  Spidey Visits Dallas   - -  Sea of Good Cheer 

Check out the headline:  "Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders Missing!"  It's time, once again, to dive into another Dallas Times Herald Marvel freebie comic.  This time it's not just superheroes doing their thing, we get America's Sweethearts as special guest stars!

The year was 1982 and our adventure begins with Peter Parker and his childhood friend Fran finishing up a shopping spree at a north Texas Sanger-Harris (who sponsored the comic).

After the stiff wind of exposition blows through Dallas, it's replaced with the rain storms of plot advancement as the cheerleaders get lost on the way to their performance at Fort Sage (which seems to be in California).

Instead of finding the army base, they find an army base and decide it's probably the one they were looking for.  After all, it's not like the people there were acting suspicious or anything...

By the way, that lady in the cowboy hat appears to be legendary former DCC director Suzanne Mitchell.  I was wondering if "Fran" was also based on a real person, and I found a Francis Roberson that was an assistant director around this time period but I couldn't confirm if she ever knew Spider-Man.

After the "army" guys get the girls situated in the conference room with promises of hot coffee and not being murdered, we get to see what's really going on in this facility.

Yep, it's the Leader, an evil mastermind who was mutated in a similar accident that created the Hulk.  But instead of increasing his physical strength, the gamma radiation increased his mental abilities making him super smart (according to him).

Well, it doesn't take long for Fran and the gals to get suspicious.  She sneaks around the base to find a phone (remember the 80s?) and call her old pal Peter Parker.  So Peter's alter ego, Spider-Man, starts the hunt!  When he turns up nothing, his only recourse to arbitrarily swing around the desert.  It doesn't take too long before he runs into another old friend...

The Hulk was just wondering around the desert (as he does), punching tanks (as he does) when he ran afoul of the fake army guys.  It doesn't take too long for Spidey, the Hulk and the Cheerleaders to all converge on the Leader's compound for a final battle.

Nothing gets things sorted out like a great big explosion.  With the bad guys defeated, the Hulk wanders off and the Cheerleaders were free to go find the actual army base where they put on one their best shows.

And Peter Parker was able to get the pictures.  Although it looks like, instead of the Daily Bugle, he may be freelancing for "Cheerleader Butts Magazine."  C'mon Pete...we know what you're doing...at least try to be subtle.

And the story ends as it begins with Peter and Fran doing some more shopping at Sanger-Harris.  Most adventures end with a sense of relief and maybe a trip to the emergency room but this one ends with a job offer. 

I'll leave you today with a Superman-esque character tempting readers with the idea of a Dallas Times Herald paper route:

Houston Heroes

Previously:

Peter & Frank Do Dallas    - -    The X-Men Visit the State Fair

Tom Landry: The Comic Book

We've seen Marvel Comics superheroes come to Texas before but so far they've been confined to Dallas.  Sure, it's an adventurous city but when out-of-towners want the "Everything's Bigger in Texas" experience they almost inevitably want to visit the biggest city in Texas.  And so it was only a matter of time before Spider-Man and the Hulk showed up in Houston:

What we have here is another newspaper freebie from Marvel Comics in the 80's.  It was given away in the Houston Chronicle and sponsored by Foley's Department Stores (and believe me, you'll get the hint throughout the story).

So what brings our heroes to town?  An emergency at NASA?  Nope, just the further frustrations of Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson:

After lamenting the lack of good NYC based news stories, JJJ is tipped off by Peter Parker about a Houston Chronicle article about rodeo superstar Rex Ryder and Jameson is immediately smitten.  So there's nothing left to do but hop on the first plane for the Lone Star State:

One of the disappointments of the comic is that other than the setting, there are just about no Houston area name-checks.  They head to the rodeo but don't actually say it's the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo.   We don't even get a decent shot of the city skyline.

So we must be content with generic cowboys and cowboy accoutrements at the parade and the stockyards.  And there are a few distinctly non-Houstonian elements at the festivities.  Peter's Spidey Sense kicks in almost immediately as he spots members of the criminal ne'er-do-well gang known as the Enforcers:

So now that Peter Parker is a "Spider-Man with a mission," we turn our attention to the nearby stables, and if you weren't satisfied with the amount of Marvel characters that inexplicably decided to converge on Houston this day, then you're in a for treat!

Yep, the Hulk's alter ego Bruce Banner is still trying to Bill Bixby his way across the country and picked Houston as a place to stop.  Apparently he pulled on his best pair of purple dungarees and got a job at the rodeo.  And it doesn't take long for him to also realize that there's troubling brewing.

So apparently the Enforcers have kidnapped Rex's best girl Annie and decided to use her for leverage to make him throw his Bull Riding event.  And if that wasn't enough, they let him know (for some reason) that they're also going to rob the box office.  That's a pretty ambitious scam for a rodeo caper.

Meanwhile, as Bruce Banner investigates, he makes an additional discovery.  If the triple decker coincidence sandwich that is this story hasn't satisfied you so far then get ready for the fourth heat!

 Yep, the Spider-Man villain "Rhino" has also decided to brave the humidity to rob what must be an amazing box office and he makes Mistake #1: he backhands Puny Banner!  Well, you can guess where this is going...

Yep, the manure hits the fan as two different sets of heroes and villains converge at the rodeo and the results include the Rhino punching a bull...

...Spider-Man "lasso-webbing" the kidnappers...

...the Hulk beating up the Rhino, which inadvertently leads to a van (which was unfortunately left in neutral) being pushed by the two warring brutes down a hill, straight for the runaway wagon that held the kidnapped Annie...

...leading to a daring "double rescue" and solidifying the notion that super heroes cause as many problems as they solve.

So when all was said and done there was nothing left to do but have a celebratory shopping spree...at Foley's, of course:

And with that, our action packed adventure in the Gulf has concluded.  Sure, there's a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of murky motivations but thanks to our heroes, the rodeo funds were saved and Rex and Annie get to ride off into the sunset.

If experience has told us anything it's that it won't be long before the Lone Star state ends up in the comics pages once again...

...to be continued?!?

Hulk Sighting in Dallas

Recently the Dallas Observer finally became readable when it turned into the Daily Bugle to promote the Dallas dates of the Marvel Experience Tour.  The mock paper mainly contained thinly veiled ads promoting ticket sales but they did manage to slip in a news story about the Hulk wandering around Parkland Hospital: