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Like I mentioned in my Random Crap Article last month, I said that I was going to restart my Random Read series of articles that ran briefly back in 2011 and then I had to stop. Now that my life is on solid ground again and my brain is working somewhat normally I have decided to give it another shot.
For those of you who are new to this series of Articles, a brief story. When I went to the Dallas Comic Con in 2011 I had a budget of $50 in which to buy things that I wanted. I already had the idea of doing another series of articles for the Collector Times since I had nothing else to do with my time and thought I would take some of that money and use it to buy comics from the cheap comics boxes at a comic book convention. The comics I picked out ranged from about fifty cents to a dime each. They were mostly early Image Comics stuff Like WildCATS, Savage Dragon and so forth. After I stopped doing the articles (because of you know, Life) I kept the idea in the back of my mind of one day returning to it. Fast forward to this past November when the local used book store was having a 20% off sale the weekend after Thanksgiving and I decided to stop in and look around. I raided the comic book bin they had there looking for anything that struck my fancy. I did find some older issues (from the mid-1980's) of books like Amazing Spider-Man, Conan the Barbarian, Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor and Star Wars. With the cover prices from the 1980's being anywhere from sixty cents to a dollar depending on age, and then getting them for half price and then twenty percent more off I was about to go to comic book hog heaven. There was also a trip to the local comic book store where they were having a sidewalk sale with boxes of quarter comics, $5 t-shirts, statues that were about 40% off. I hit those too and found something that fellow Collector Times columnist Jess Willey has been recommending to me for years and I had not really thought of until I saw them in those quarter boxes. The comics I found were the work of writer Mark Evaner and artist Sergio Aragones and the title was Groo the Wanderer. I made one more trip to the used book store on December 26th and got another batch of comics to finish out the year at 20% off as well. Right now on the left side of my writing table I have the stack of comics I purchased at the sales that is about six inches high. (For those of you whose countries use the metric system; that converts to about 15cm).
Now that I have reading material that will last until well into 2015 let's get started with the reviews. You're getting two this month and probably in subsequent months as well, because I did not do one in January.
Amazing Spider-Man 255
Published by: Marvel Comics in June of 1984
Writer: Tom DeFalco Pencils/Art: Ron Frenz
Cover Price: 60 cents Purchase Price: 24 cents
Okay so right off the bat I want to say that I have always had a soft spot for the web slinger. "Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends" is one of the few Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980's I remember really liking as a kid. When I had the cash flow back a few years ago, I collected Amazing Spider-Man from the start of Brand New Day until the end of Kraven's Last Hunt at which point the whole book was dead to me. Going back in time to the days the of the 1980's where comics were more concerned about telling a good story instead of the writers getting bogged down in minutia and the artists showing off their amazing art skills while the reader suffers was something I missed about comics of the era.
The Cover:
The cover of the book has the black suited Spider-Man (before we knew it was Venom) and some guy sporting a sort of Jean-Luc Picard haircut but longer and three creatures that look they might be some sort of primates or gorilla's. The big thing the cover is trying to get across is with the title of the issue, 'Even a Ghost can Fear the Night!' I think this was back during the time where the cover of every issue had to have at least one exclamation point. It was something like a law in the 1980's and carried over to the 90's as well. It is a great cover and does not give away all that much about what goes on in the issue or is an out and out lie like most covers are today.
The Issue
It seems to start off pretty well, we see a villain for the issue who was trying to commit one last heist before "retiring." The only problem is that the penthouse that he breaks into is the one Red Ghost is using as his lab to make the cosmicizer that will increase the powers of him and his primate muscle 1000 fold. Meanwhile, Peter Parker is just getting back to New York after dimension hopping with Captain Marvel and Starfox (in the pantheon of lame characters The Avengers Starfox is up there with the New Mutant's Cipher in useful powers) and somehow he mentions getting the black suit in Secret Wars even though at the time this issue came out Secret Wars was on issue #4 and he did not get the black suit until issue #8. (Way to spoil it Marvel.) It looks like Peter is going through a rough patch with Aunt May because he decided to drop out of graduate school. He takes off after trying to make amends with May Parker and goes out on patrol. This leads to the reason we came to this book, to see Peter fight the juiced up primates and the thief from earlier in the story that has been drafted to make a jewelry heist. Spider-Man gets there and after not one, but two fights in two different locations the Red Ghost, the primates and the thief get away leaving Spider-Man having to run away from the police. The victory is empty because the cosmicizer is destroyed but all the bad guys got away. On the last page we have a sort of set up for what is going to happen next as we see the Hobgoblin's van (He needs a van? I thought he had that glider thing to get around.) and we have thought bubbles of a man in shadows grabbing the spider tracer off the van and crushing it with all the traditional bad guy dialog included.
The Art
The art is pretty standard fare from what I remember about the Spider-Man books from the 1980's. Frenz is one of those comic artists that take his time in doing his art and it shows. While more modern comic book artists would just slap some things down on a piece of art board and possibly trace poses from a magazine and call it good the art in this book shows that the 1980's were a time when comic book art was good. My only complaint about the art, and this is a minor one, is that some panels that show reaction shots or close ups have a tendency to have a background that is just one color. I think I read somewhere that this sort of thing has been going on in Spider-Man books for years so it's not like it was a one off. It doesn't really do anything to throw off the story or distract the reader, so I can let it slide.
