I Love Ya But You’re Strange is a feature that spotlights strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Today, we look at the surprisingly long history of Marvel M&M comic books, including an M&M version of...Reservoir Dogs?!

As I noted in an old I Saw It Advertised One Day, as soon as M&M’s were first introduced on television commercials, anthropomorphized versions of the candies have been starring in animated form. However, they tended to just be sort of generic mascot personalities, even as recently as 1994. Heck, even when M&M’s launched a series of CGI animated commercials in late 1994, where celebrities explain what their favorite M&M color is to the standard generic Red and Yellow characters, the commercials remained fairly generic, outside of the clever interaction between humans and the animated candies. However, in 1996, they then cast Jon Lovitz and John Goodman as the new voices of Red and Yellow, respectively (J.K. Simmons would replace Goodman pretty quickly), and Red’s new acerbic personality really caught on, and suddenly the celebrity interactions were a lot more fun...

(including the iconic 2000 commercial where Patrick Warburton admonishes them for eating M&Ms when they ARE M&M's). Over time, they have slowly introduced new characters, to the point where they have a pretty well-defined cast of M&M characters beyond just Red and Blue. It's pretty fascinating, honestly, how much they've made them part of the general pop culture zeitgeist.

In any event, now that the characters were so well established, it only made sense that they would be used in OTHER marketing areas, and this has led to a surprisingly long-running series of Marvel tie-in comic books featuring the M&M's characters!

What was the first Marvel M&M's comic book?

The first Marvel M&M tie-in comic book came in 2005, in an utterly delightful one-shot by Todd Dezago, Ron Lim, and Pat Davidson. It starred the M&M Minis, and since they had no distinctive personalities, Dezago was able to cut loose and do whatever he wanted. He had the M&M Minis trash an M&M lab, and resulted in the creation of a twisted creature known as Master M, who used the tubes that the Minis came in as some sort of weird power source...

He then sends the Minis through wormholes, and then Dezago, Lim, and Christopher depict various offbeat adventures, like the Red Minis fighting against a killer clown, or the Pink Minis fighting off a crazed ballerina...

The comic book didn't have a true ending, as it teased a continuation of the story online.

How did the M&Ms tie in with Iron Man 3?

In 2013, as a tie-in to Iron Man 3, Marvel did a comic book by Paul Liss, Tom Grummett, and Cory Hamscher, that saw Tony Stark debuting a new series of pod-like armors to help out law enforcement. At the celebrity gala for the product launch, the M&M's are, naturally, attending,

The M.O.D.O.K. attacks, and Iron Man uses the pods to suit up the M&M's to help him fight M.O.D.O.K., while Ms. Brown stays behind to help Pepper Potts coordinate the battle...

Here is an example of the product displays that were used to tie in with Iron Man 3...

Trippy stuff.

How did Marvel do an M&M version of Reservoir Dogs?

Really, the 2019 comic book, Hazelnut Hysteria, by Sean Ryan, Dario Brizula, and Laura Villari, was more of a parody of heist movies in general, but obviously, it most famously parodied the classic 1992 Quentin Tarantino film, Reservoir Dogs...

With the opening of the comic book, as the M&M's go to steal the last package of Hazelnut Spread M&M's in the local store (and just like how the characters in Reservoir Dogs were named after colors, so, too, are the M&M's)...

Apparently, the slow-motion walking scene has become a popular photo for people to do in the lead-up to their weddings, because you typically have a bunch of guys wearing suits together. I actually did one for my brother's wedding back in 2010. It's silly, but cute.

Anyhow, the comic then switches to a parody of Point Break, with the characters wearing Avengers masks (a la the robbers in Point Break wearing U.S. Presidents masks - this comic predated Spider-Man: No Way Home, where some robbers actually did wear Avengers masks)...

Next, in a parody of Mission: Impossible, Yellow makes like Ethan Hunt in the iconic vault scene of that movie, as he is lowered to the ground...

Then the M&M's start betraying each other, in an homage to basically every crime movie ever made, with Ms. Brown and Blue winning the day in the end...

There have been a few other M&M's comics by Marvel in recent years, as well, including a couple of comics written by former longtime Marvel editor, Ralph Macchio, who retired as a Marvel staffer a few years back, but apparently keeps busy in retirement doing these licensed comic book gigs.

There was a tie-in to Guardians of the Galaxy, as well, in 2014.

And of course, when M&M's celebrated its 75th anniversary a while back, it did a number of Marvel homage pieces to famous Marvel covers to help celebrate M&M's anniversary.

It's really kind of surprising just how long-running these homages are. The Macchio issues were just last year, and the first ones were in 2005, so we're talking TWENTY YEARS of these bizarre little comics.

Thanks to longtime reader Amy R. for the suggestion! If anyone has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You're Strange, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!