Some Comics Make for Better First Experiences than Others

I've spoken before about how my earliest Spider-Man comics were a two-part Secret Wars II tie-in in Amazing and Spectacular where the Puma tries to enlist his help in killing the Beyonder. Which is kind of a strange introduction. Cat-man trying to get Spidey to help him kill a jheri curl wearing sentient universe. Peter and MJ, in "just friends" mode, repainting his apartment because some punks torched it for Parker calling the cops on them.

But it's still fairly recognizable as a standard Spider-Man story. Animal-themed opponent (since Spidey ends up between Puma and the Beyonder). Spidey being completely outclassed on both sides, but still trying to get in the middle of it and keep anyone from dying. Undercut somewhat by the point where the Beyonder tells him to let the Puma kill him and Spidey calls them both nuts and just leaves.

The funnier thing, though, is the next Spider-Man comic I remember getting, Web of Spider-Man #32. Part 4 of Kraven's Last Hunt. For a long time, over a decade at least, the only part of that story I'd actually read. That's a weird experience for a kid.

Page 1 opens with Peter floating naked in an endless white void. Page 3 has Ned Leeds (recently dead) pulling a Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not that I'd seen that movie yet (I might have seen Last Crusade in the theaters by this point, not sure).

By page 6, Peter is crawling naked from the corpse of a spider (love the bit of spider entrails hanging out there, Mike Zeck killed it on this comic) towards a bunch of shadowy monsters with sharp nails and teeth. I don't know about other elementary school kids, but I had no idea what was going on there. I was probably trying to interpret this thing literally, and that wasn't helping it make any more sense. "Metaphor" and "symbolism" were definitely not in my vocabulary yet. 

Page 9 he's climbing from his own grave (which is infested with little black spiders). Then he finds out he's been "dead" for two weeks, tears up a bunch of stuffed tigers and shit. I had no idea that the two black guys he briefly yells at before leaving worked for Kraven. Minus that context, I thought he was attacking two innocent funeral home directors because he was confused. I mean, he just dug himself out a grave, he probably doesn't know where he even is.

It's not until after that we might have hit something that made sense, when he goes home to Mary Jane. Then he's awake and determined to go find Kraven, even though he really doesn't want to. But then you get to the last page, Kraven's standing there wearing a copy of Spidey's costume (minus the mask). I have to think this was my intro to Kraven, so I don't think I had any clue what was going on there. Although I know I liked the three panels at the top of the page, where Kraven's smile fades as Spider-Man gradually lowers himself into the background.

I can't say it was an effective cliffhanger, since it was years before I got around to finding a tpb of the entire story to learn what happened next. I think it was maybe just such a strange read at that point in my life, I didn't know what to make of it. He doesn't really fight anyone, there's no banter or wisecracking. The last three pages are almost entirely silent. Until the last page, Kraven only shows up in these occasional panels where he's slowly pulling off the mask and repeating that "he's coming." There's one page of Vermin (not that I had any idea that's who it was) running into an electric fence and retreating into the dark. 

It's definitely a comic that assumes you did not decide to start reading with part 4 of 6. In my defense, this was included in one of those packs of comics you could buy from the Penney's Christmas catalogue, so it's not like I grabbed it off the old spinner rack.

Sunday Splash Page #104

"Captain America is Going to Save the Country's Crumbling Infrastructure", in Captain America Annual #8, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Zeck (penciler), John Beatty and Josef Rubinstein (inkers), Glynis Oliver (colorist), and Jim Novak (letterer)

I own one Captain America Annual, and this is it. The one with the cover that's been homaged 10,000 times. The reluctant team-up with Wolverine. Cap telling Logan the Avengers would never have him, little knowing what was going to happen once Brian Michael Bendis got to write the Avengers. 

(To be fair, it was Stark that pushed for Logan being added, not Steve Rogers, so Cap was true to his stance. Stark just overruled him, and exercised his usual poor judgment. And I can't remember anything significant Logan actually did while part of the Avengers. Get shot in the face by the Hood?)

I was gonna describe this as having the typical Marvel misunderstanding fight, but I'm not even sure Cap vs. Wolverine qualifies. I guess it does, in that Cap suspects Wolverine might be here for nefarious purposes under the orders of Magneto, who the X-Men had recently accepted into their ranks. Although before the issue is over, I think Cap realizes how silly the idea of Logan readily following orders is. But Cap doesn't leap in , hurling his shield around. He just starts speechifying at Logan until the Canadian loses patience and tries to carve him into pieces. There's no misunderstanding on Wolverine's part. He's got shit to do, this old man won't quit talking at him, so he decides to kill him. 