The Writing
I know that DeFalco gets a bad rap for his writing, but this issue feels complete to me. Even though the bad guy gets away at the end and nothing is resolved in the Hobgoblin/Jack-O-Lantern or Aunt May storylines it is nice to know he touched upon them rather than just ignoring them. While those are on the back burner simmering away; another plot is added when we see the seeds planted about the alien suit (Venom).I used to complain about all the plotlines that readers had to follow across the three or four various Spider-Man titles back then, but various X-Books or Avengers Books we have now that have something on the order of double that number to keep track of what is going on so I'm not going to complain about the number of Spider-Man titles that you would have had to keep up with back then.
Overall
Spider-Man was one of those titles that I liked as a kid and going into my teen years. Then the sirens call of the toy world got a hold of me and I have only now been able to throw those shackles off. I used to like the Brand New Day storylines, but after reading just one issue from roughly 29 years ago I can say that I am glad I sold those issues to the used book store. This issue seemed just right for the relaunch of this column.
Amazing Spider-Man 258
Published by: Marvel Comics September 1984
Writer: Tom DeFalco Pencils/Art: Ron Frenz
Cover Price: 60 cents Purchase Price: 24 cents
The Cover:
This cover is relatively simple compared to the one for the other issue. It has Peter Parker being sucked into a vortex of black and white grains as well as some larger spheres of other colors. Peter is being pulled on by two of his Spider-Man costumes; the old red and blue one (which I absolutely love) and the black one (which I thought was cool back then) that we find out more about in this issue. It is kind of creepy to see the two costumes fighting over Peter Parker like that.
The Issue:
The issue starts out with Peter and Mary Jane in his apartment and she's talking about how she knows he's Spider-Man. Mary Jane is wearing something that was so fashionable back in the 1980's that all of a sudden thirty years later it seems like it is in fashion again. In the past two issues of ASM (which they did not have at the bookstore so sorry fellow readers), Spider-Man fought the Puma, and he's guessing that is how MJ figured out that he's Spider-Man. All of a sudden Black Cat (who seems to be rocking a long layered haircut) appears through the open front window and then MJ runs off crying. Peter then stops Black Cat from leaving with some webbing from the jacket. An ability that he did not realize he could do while his costume was disguised as normal clothes. There's a one page break as the Puma (as his alter ego) makes it back to New Mexico and he has his secretary get anything she can about Spider-Man including footage of him fighting. There's another one page break where we see MJ packing to leave town and a picture of her sister and children falls from some of the clothes. She realizes that she's just running away from Peter like she did with her sister when things got tough. There's a Peter self-introspection montage about everything bad that is going on in his life. And then we see something that was only hinted at in issue 255 when the alien costume takes control of Peter's body and he goes out on night patrol while unconscious. He has all sorts of bad dreams that involve something similar to the cover of the book. Waking up he gets the costume and leaves his apartment to take Reed Richards up on an offer Reed made to Spider-Man after he got the alien costume. The Rose is apparently keeping the existence of a possible new/old Hobgoblin a secret and after fighting some of the Rose's best goons he is convinced that the Hobgoblin he has is the genuine article. Hobgoblin seems to have some information that will make The Rose increase in villain political power until he's bigger than the "Kingpin of Crime." Reed gets the results of his scans, analyses and other procedures he did on the alien costume and finds that the costume is actually not made of some alien material but is instead a highly evolved symbiote that has made Peter his new host. With the help of Human Torch and Mr. Fantastic they manage to get it off of Spider-Man and have him change into an old Fantastic Four costume and put a paper bag over his head as a mask. After Johnny drops off the newly attired Spider-Man, Peter is making his way back to his place when he encounters a couple of guys robbing a liquor store and puts a stop to that. Peter makes it back home and is watching television when Mary Jane comes to visit and she says she's sorry for what she did the other day, and wants to confess her secrets to Peter since she knows so many of his.
The Art
The art is much like the one in issue 255 with some panels having just one background color and the action going on in the foreground. It is only in the beginning of the issue so it is not that bothersome. I know there's a reason why artists and colorist's do that sort of thing and it has a name, but for the life of me I cannot remember what it is called. Otherwise Frenz's art on the book is great and a lot of new artists could and should take notes on his style.
The Writing
I know what you are thinking, again with the DeFalco, but in the letter column of 255 they said that DeFalco was the new writer and Frenz was the new artist on the book. Again it seems that things are coming to a slow boil. We get the black costume storyline out of the way early (and a month before he actually gets it in Secret Wars) and we are left with things being pretty much status quo starting next issue. I'm just wondering what is going to come of the whole Rose and Hobgoblin thing as well as the whole thing with Puma.
Overall
The issue did not oversell itself on the cover and it seemed to have the right balance of characterization and story to get things to move along. I also like knowing where the whole thing about the HeroClix Bag Man clix came from in the Web of Spider-Man expansion from about four years ago.
That's it for this month. I don't know what I'll be reading next month, because the title of the column is 'Random Read' so be sure to come back to see what comics I have to talk about.
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