Should this title be in the letter "P"? Maybe, but Summer (and Fall) of Spiders can't waste time worrying about alphabetizing!
(Slightly) more seriously, when I started the word document I'm working from, I only had issues from after the book dropped the "Peter Parker" portion of the title, so that's how it got listed. As Kelvin noted when we looked at the first volume of Web of Spider-Man, the idea behind this title seemed to be they were going to focus more on the Peter Parker side of Spider-Man. Except it wasn't like Amazing Spider-Man was all costumed antics, all the time. The job, the scrambling for rent, the schoolwork, the elderly aunt, the girl troubles, that's always part of Spider-Man, albeit the ratios of the components vary with era and creative teams.
So, in practice, Spectacular Spider-Man is just another book about Spider-Man. And at least when I was a kid, it was the secondary book. Amazing got the hotshot artists, the MacFarlanes and Larsens. Spectacular got over 100 issues of Sal Buscema, albeit the last 20 or so doing breakdowns with someone else on finishes. Buscema is steady, reliable, can make sure all the information you need is on the page, but he's not flashy. Plus, most of the issues I read as a kid were part of J.M. DeMatteis' stint as writer, when he would spend entire issues on Peter in some hallucinatory state, confronted by the trauma of losing his parents as a child. Given the choice, I'd rather have read about him fighting a Spider-Slayer.
So, unlike with Amazing Spider-Man, where I have decent chunks of several different creative teams' runs, or even Web where I mostly have Gerry Conway's stuff, my Spectacular Spider-Man collection is a hodgepodge of different writers and artists. Bill Mantlo/Al Milgrom for 4 issues, all centered around this big showdown with Doc Ock, and Peter wanting to get really serious with the Black Cat. 6 by Peter David, 4 of those his and Rich Buckler's "The Death of Jean DeWolff." 3 by Conway/Buscema (Acts of Vengeance tie-ins), 2 by DeMatteis/Zeck ("Kraven's Last Hunt"), 2 more by DeMatteis/Buscema. 2 by Ann Nocenti and James Fry (Typhoid Mary's involved), and then 4 by a combo of DeMatteis, Glenn Greenburg and Luke Ross. Three of those are tie-ins to Spidey's "Identity Crisis" story, and the other was a joke issue about the "League of Losers."
It's mostly scattered issues tying into some larger event or story I liked, or else a brief, single story that had some specific hook for me. Nothing longer than 4 consecutive issues. DeMatteis and Buscema did a pretty good job with Harry Osborn's slow
downward spiral over about 2.5 years, but it's not one I wanted to
keep a lot of around. It's in the background for long stretches, and the foreground wasn't grabbing my attention much. Plus, even when it is the main story, it's pretty depressing until the last minute.Watching Spider-Man's best friend slowly implode under the weight of all his father's sins is not exactly an uplifting saga.
2 comments:
I think I first noticed Sal Buscema's art around the mid-90s, in Complete Spider-Man, which reprinted the then four ongoing Spidey comics. The previous UK Spider-Man comic, Spider-Man and Zoids mostly reprinted Amazing (often out of order), with a scattering of the others; although it did reprint a couple of PPSSM issues, a quick check suggests they were the Rich Buckler Sin Eater stories.
Anyway. I absolutely hated Sal Buscema's art back then. It was distinctive, but it was angular and scratchy and everyone looked like they were ancient and wrinkled and constantly shouting.
I've since grown to appreciate what he was doing, so sorry, Sal. I was 10 and didn't know any better.
That was pretty much how I felt about Buscema back then, too. His MJ did look substantially older than say, Bagley or Larsen's version and the work felt kind of stiff. Although I did like how hard he made it look like people were getting hit. He made the fights look like real knock down, drag out affairs.
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