But once that's out of the way, this is a team-up, against a prototype robot that was supposed to be America's defense against their own army of super-soldiers, if necessary. With only one super-soldier, and him missing, the project got mothballed. That's not a bad hook for a threat. A mutant calling himself Overrider, with the power to control machines, finds TESS and brings her online to help carry out his plan: prevent nuclear holocaust by getting rid of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal, for the sake of his son. Not atypical for an '80s comic.

Both of the heroes are drawn in different ways, and each of them go about gathering useful information different ways. And it isn't simply Cap asking questions politely and Logan busting heads. Cap has his computer hotline thing people can contact him through, and Logan takes advantage of Cerebro's files to get a bead on who Overrider might be and his motives.

The two don't get along at all, but for all Logan's grousing about, well, everything Cap says or does to him, he mostly follows the shield-slinger's suggestions, if they're phrased nicely. Like me, Wolverine is willing to help, he just wants to be able to bitch about it while he does. I think TESS would be repaired and sent at the Avengers later as part of some group of machine foes, but my next encounter was when Doom repaired it to throw at Spider-Man during Acts of Vengeance.

Next week, well, I wanted to highlight a one-shot about Batroc Kieron Gillen and Renato Arlem did a few years ago, but there was no splash page. So we'll turn our attention to a different Captain.

31 Days of Scans - Favorite Canonical Romance

I think I knew the answer to this right from the start, but I had long enough for other possibilities to start elbowing in. I considered Ryoko and Tenchi, but I never saw them actually become a couple. Tommy Monaghan and Deborah Tiegel - that's "Tiegel" to you - gained a lot of traction. With those two I always think of the scene as they try to hold off the Mawzir's forces from inside the church. Tommy with a big shit-eating grin, asking, "C'mon, am I really such a bad guy?" and Tiegel responding "YES!" as some poor sap is getting launched through the background by an explosion. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a decent shot of it, so here's an extremely awkward moment instead.

Even so, the choice is Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker.

Jeez MJ, it's supposed to be a happy occasion.

When I first started reading comics, MJ and Peter weren't a couple. They were friends, probably the closest friends either had, but they weren't dating. MJ knew Peter was Spider-Man - had known for years - and now Peter knew that. MJ had understandable reservations, but she was still his friend. She helped him repaint his apartment after some punks torched it, and had even offered to let him stay with her. By the next time I got some comics, they were married, which seemed perfectly normal to me. They were friends, then they fell in love and got hitched. Made sense to me.

Of course, the first comics I had with them married were from Kraven's Last Hunt, which was a traumatic event for both of them. Peter for obvious reasons, being forcibly confronted with how he was likely to end up if he kept being Spider-Man. The next time he lost, he might not get off only being buried comatose for two weeks. As for MJ, she's left with uncertainty. Peter swung off into the night, and didn't return. She doesn't know what happened, and she doesn't have anyone she can talk to about it. She has to carry that fear and worry by herself. Peter returns, but almost immediately heads back out to find Kraven. This isn't smart, he knows, she knows it, but he still has to do it. Mary Jane doesn't want him to, she'd thought she lost him once, but she tries to support him. I always like those last few panels, Peter holding her hand to his face, it said a lot.

I suppose I like them because they seem to compliment each other. There's a certain similarity between the carefree, party girl attitude MJ often affected, and the wisecracking Peter does when he's Spider-Man. And in both cases, it had the effect of making others think they were shallow. When Gwen died, Peter outright accused MJ of caring about no one but herself, and a lot of the other heroes tended to look askance at Spider-Man. But just as Peter takes being Spider-Man very seriously, MJ is a thoughtful, empathetic person. She's known Peter was Spider-Man for years, and she guarded that secret carefully. While some of his enemies have learned his identity over the years, they didn't get it from her. Around Peter, MJ can drop the carefree attitude if she doesn't feel like, and express her fears openly. Mary Jane helps Peter from getting too hung up on his problems, or too full of himself.

I don't have a problem with Spider-Man being married. I don't buy that it makes life too good for him if he has someone waiting for him. Marriage presents its own challenges and problems from single life. Sometimes there are going to be problems waiting at home, on top of whatever went on at work. There's another person who has to be considered before making decisions. That other person will have their own problems, and their own decisions. There are going to be disagreements. Peter being a superhero meant some of the problems were kind of unusual, like his parents returning from the grave, or his old costume teaming up with a disgraced reporter to try and kill him. But money issues are still a possible problem, so were children.

I think they're a good couple. They argue, but they make up. They don't forget they love each other. They each will try to deal with things by themselves, to spare the other, but ultimately they share the load. And they were clearly attracted to each other. In the comics of my youth, those two were making out at the drop of a hat. This probably formed my impressions of marriage, but the couple finding each other attractive and acting on it, and this being presented as perfectly OK seemed fine to me.

