Background

Maxwell Markham was a professional wrestler who competed under the nom de guerre of the Grizzly. His excessive violence in the ring brought him to the attention of Daily Bugle Publisher J. Jonah Jameson whose crusade in the name of public decency got Markham expelled from his sport.

Ten years later, Markham meets up with the Jackal who provides the wrestler with a grizzly bear costume and an exo-skeleton harness that amplifies his strength and acts as a great girdle. Markham then sets out to get his revenge by attacking J. Jonah Jameson. Fortunately, Spider-Man steps in and saves the publisher, then later deduces that the Grizzly's great strength is not natural. The webspinner trashes the exo-skeleton and easily defeats the Grizzly.

Max Markham puts in his prison time and tries to go straight but he is constantly taunted by people who can't believe he ever really beat Spider-Man. Looking for a rematch, Max takes his trashed exo-skeleton to the Tinkerer. The criminal handyman repairs Max's harness and patches up his Grizzly suit. Markham eventually faces off against Spidey on the roof of a speeding Amtrak train. The wall-crawler realizes that Max will never regain his self-esteem, and therefore will never quit fighting, until he wins. So Spidey allows the Grizzly to get him in a bear hug, feigns a broken back, and allows Max to bask in the glow of his victory. The ex-wrestler returns to his Lower West Side hangout, secure in the knowledge that he was good at what he did, no matter what anyone else may think.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do any good to go around and tell people you killed Spider-Man by breaking his back when the wall-crawler is still very much alive. What can you say to that? (The Grizzly says, "I did kill 'im, but... uh... he got better.") Feeling cheated by the web-slinger, the Grizzly combines the Gibbon, the Spot, and the new Kangaroo into a team he calls the Spider-Man Revenge Squad but that everybody else comes to know as The Legion of Losers. Planning only to get back at Spidey, Max and the Gibbon are shocked when the Spot and Kangaroo rob a bank. The team manages to capture the wall-crawler but Grizzly and Gibbon realize that Spidey is really an all right guy so they release him and help to capture their teammates. That's when they get the idea to form a new crime-fighting dynamic duo... "The Gargantuan Grizzly and his Partner, Gibbon, the Boy Monkey". Maybe they'll even get action figures of themselves out of the deal!

The two crime-fighters take to the night in their BearMobile, which they trash. They then stumble on a bank robbery being committed by the White Rabbit and her gang. Predictably, they get captured and it takes Spidey, disguised as the Bombastic Bag-Man, to help the duo out. The Daily Globe gives all the credit to the Grizzly and Gibbon for stopping the White Rabbit gang. Toy Biz offers the duo a deal to make action figures.

Grizzly later returned to a life of crime by working for Hammerhead. He later met The Colbert Report's host, Stephen Colbert, after robbing a bank. (Marvel used Colbert, a Comedy Central TV show host, as an in joke whenever possible during the 2008 USA Presidential election.) Colbert knew his mortal enemy when he saw him. (He often accused bears of being America's #1 enemy.) As Spider-Man kept the Grizzly busy, Colbert accused the criminal of trying to assassinate him. Grizzly had no idea what he was talking about. The fight continued, until Colbert pushed a masonry statue of a bald eagle off of a building and onto the Grizzly.

Thanks To:

The assistance of the Marvel Chronology Project is gratefully acknowledged.

Some of the above information is extracted from the various versions of the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe and the more recent Marvel Encyclopaedias.