366 Days with J. Jonah Jameson, Day 104: Cereal Killer, qu'est-ce que c'est

Panels from Cap'n Crunch advertisement "Where's the Cap'n Mystery?" in Cloak and Dagger (1985 series) #5 (January 1986), pencils by Ron Frenz

My Crunch-Sense is Tingling

One of the most prized comics in my collection is Uncanny X-Men #201 (January 1985). No, not for the ground-breaking battle that pitched Cyclops against Storm for the leadership of the X-Men (Spoiler alert: Storm won), nor for the first appearance of everyone's favorite 1990s X-Man and the guy who brings you crystal-clear channel reception, Cable, but rather for a two-page advertising supplement that gives us the rarest installment of Marvel Team-Up ever printed: a crossover between Spider-Man and Cap'n Crunch. Now, I'm a big big fan of sugar-frosted cereals, and I've tried 'em all out of the Crunch family: regular crunch, Crunchberries, Peanut Butter Crunch, Christmas Crunch, Vanilly Crunch, Punch Crunch. If you're a fan of the Crunch mythos, you may even remember the ultra-rare Admiral Crunch, where the good Cap'n was promoted to a desk job but regained command of the Guppy and once again gathered his faithful old crew in order to fight off a massive destructive alien machine which turned out to be a Voyager probe and...oh wait, I've gotten my cereal mixed up with my Star Trek movies.

Published to tie into a promotional contest to deduce where the Cap'n had disappeared to (Spoiler alert: he was in the Milky Way), here's the two-page Spider-Man saga I like to call The Search for Crunch:




Geez, Spidey didn't search this hard for the killer of Gwen Stacy.

Still, the promotion was so successful that Quaker Oats revisited it in 1999 by creating the teeth-rottingly yummy Mystery Crunch cereal, sending the Cap'n off into limbo for several months as everyone tried to discover where he was. Mulder and Scully actually even spent fourteen episodes searching for him on the sixth season of The X-Files. No Spider-Man tie-in for that period, I'm sorry to say, as Spidey was busy still trying to live down the Clone Saga to play breakfast detective.

Still, we are indebted to the "Where's the Cap'n" promotion for giving us perhaps the ultimate Spidey/J. Jonah Jameson face-off: