At the Ballet

The NBC cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends teamed-up the wall-crawler with Iceman and Firestar (sometimes hyphenated as Fire-Star). The crimefighting trio also appeared in a handful of comic books based on the animated series. Although Iceman (Bobby Drake) had blond hair on the cartoon, comic books based on the show consistently colored his hair brown, the same color his hair typically appeared in Marvel Comics.

One of those comic books starring the Spider-Friends was an advertising supplement to the Dallas Times Herald. In that issue, the heroes had tickets to see the Nutcracker featuring the Dallas Ballet. The performance was almost ruined by the villain Daddy Longlegs (Ramsey Kole), an aspiring ballet dancer once ridiculed for being too short. Out of desperation, he broke into into the laboratory of Giant-Man (Bill Foster) and drank a secret formula to increase his height. The serum tragically enlarged him to 15 feet tall, with disproportionately long limbs. After stopping the towering criminal, the three heroes enjoyed the Christmas-themed ballet.

Spider-Man, Fire-Star and Iceman at The Dallas Ballet Nutcracker. 1983. Jim Salicrup (writer), Jim Mooney (pencils), John Tartag (inks), L.P. Gregory (letters), Stan Goldberg (colors), John Romita (art director), Sol Brodsky (production supervisor). Daddy Longlegs was a relatively new villain at the time, having first appeared in Spider-Woman #47 (Dec. 1982).