I don't know what to focus on there. That Reed expects us to believe he says,
'In for a penny, in for a pounding,' or that Cyclops showed up in business casual. To be fair, it's not his worst uniform by a long shot. That blue one from his early X-Factor days, with the yellow X that went from the shoulders all the way down his body? Hideous.
It's Peter Parker's birthday, so of course New York is under attack by the Mindless Ones. A bunch of heroes tried to devise a science solution, but only succeeded in allowing Dormammu to reach their universe. Whoops. Dr. Strange shows up, outright tells them they got played, and declares he must face Dormammu alone. If he doesn't want the science heroes to mess things up, maybe he should try getting there on time. You'd think he'd be more alert to incursions by Mindless Ones.
Spidey is mostly trying to civilians clear of danger, but can't leave Doc to face it alone, especially when Dormammu's guys try to run interference. Unfortunately, this leads to the webslinger landing smack in the middle of whatever spell Strange was building up, and the two of them end up outside space and time. Double whoops.
Strange is a little snippy here, written with a kind or exasperated arrogance that makes me think JMS was watching a lot of
House at the time. Strange is more polite than Hugh Laurie, but only slightly. He gets them back inside the universe, but the time side of things is still fluid, as they're moving between moments before Dormammu arrived, and after he's killed all resistance. Strange says they have to stay together, but Peter hears Mary Jane calling for help and rushes off.
He's unable to keep her from getting her neck snapped by a Mindless One - what is it with Parker's loves and spinal trauma? Felicia better watch out - and when he lunges forward, finds himself in a different time. Or times. He's both in the past, watching his high school self about to get bitten by the spider, and sometime in the future, watching an older version of himself await some special law enforcement team that's going to take him down for killing someone.
The next issue is the one where Peter has to fight his way back to the present through his entire life as Spider-Man, which leads to the double-page splash of him fighting a whole mess of his enemies over the years. The last few pages of that issue are drawn by John Romita Sr. In a couple of issues, he meets a guy who does tailoring for the costumed set who shows him a possible redesign that just so happens to be what his future self was wearing. John Romita Jr. has about 10 more issues to go before he moves to, actually, I'm not sure what he moved on to.
World War Hulk eventually, but that's three years away. There was something else in there I'm sure. Mike Deodato is going to take over as artist from JRJR, and his first story will be
Sins Past. Yikes. Nowhere to go but up from there, I guess.
[1st longbox, 108th comic.
Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #58/499, by J. Michael Straczynski (writer), John Romita Jr. (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Dan Kemp (colorist), Randy Gentile (letterer)]
4 comments:
JRJR moved on to a Sentry miniseries at some point, but I don't remember when that was exactly, and it's best left forgotten because, well, the Sentry.
He also did a year on Wolverine with Mark Millar around this time. That wasn't too bad, as I recall. Black Panther too?
Now that you mention them, I remember all those. Yeah, I think he did the first arc of Hudlin's Black Panther, where Wakanda gets invaded by some group of mercenaries that included some weird, fundamentalist Christian lunatic pretending to be the Black Knight. I think that's also when we find out Wakanda has the cure for cancer, but won't share it with anyone because, reasons.
And Millar's Wolverine run. He wrote the book after Rucka left, but before Daniel Way. Jeez I bought that whole mess. Must have blocked it out.
I think I bought that Wolverine run because I liked JRJR at the time. Not sure. A friend of mine that doesn't read superhero comics ended up with my entire collection at one point -- again, I can't remember why -- and he got quite attached to that story arc.
He also enjoyed Preacher and Grant Morrison's The Filth, but what really spoke to him was eleven or twelve issues of undead Wolverine fighting the Marvel Universe on behalf of the Hand. (shrugs)
What's that line from the Lorax? "You never can tell what some people will buy?" I guess for a basic concept, "Wolverine fights the Marvel Universe" sounds potentially exciting.
I know at some point Wolverine tries to attack the Hand with a Sentinel, and it sort of works. And that the Hand used Wolverine to draw out Elektra because they really wanted her back. I'd think Wolverine would be more useful than a lady who got killed by her own weapon once, but sure, whatever.
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