On Strips: MJ's Cabbie

By | Friday, June 12, 2015 3 comments
Tales of the Marvel Universe
In yesterday's Amazing Spider-Man strip, Mary Jane leaves the movie she's working on by hopping in a cab and telling the driver to tail Spider-Man and Black Widow, who she's jealously concerned may becoming romantically involved with one another...
It's kind of a crap idea that's a few decades out of touch, but let's focus on that cabbie. He notes that he gave the Invisible Woman a lift on "the first day she did her vanishin' act." That is, of course, a reference to this sequence from Fantastic Four #1...
The same driver actaully shows up again later in Fantastic Four #160 when he picks up Alicia Masters. When she asks to be taken to the FF's headquarters, he relays the story...
Fantastic Four #160 sequence
And he also shows up later in Tales of the Marvel Universe #1, relaying the same story yet again (his audience notes they've already heard this a million times), this time while watching one of the Thunderbolts' first battles on the news.

What had never been revealed before, however, was that this was evidently the same cab driver from Thor #129, as suggested by the strip's reference!
Thor #129
As far as I'm aware, this is the first time Thor's cab ride has ever been referenced in another story and no one has ever made the connection to the cab driver from FF #1 before.

It's also a seemingly rare digression (these days) on writer Stan Lee's part to pull out continuity nods like that. While he did it pretty regularly back in the 1960s, the writing he's done on the newspaper strip -- while sometimes dated and stilted -- has rarely referred back at his own career like this. It's a different medium with an audience that isn't as attuned to long-term continuity as you find with comic books. It's also a pretty rare nod to continuity in the Marvel Universe overall any more. While some fans complain that there's no respecting a character's rich history, others cite decades of continuity as an albatross around their collective neck. So editorially, anything much further back than the previous storyline has largely been glossed over at most or, more frequently, completely ignored. The throwback in yesterday's strip is very much an anomoly, but it's a curious instance of contrasting previous storytelling norms against current ones.
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3 comments:

Matt K said...

I've considered writing something about it myself, but I think I can skip it now: This post really sums up why I feel some small but persistent sadness that Marvel is, finally, implementing a reboot.

I can't remember the last time I bought a new Marvel comic. But the idea of something like this continuing to grow, organically, decade after decade like some riotous garden… it still somehow feels like a loss to think that corporate groundskeepers will be going in with napalm and starting over.

Unknown said...

It may be that, as I understand it, these days Roy Thomas writes the strip from Stan Lee plots. We all know what a fanatic Roy is with continuity. Anyway thanks for connecting the cabbie dots.
D.D.Degg

Unknown said...

It may be that, as I understand it, these days Roy Thomas writes the strip from Stan Lee plots. We all know what a fanatic Roy is with continuity. Anyway thanks for connecting the cabbie dots.
D.D.Degg