The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Spider-Man
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Why have a Native American superhero when you can have a Native American supervillain! The politics of Puma (this issue is his first appearance) are fantastic–successful Native Americans use their special abilities to become assassins for hire. It’s great. You’d never see this kind of thing today. Maybe Jason Aaron can do a Puma MAX…
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I guess the Bob Layton inks–on the cover–make all the difference. If only Esposito made LaRocque look a tenth as good as those Layton inks do on the cover…. Anyway, that opening is misleading. This response is a positive one. The issue is a great day in the life story. Peter Parker is in Cleveland…
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I’m not even sure where to start. About half the comic deals with the Living Pharaoh’s origin and his escape from prison. It’s a strange origin; he seems a lot like an Egyptian Peter Parker for a bunch of it (you know, if Peter weren’t a college dropout or whatever). Michelinie does everything he can,…
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I guess this issue is better than the last one. Milgrom’s directly continuing it, which will probably wreck havoc in the monthly Spider-Man continuity over in Amazing, and he keeps his recap of the previous issue brief. The writing is still bad–in the case of Cloak and Dagger and the Black Cat, very, very bad–and…
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What would I do without Al Milgrom? I’d never have been able to understand this issue, like when Cloak and Dagger talk to each other about their origin. Or when Peter thinks all about the problems he’s been having with the Black Cat and then explains their last adventure together. But Milgrom is dealing with…
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What a lame issue. I mean, I wasn’t expecting much when I saw Cary Burkett’s name on it, but it’s a lot worse than I thought. Pretty sure Peter gives away his identity–or at least risks giving it away–at the end of the issue too. There’s a lot bad about it–Burkett’s expository dialogue is terrible,…
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Milgrom sure does like some naked Peter Parker. He’s got Petey traipsing around his apartment in a too short robe, even answering the door for his landlady in it, then tossing it at the fourth wall to get into his costume. The art this issue is rather bad, which is always a surprise. Spider-Man was…
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Did Louise Simonson get paid by the word? Ten pages into this issue and I was already ready for a nap. It’s the most boring comic book I can remember reading–Spidey and Marrina (from Alpha Flight) get kidnapped by an alien collecting lifeforms, including some Superman might want in his zoo, and Alpha Flight shows…
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It’s a perfectly decent done-in-one. The issue opens with the Black Fox (I thought he was the Black Cat’s father, but maybe not) and he introduces the issue’s main story, the Red Ghost wanting to rob a bunch of stores so he can afford to build his death ray (or whatever it’s called). There’s some…
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Michelinie being a competent writer aside, I really loathe nonsensical inter dimensional stories. Spidey and Starfox have to go into another dimension to figure out why Captain Marvel is all messed up. So the two mismatched heroes (we know they’re mismatched because of Spidey’s constant thought balloons on the subject) meet these two warring tribes,…
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Michelinie writes a good issue here. Ten pages in and he’s had two action sequences, one for Spidey, one for Captain Marvel; it feels like you’re spending the day with the characters. Not in some fun sense, rather as though Michelinie is approximating real time in summary. It’s impressive pacing and it makes up for…
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Milgrom spends the majority of the issue on Spidey and the Black Cat fighting a new villain, the Answer, who’s one of Kingpin’s henchmen. It all ties into the Black Cat getting her powers from Kingpin and… and… and I’m bored already. The first half of the issue isn’t terrible. I mean, the art’s weak.…
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Here’s my issue… yes, Spider-Man has lots of human problems–his aunt’s pissed at him, he’s got girlfriend trouble, he’s got job trouble. He’s apparently the only superhero in New York when there’s a superpowered terrorist blowing up toy stores. The list goes on and on. But let’s look at these problems. Aunt May’s pissed he…
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Where to start… I’m tempted to start with Rick Leonardi, who comes up with these great layered panels (or maybe Bill Anderson inked them to make them layered), but simply cannot keep any consistency when drawing people. Maybe he does all right when he’s got football helmets on them–it’s a football corruption story, luckily Peter…
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It takes them a while–almost the entire issue–but Milgrom and Mooney eventually get a couple good panels in here. When I say good panels, I mean good close-ups. I wasn’t really paying attention to the art (it’s marvelously mediocre) as there’s so much else to get the reader’s attention. Like Peter Parker thinking crappy thoughts…
