Today, we take a look at the Marvel’s tie-in comic book it produced with Combos starring … Combo Man, a hero consisting of a bunch of different Marvel superheroes and supervillains!
In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!
CHECK OUT THE FIRST MARVEL COMBO MAN AD AND SEE IF YOU CAN GUESS WHO COMBO MAN WAS MADE UP OF
As I have written before (like recently in a piece about how there were so many Marvel comics being produced around 1993 that there weren’t enough name brand guest stars to go around, so titles had to “settle” for lesser known characters as guest stars, like USAgent or Thunderstrike), the 1990s saw a massive sales boom for Marvel Comics (and the comic book industry in general, of course, but Marvel was particularly well positioned to get a large chunk of the sales boost) and due to that sales boom, suddenly Marvel was in a really advantageous position for working on sponsorships and other related tie-ins, because the company could easily explain to possibly partners that these ads would be seen by a TON of people since Marvel had such a wide reach at the time.
Already, comic book ad tie-ins were common, like the mid-1980s major ad campaign for Cap’n Crunch cereal where the Cap’n went missing and there was a notable series of comic book ads in Marvel Comics featuring Spider-Man joining the search for the Cap’n …
However, Combo Man was a step above that. Combos is a popular snack food that actually existed due to cross-marketing, as Anheuser-Busch brewery had a snack food branch of its company called Eagle Snacks that produced snack food, presumably under the concept that beer and snack food pair well together. Eventually, the company was sold off and Mars purchased the rights to produce Combos around 1995 and continues to produce them to this day.
In 1995, Marvel and Combos came together to do a popular series of ads featuring Combo Man, a hero who was made up by combining 14 different Marvel characters (both heroes and villains). There was a contest where you had to see if you could name all 14 of them …
What do you think? Can you name all 14? I’ll give you a spoiler space here before I post the aswers.
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Here are the results, courtesy of a series of Combo Man trading cards. The trickiest ones are definitely Daredevil (considering he had only recently changed his costume, so you’d have to know that the costume was the new Daredevil one and not the classic one) and, of course, the number one hardest one, Century, a then-new hero who was a member of Force Works, the team that formed in the wake of the Avengers West Coast disbanding.
The main parts of the costume are very simple …
But then you have Sabretooth, who is not that simple (note that somehow Wolverine is not involved) plus Daredevil and Century …
and Gambit’s boots are not exactly the most iconic pair of footwear in the Marvel Universe …
You also have to love the idea of combining the power of Silver Surfer with the power of, you know, Punisher. “Well, now I have the Power Cosmic … and the ability of some dude.”
If that was all we had from Combo Man, I think he’d still be a notable enough character, but there was so much more, including a Combo Man one-shot comic book written by Mark Gruenwald!
COMBO MAN’S FIRST COMIC BOOK ADVENTURE
The comic book did not come out until 1996. It had a cover by John Statema, drawn in 1995 (so I suspect that the comic book came out in early 1996) …
The issue was drawn by Hector Collazo and Greg Adams. It opens with a young college student, Rick Wilder, being pressured into breaking into a college lab to steal some test questions for some bullies. Rick has a bunch of Marvel Comics with him and a bag of Combos.
He discovers that some Advanced Idea Mechanics stooges were there, too, hassling the professor and Rick went to go help him but walked right into a live experiment …
After Rick ate a Combo (which, you know, you do in a crisis), he somehow combined the forces of the comic book characters in the comics that hw was reading and it turned him into Combo Man!
The AIM goons were being assisted by the evil android known as the Super-Adaptoid, but when Rick went to overload the villain’s abilities, he suddenly tuned back to himself. As it turned out, he needed to continuously eat Combos to keep himself as Combo Man …
He then overloaded the Super-Adaptoid and decided to go tell those bullies to stick it …
Amusingly, in 2019, as part of a celebration of Marvel’s 80th anniversary, writers John Cerilli and Frank Tieri and artists Jacob Chabot and Stefani Rennee and letterer Joe Caramagna did a one-shot featuring Zippy Pig and Silly Seal, two of Marvel’s Golden Age funny animal comic book characters.
In it, Method Man visits a Comic Con of down on their luck Marvel comic book characters and there is Combo Man!
And then, in their fascinating series, Crossover (about fictional comic book characters crossing over into our world, featuring guest appearances by a variety of characters from different companies), Donny Cates, Geoff Shaw, Dee Cunniffe and John J. Hill showed some captured comic book characters being experimented on and there was Combo Man again in the fourth issue!
Well, basically Combo Man, close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, but not so close for copyright violations.
If anyone has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You’re Strange, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.om
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