"Wait until I've told you this marvelous Tale of mine...."

I don't know why, but I've seemed to gravitate to Spider-Man. I like the costume, the women he's had in his life, and of course his powers. I also liked the fact that Spider-man, despite his "loner" image, was always teaming up with some hero or heroine in the MU. In fact he even had his own comic called Marvel Team-Up to capitalize on that fact.
I also seem to really like Reprinted comics. I guess it's because you feel like you're somehow cheating the publisher by buying what could be and sometimes is a an expensive issue for cheap. In any case, back in my youth I collected Marvel Tales feat. Spider-Man. I guess it was the combination of an old story I'd never read before and the new artwork that made up the cover. Even though I sometimes wondered how come the artwork on the cover usually never matched the artwork on the inside, it wasn't enough of a deterrent to keep me from buying the comic anyway. I guess in my young mind, the new cover was a bit of a bonus. Kind of the same principal applied to Classic X-Men/X-Men Classic also. And let me tell you, Marvel Tales used to have some kick-ass covers! Remember the covers that Todd McFarlene used to draw for MT? I do. Here's a sample of a few he did:

Some of favorites and the issues I actually had are the following:

And that's just a few from the covers section of my Google search. There were many more, but you get the idea. I just loved the marvel team-up issues, and honestly, the stories weren't all that bad considering the time period.



I think after blogging about the Marvel Tales issues, the next time I go to my not-so LCS, I'm gonna' grab a few of these just to reminisce a little.