Issue(s): Marvel Team-Up #23
Cover Date: Jul 74
Title: "The night of the frozen inferno"
Credits:
Len Wein - Writer
Gil Kane - Penciler
Mike Esposito - Inker

Review/plot:
A (mostly) non-Spidey issue of Marvel Team-Up. In Giant-Size Spider-Man #1, he is briefly attacked by a not-fully-revealed Equinox, and then borrows a vehicle from the Fantastic Four to head off for his encounter with Dracula.

This issue has the Human Torch following up on Spidey's report on Equinox.

Equinox generates ice, so the Torch initially assumes that Iceman is the culprit, and manages to locate him quite easily. For those who suspect that the regular super-heroes have an inherent bigotry towards mutants, this is a good example.

After fighting for a while, the rest of the X-Men (in their original uniforms again, and without Havok or Polaris)(or Beast) show up to break up the fight.

They need Iceman for a secret mission "more important than you could imagine", but Iceman wants to stick around and clear his name first.

So he and the Torch team-up and eventually find Equinox, the Thermodynamic Man...

...who, conveniently enough, turns out to have the powers of both Iceman and the Torch.

He can either use one set of powers or the other, and when he's switching between them, he's vulnerable to an attack from both of them.

Equinox will be more interesting in his return appearance, and it's somewhat ironic here that he keeps referring to Bobby and Johnny as "children" or "young meddlers", since he'll turn out to only be 17 himself.

Pretty goofy, but interesting because of the interaction with Giant-Size Spider-Man. And i wonder what the X-Men's secret mission was! (We'll actually hear about the mission again in Defenders #15-16 but we don't learn anything more about it. It's a secret!)

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 2 - first Equinox

Chronological Placement Considerations: Takes place concurrently with Giant-Size Spider-Man #1 and between FF #149-150 for the Torch.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Essential Marvel Team-Up vol. 1

This was published the same month as the conclusion to the Secret Empire saga, so it was a busy publication month for the X-Men. Fnord has done a good job of inserting quite a bit of time, or at least other comics, between the two, which is more satisfying than the X-Men rushing off on their secret mission right after facing President Nixon.

Given that the secret mission is referenced in two separate comics, I wonder if there was an intention to depict it somewhere. Investigating Krakoa seems like an important enough mission, but we're a year away from that.

Given that Wein writes this ish, plus Defenders 16, plus GSXM 1, though, you have to wonder...

Actually though...sure, they have to change costumes and pick up Lorna and Havok, but I don't think any of the X-Men appear between the end of this issue and GSXM 1, do they? Could they have been captives on Krakoa that whole time, which in Marvel terms wouldn't be very long at all? I suspect that may have been the intention.

Cutting against my idea, though, is the flashback to the old team learning about Krakoa that we get in GSXM 1, which says the whole team, including Alex, Lorna, and Bobby, rushed to Prof X's summons. Still, I'd like to think Len was setting things up here.

Given Johnny Storm's later comments to Quicksilver and in FF Vs. X-Men, maybe it's just him that has prejudice toward mutants(possible spurred by Crystal dumping him for Quicksilver)?

On the one hand, this could be read as "anti-mutant" prejudice. On the other hand, I have always seen, in the FF and the Avengers, a general distrust and possibly even dislike of any other costumed heroes. They seem to view the rest of the MU as amateurs who don't know what they're doing and aren't to be trusted.

Did Cyke lift up his visor to fire his optic blasts?

I always liked Equinox. When I was younger, I loved it when his fire and ice parts switched, and with him shooting fire when his hands were ice and shooting ice when his hands were fire. He recently showed up in ANAD AVENGERS #5-6, but the artist didn't switch the fire and ice parts panel to panel as originally shown; however, it was still great to see the character again.

It's obvious to me, though not to the heroes, that Equinox needed the Atomic Clock in his plans to fix his condition, or at least help regulate it.