Issue(s): Marvel Team-Up #29
Cover Date: Jan 75
Title: "Beware the coming of... Infinitus! or How can you stop the Reincarnated Man?"
Credits:
Gerry Conway - Writer
Jim Mooney - Penciler
Vincent Colletta - Inker

Review/plot:
I like the redundancy of this tease of the villain of this issue, from the cover:

I think all villains should be introduced that way. "This is Skeletor, the Skeleton Man. He's a Skeleton Man". The copy for Infinitus is actually setting up a punchline for the comic cover but i still think it's great all on its own.

This issue has the Human Torch as the headliner instead of Spider-Man due to the fact that Spider-Man was teaming-up in Giant Size Spider-Man and Marvel at the time had this crazy idea about brand dilution.

Tony Stark has requested help from the Fantastic Four, and is pretty peeved when only the Human Torch shows up at his Detroit factory.

We never do find out why only the Torch showed up. I imagine Reed Richards saying, "Johnny, go find out what Stark wants, and if it turns out he wants MY team to help him with some corporate sabotage nonsense again, tell that boozing engineer to take a flying leap."

Corporate sabotage does initially seem to be the problem, with our aforementioned Infinitus The Reincarnated Man Who Never Dies running around killing people.

Actually it turns out the billing on the cover was overdoing it a bit. It's not that he never dies. He just claims to be a reincarnation of an Egyptian king.

Infinitus makes another attempt on Stark and his assistant, Rodgers, while Stark is briefing the Human Torch. Johnny saves them, and apparently not at the cost of severe burns, thanks to a very select amount of flaming on.

The Torch then tries to capture Infinitus but gets blasted, and Iron Man has to pick him up.

I love that IM is getting in on the hyping of this Infinitus guy, too. He's not just Infinitus. He's "the man who calls himself Infinitus"!

This comic just keeps getting better, though, because next Johnny Storm goes to a library to research the things Infinitus was saying.

"Uhhhhh, normally i just ask about something and Reed summarizes the information i need to know or i get a computer printout or something. Do i really have to read all those books?"

This panel is super great:

It's the grin.

Anyway, Johnny discovers some obscure fact (Amenemhet was really part of the 12th dynasty, not the 11th), and he draws all sorts of conclusions from that, like therefore Infinitus is a fake but not a crazy person because it's too specific a mistake for a crazy person to make and therefore the killer must really be going after Rodgers and not Stark and all the other people he killed were just red herrings, and therefore it must be Rodgers' brother that hasn't been mentioned at all in this story until now! And somehow it all turns out to be true.

The only possible explanation is that this is all some elaborate hoax by Stark. Maybe Johnny was getting in Reed's hair so he asked Stark to arrange a little murder mystery for him, and told him to just go along with whatever solution Johnny came up with. There are clues to support that: Tony's weird thought above about applied psychology and this scene where Tony is secretly smiling about all the murders that are going on.

Comics often have to promise that the plot of the issue is not a hoax; this is one time that i wish it was.

Quality Rating: D

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: The story is context free for both characters. Tony Stark was working out of Detroit about a year ago, but his comics for 1975 are mostly wrapped up in the War of the Supervillains (and aren't even in any sensible kind of order), so this should really fit in anywhere.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A