Marvel Team Up #135
Spider-Man and Kitty Pryde headline “In the Lair of the Morlocks”, written by Bill Mantlo with art by Ron Frenz and Mike Esposito. Prof. Xavier wants Kitty to have normal teenage experiences, so she is babysitting two brothers. Obsessed with ersatz Dungeons and Dragons game “Sewers and Serpents”, the boys sneak out to play in the nearby sewers. They get kidnapped by a gang of human “Morlocks”, the same sewer dwellers that knocked out Spider-Man after he stopped a runaway subway train.
These so-called Morlocks claim to have preceded the mutant ones first appearing in Uncanny X-Men #169. Their leader Strigor has access to high-tech magnetic railcars and special energy bonds strong enough to keep Spider-Man captive, which make them a little more than your usual mohawked 80s punks. Strigor never specifically states that he built any of the tech, and the reader gets the suspicion that he really isn't bright enough to have put it together on his own. All of which begs the question, just who was bankrolling these guys? As usual, Kitty’s phasing power is useful for disrupting electronic gadgets and hardware, springing Spidey from the energy bonds restraining him.
The opener features a runaway subway and was sufficiently cool, but otherwise this is a miss. Good action sequences from Frenz, but not much to back them up in terms of real stakes. You never get an impression of Strigor's larger plans or if he even had any. A cameo by one of the actual Morlocks from the pages of X-Men (maybe Sunder or Erg) would not have been out of place and could have been a nice touch.
This had a chance to be a cool “lost tale,” tying into other X-Morlocks business, but turned out to be immediately forgettable. The peripheral connection to Dungeons and Dragons, especially with another Mazes and Monster-style instance of people obsessed with wanting it to be real and exploring sewers, is a point of curiosity and not much more.
For completists only! Also note that, while wearing her Ariel costume, Kitty Pride is giving cover billing as Kitty Pryde. Poor Kitty has never seemed able to settle on a codename. If I understand what I read online, these days she is also going by the more grown-up sounding Kate these days rather than Kitty.
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