Tiegel opts for an interesting opening move in some issue of Hitman. I'm going to guess Garth Ennis (writer), John McCrea (penciler), Garry Leach (inker), Carla Feeny and Heroic Age (colors), and Willie Schubert (letterer). Mary Jane can't believe how bad her favorite TV show's gotten, and Peter gets a pretty good welcome for being away for two weeks without a word in Web of Spider-Man #32, by J.M. DeMatteis (writer), Mike Zeck (pencils), Bob McLeod (inker), Jason Tetrault (colorist), Rick Parker (letterer). Pete's reminded he can't slip bullshit past MJ in Spider-Girl #44, by Tom DeFalco (script and plot), Pat Olliffe (plot and pencils), Al Williamson (inker), Christie Scheele and Heroic Age (colorists), John E. Workman (letterer). Mary Jane has good news for Peter, which means they're doomed in Amazing Spider-Man #398 by DeMatteis (writer), Bagley (penciler), Larry Mahlstedt (inker), Bob Sharen (colorist), and Bill Oakley (letterer). The likely moment when the bundle of joy in the previous page was conceived in Amazing Spider-Man #381 by David Micheline (writer), Mark Bagley (penciler), Emberlin and Milgrom (finishes), Rick Parker (letterer), and Bob Sharen (colorist).

31 Days of Scans - Day 23

Favorite Costume. There are a lot of different costumes I like. Spoiler's outfit, Storm's sort of punk leather jacket with the Mohawk look, at least a few of the Iron Man armors (although those depend on who is drawing it), the Scarlet Spider outfit, the Batman Beyond costume.

But for the purposes of this post, I'm going to pick the black-and-white Spider-Man outfit. I probably still like his classic red-and-blue duds more, but I talked about them when I did the Favorite Character post on Spidey. Besides, the symbiont costume was a heck of a lot easier for a little kid enamored with Spider-Man to draw.

The look's a little more limited than his original costume. It lends itself to stories where Spider-Man can lurk in shadows, the eyes and spider emblem shining out of them. You can do similar things with his original costume - Spidey's no stranger to surprising people from the rafters in that get-up - but the black-and white costume rarely seems to get used in more light-hearted or silly stories. It can be - like the one where Peter's landlord's husband spikes the punch at Pete and MJ's moving out party, and Spidey ends up fighting Hobgoblin while drunk - but it's not the norm. It feels like the black costume gets a lot of stories where Peter has to deal with a serious loss or psychological trauma (though he has his fair share in the classic costume, too), but the red-and-blue duds get the stories where it's mostly just Spidey having a less-than-stellar day. The ones where he's more the butt of the universe's joke than anything else.

So the black-and-white outfit is mostly associated with dark, frequently angry Spider-Man stories, and I'm hardly a huge fan of those. But in small doses - and most critically, done well - they can be good. And frankly, I like to see Spider-Man get fed up and stop fooling around with bad guys every so often. I like the jokes, I like the humor, the focus on protecting innocents first, but every once in awhile I just want Spider-Man to wreck a super-villain's face. So when the costume is shorthand for "Spidey's about to remind everyone how he's survived this long", I'm on board with that.

Besides, it's a really cool look. It's very simple, but it works at grabbing attention. It plays up the "spider" in "Spider-Man" a bit more. Despite the lack of web design, it makes him look more spooky, more alien. Big white eyes, framed by darkness, staring from out of shadows, like they're just hovering. The spider emblem much bigger, front and center, you can't miss it. It's playing up that fear some people have of spiders, lurking in the shadows, making traps, watching with their multiple eyes. The original costume is certainly odd in its own way, and if someone dropped down on me in the middle of a mugging wearing it, I'd probably be a little freaked out. But I'd know that was a person in there, just from the all the colors and the look of it. The black-and-white one, I'm not so sure, especially talking about something moving as fast as Spider-Man can. What would that even look like to the naked eye? A dark blur, leaping around, tossing full-grown humans like they're rag dolls, shooting webbing. Spidey's constant chatter would break the illusion a bit, but like I said, in a lot of stories where he wears that suit, he's not very talkative.

And, as demonstrated in the above picture of Eddie Brock, and the one before that of Kraven, just about anybody can look good in it. There were a lot of things I didn't like about Venom, but the look of him wasn't it. Mayday had her own variant for awhile, which wasn't too shabby (although Ron Frenz had altered his art style and not for the better, which hurt it a bit).