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People used to read this comic on purpose? Like, they’d go to the store and buy it and want to read it? Maybe this issue isn’t the norm, but something tells me Milgrom’s writing isn’t going to be much better when he’s writing Spider-Man than when he’s writing the Black Cat. I mean, the issue…
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Wow, Priest can write. I’ve liked his stuff, been impressed what he could do with Marvel superheroes, but this issue is just fantastic. Maybe because he… he writes thought balloons like they’re internal monologue and not declarative statements, not opportunities for expository shortcuts. He also should write Batman, because he borrows Batman and Jim Gordon’s…
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Tom DeFalco really likes expository dialogue and thought balloons, not to mention narration. Peter Parker cannot shut up he’s talking to himself so much, then there’s the Black Cat thinking about recent events to catch the reader up. Strangely, the issue opens on this amusing exchange between Jonah and Robbie about the best way to…
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What a nice finish. I’m not sure if Spider-Man and Dr. Strange have any real comics history between them–besides being New York heroes who traditionally weren’t members of the Avengers–but McCarthy makes it seem like they ought to. Even with the discrepancies in the colloquialisms–one panel Spidey’s using seventies slang, then sixties in the next…
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Well, the first issue was certainly no fluke. Here, set entirely in some magic dimension, McCarthy lets loose with both the art and the storytelling… almost immediately finding the humanity in it all. He sets Spider-Man on a quest to kill a fly. Kind of a human fly (its soul is human). The story itself…
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Maybe I don’t give Marvel enough credit. I mean, really… Spider-Man: Fever is a wacky book. It’s a good comic–but there are some pacing issues and maybe McCarthy could use a co-writer, but it’s also a really wacky comic. McCarthy’s art is a little mixed media, but it’s mostly sixties influenced figures over some very…
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I read this series when it came out, but I barely remembered anything about it besides it being really good–I didn’t, for example, remember the crimes against the comic book medium the colorists perpetrated. Suffice to say, I didn’t remember this issue. This perfect issue. I mean, it’s a perfect close to this limited series,…
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It’s a cute issue. It’s set during the black costume period, when Spidey was with the Black Cat. I sort of remember reading these comics as a kid and, from just the Secret Wars II crossovers I more recently read, they aren’t cute. It’s a strange approach for Slott to make–it’s an all humor issue.…
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And the coloring problems return. Not quite as bad, but whoever’s doing it–there’s no name just Sotocolor–thought adding three dimensions with color shading was a good idea. And is wrong. But it’s hard to care, because the series just gets better issue to issue. Here, Slott marries two very disparate elements of Spider-Man history–he relieves…
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Now, this issue doesn’t have the same coloring problems as the first. It has different ones, but they’re far less garish, thank goodness. This issue, for the most part, is a Human Torch issue. He and Spidey swap jobs for the day. Spidey messes up the Fantastic Four’s scientific exploration while the Torch takes on…
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Who let this comic out with these colors? I don’t usually go nuts, in support or against, over colors. I doubt I even know a single colorist’s name. But Felix Serrano is a criminal. He took Ty Templeton’s lovely retro-artwork–it’s supposed to be in the Silver Age style–and added this glossy Photoshop slime to it.…
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On the other hand, Tobin seems to think the last issue is a useful place to totally waste not just the reader’s time but his or her money as well. This issue is an imaginary story. It’s a few pages of Spider-Man having the power of the Beyonder, then it’s all about how Doctor Doom…
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Can we get one introspective Spider-Man story without the burglar or Gwen Stacy? How’s this comic an all-ages book if you’ve got Gwen falling in it? It doesn’t seem like something a six year-old would really engage with. Anyway, more expanding and updating from Tobin here–Spidey talks text messaging, which they didn’t have in Secret…
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Tobin switches gears here (and breaks continuity with his first issue, no less) with an untold Secret Wars story. It’s the kind of aside I’m not sure ever would have occurred to Jim Shooter as he was writing the originals (or whatever his scripting is called… not sure writing is an appropriate term). It’s about…
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I wish I remembered Secret Wars a little bit better, not enough to go read it again, of course. What Tobin’s doing with this series–it’s a retro book masquerading as an all-ages book; if it really were an all-ages book, I don’t think Patrick Scherberger would be going so far to show how eye holes…
The Stop Button 