Spider-Man & Hulk: Toilet Paper #1 // Review
There was an old legend that used to be a joke around the comic shop: Marvel once printed a team-up between Spider-Man and the Hulk...on toilet paper. It was a very brief story that would cycle through a few times over the course of a roll. Evidently, the short-lived product was only offered in 1979. Since then, it’s been a weird collectible that has occasionally gone for auction on eBay. Marvel opens up April with a faithful reproduction of the original comic sequence in its original light blue format for an online exclusive. Spider-Man & Hulk: Toilet Paper #1 is a strange, little curiosity that was written by Jim Salicrup with art by Michael Higgins.
Peter Parker is running late. Empire State University is unveiling a new power plant as a part of an atomic energy exhibition. He’s doing a paper on it, and he has to be there for the unveiling. Meanwhile, Dr. Bruce Banner is ALSO running late. Evidently, they’re using a new process for the power plant that could potentially stabilize Banner’s condition so that he doesn’t have to turn into the Hulk ever again. Unfortunately, the Gamma-irradiated villain known as The Leader is looking to steal the tech for himself. Now, Spider-Man and the Hulk must team up to stop him and his giant robotic exoskeleton.
Salicrup knew exactly how tight the story had to be to fit on a roll of toilet paper. He managed to streamline a story that would have fit comfortably in a full-length Marvel Team-Up. There isn’t a whole lot of embellishment around the edges of the story, but Salicrup manages a surprising level of detail and characterization between Banner, Parker, Spidey, and Hulk in something that fits quite comfortably on 20 pages in the digital. The dialogue isn’t great, but it comes across with great clarity in a simple, vertically-oriented action sequence that’s much more interesting than it has any right to be.
Marvel Infinity Comics does a strikingly good job of presenting what appears to be a kind of high-resolution scanning of the old toilet paper. It might have been nice to see something that had been made all the more clear from the original artwork, but it would have suffered in presentation. It really just looks like they took a staggeringly high-resolution scan of 44-year-old toilet paper...and it looks good. Higgins seemed to know that he needed to make the artwork sharp and simple with clean line work in order to appear at all legible in blue ink on toilet paper. Higgins’s layout works well in the vertical presentation format. It’s a quick read and kind of weird to be reminded that a the traditional orientation of text on a smartphone has the same overall aspect ratio as a roll of toilet paper, but it reads REALLY WELL in handheld format.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were a weird time for tiny mainstream comics. It was an era where big-name characters like Superman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman appeared in one-page ads for Hostess snack cakes. It was a time when custom DC comics were made as free inserts for sugary breakfast cereals. There were even mini Marvel and DC comics that were made specifically to be packaged with bubble gum. The stories for those products were always so weird and disjointed without much in the way of plot. Odd to think that Jim Salicrup came up with something far more clever, concise, and sharply rendered than any of these...for a roll of toilet paper in 1979.