Spider-Man enjoys the miracle of a suit that heals you without asking for you to provide proof of insurance first in Ultimate Spider-Man #35, by Brian Michael Bendis (writer), Mark Bagley (penciler), Art Thibert (inker), Transparency Digital (colorist), and Chris Eliopoulos (letterer). Spider-Man shows he's no drunken master in Web of Spider-Man #38, by Fabian Nicieza (writer), Alex Saviuk (penciler), Keith Williams and Mike Espositio (inkers), Janet Jackson (colorist), Rick Parker (letterer). The Kingpin really needs a better plan than, "fistfight pissed-off Spider-Man" in Amazing Spider-Man #542, by J. Michael Straczynski (writer), Ron Garney (penciler), Bill Reinhold (inker), Matt Milla (colorist), and Cory Petit (letterer). Kraven experiences that awkward moment when he meets the person he's cosplaying as in Web of Spider-Man #32, by J.M. DeMatteis (writer), Mike Zeck (penciler and colorist?), Bob McLeod (inker), Ian Tetrault (colorist), and Rick Parker (letterer). Eddie Brock rocks that symbiont jacket like a boss in Amazing Spider-Man #375, by David Micheline (writer), Bagley (penciler), Randy Emberlin (inker), Bob Sharen (colorist), Richard Starking and Rick Parker (letterers).

31 Days of Scans - Day 19

The theme for this week is to pick a character I used to hate, but now I like. Or at least don’t hate them. So, when I was a kid, I really didn’t like Captain America. I know, I know, you’re thinking how two days ago, I cheered Squirrel Girl for beating him up and wondering if I don’t still hate him. You have to understand, that was about him being old, not him being Captain America. That's ageism, which is totally different! Anyway, in my younger days I fancied myself a smart aleck with limited respect for authority, and Cap seemed like the definition of the stuffy, stick in the mud leader character to me, not a whole lot different than Cyclops on the X-Men cartoon.

Look at that speech he makes to Wolverine. ‘Furthermore, I think your general attitude –‘? What is that? I was wholly rooting for Wolverine to take him apart, especially since Logan was on the trail of the same bad guy as Cap (the days when Marvel misunderstanding battles were still common). That was my perception of Captain America: He made big, boring speeches while the cool characters tried to get stuff done, if only he’d shut up and let them do it. What saved him? For one thing, I got a little older, my feelings changed. Characters who stood for ideals didn’t seem so bad to me. But that’s boring and doesn’t really involve pictures, so let’s say there’s more.

Like Kurt Busiek’s Avengers run. Put Cap up against actual bad guys, rather than good guys he chooses not to trust, and the speechifying is more acceptable.

What’s more, make them serious bad guys. Villains out to enslave or eliminate the human race, and fully capable of taking down all the Avengers to do it, let alone one man with somewhat enhanced physical abilities. Have Steve Rogers square off against that, and still be able to make big speeches while going on the attack, and I’m good with it. For that matter, have him face long odds against a friend he feels has gone astray.

One of the issues that struck me the most when I first read it was from Geoff Johns’ stretch on Avengers. Thor has Odin’s power in addition to his own, and he’s taking a more active hand on Earth than his dad. Some people in a small Eastern European country have started to worship him, and when their government cracks down, Thor cracks down on the government. It’s near the Russian border, so they get spooked, which spooks the U.S. It’s on Latveria’s border, so Doom gets involved to make things worse, and then Iron Man tries to fight Thor with a suit powered by Asgardian magic. Into the middle of all that goes Captain America, and soon enough it’s just him against Thor.

Which doesn’t go real well, but it doesn’t stop Cap from getting right back in there and continuing to try and reach Thor with words, while also keeping him focused on Steve rather than on any of the nearby soldiers. I remember reading something on JLA/Avengers once, someone online saying how silly it was there’s a scene of Cap and Superman almost coming to blows, because what was Captain America going to do? Well, that’s kind of the point of Steve Rogers, isn’t it? If he thinks someone is wrong, is trying to oppress or bully others, he stands up to them, it doesn’t matter how powerful they are. He didn’t back down when faced with a Thor more powerful than he’d ever been before. He didn’t back down from Thanos when he had the Infinity Gauntlet. He’ll always stand up to oppose someone abusing their power, and he’ll keep trying to find a way to win. I think he was like that when I was younger, I just didn’t see it.

Diplomatic relations between Canada and the U.S. break down in Captain America Annual #8, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Zeck (penciler), John Beatty (inker), Jim Novak (letterer), Glynis Oliver (colorist). We learn genocidal androids hate trips to the dentist in Avengers #21, by Kurt Busiek and George Perez, Al Vey (finished art), Tom Smith (colorist), Richard Starkings and Comicraft (letterering). Cap punches Kang like he was just told Sally Floyd will say he can’t represent America because he doesn’t watch NASCAR and yeah, I used that joke for the Bagley post, but screw it, Civil War: Frontline was a goddamn trash fire, in Avengers #54 by Kurt Busiek (writer), Kieron Dwyer and Rick Remender (artists), Tom Smith (colorist), Richard Starkings and Comicraft (letterers). Cap gets pimpslapped by a god, and still commands respect in Avengers #63/478 by Geoff Johns (writer), Alan Davis (penciler), Mark Farmer (inker), Dave Kemp (colorist), Richard Starkings and Albert Deschesne (letterers).