Olliffe leaves the book midway through a storyline involving Seth, the Serpent God of Death, handing the art duties to Ron Frenz (who had penciled a few fill-in issues previously) and Sal Buscema, who remain the art team for the remaining 40 or so issues.
I said last week DeFalco and Olliffe mostly avoided bringing back Peter Parker's rogue's gallery to challenge Mayday. That is not really the case for the DeFalco/Frenz run, where the Venom symbiote plays a major role, as well as the Black Tarantula's emergence as a major player in the organized crime world. DeFalco dusts off Carolyn Trainer, the second Dr. Octopus, and finally, near the end of the book, the original Hobgoblin, Roderick Kingsley.
Some of these work better than others. DeFalco has no issue letting the Hobgoblin smack around characters he's established as big deals or competent heroes previously, helping emphasize that this guy is dangerous. Likewise, the symbiote ends up connected to Normie Osborn, which creates a situation where Mayday trusts her friend, but worries the symbiote could be affecting him, and it becomes another secret between her and her parents. Mostly Peter, since he's far less trusting of Normie than Mayday is to begin with.
Along those lines, they try to set Black Tarantula up as a morally ambiguous character Mayday can't decide whether to fully trust or not. He offers her help, even brings in Elektra to train Mayday when she's getting her butt kicked by Doc Ock the Sequel, but he's still a guy consolidating his hold on crime in New York City, and not to dismantle it. So it's a little different than Peter's past friendships or alliances with people straddling the line between good and bad.
(There's also a bit where he seems to be courting Mayday, which I presume is because he doesn't know she's a high-schooler, but is really damn creepy. Not sure if that was intentional.)
Frenz tried to update his style, but it's not an improvement. Mayday ends up looking way too skinny, or with her face oddly shaped or angled. The longer he and Buscema are on the book, the more the art shifts to a place between Frenz's earlier work and Buscema's. By the time we get to Amazing Spider-Girl, it's more Buscema. Which means it's solid, but nothing revolutionary or experimental. It keeps things clean and easy to follow, emotions are typically very easy to read, the action is big, full of haymakers and people getting punched through walls. It's an old-school book in the writing, still lots of subplots and page space for the supporting cast, and the art reflects that.
I'm pretty sure I was buying the book monthly before Frenz and Buscema joined the creative team, probably starting in Olliffe's last year as penciler. I stayed with it until it was finally, truly canceled at issue 100 (it survived at least one more near-cancellation during this tenure, and maybe two.) Of course, Marvel started Amazing Spider-Girl 3 months later, so it wasn't a cancellation so much as a rebranding.
I don't know if Spider-Girl was ever my favorite book, but there was a reliable, "competence" feels too much like damning with faint praise, level of care maybe, that I appreciated. You know what you're going to get with DeFalco, Frenz, and Buscema. It's not flashy, but they do their best to make sure you get your money's worth of plot, character arcs and action every month.
No comments:
Post a Comment