The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1831: Amazing Spider-Man #218, July 1981

Been a while since I read some Spider-Man. I'm currently revamping my storage system now that we're in a new house, and it's involving some necessary shrinking of the amount of space my collection takes up. I'm making my way through my Marvel Comics collection right now, and I realized I actually have a pretty significant Spider-Man collection. I'm not 100% sure where these comics came from. The collection feeds from a couple of large collections that I bought when I had my store, as well as my own significant collection that dates back to the Doctor Who Weekly's I brought with me from England when we came to Canada. Had I had the foresight, I'd have traced the provenance of each part of the collection. That would be interesting information to have.

Anyway, this was a pretty disturbing comic, in retrospect. First, Peter is really rude about a lady's looks in this issue. He tries to smooth it over by saying she's not very nice, but Mr. Parker is definitely displaying a propensity for socially-constructed notions of beauty. Second, villains The Sandman and Hydroman get dumped in the river together and come out as a single gestalt creature, eventually dubbed "Mud-Thing." It shows rudimentary signs of consciousness, but is generally unmoving and unthinking. It's this unthinking that has me disturbed. Both Sandman and Hydroman possess complete control over the cells of their mutated bodies. But in order to turn completely into sand or water, they'd need to have a different way to store their software (personality, emotions, memories), as we've seen numerous times that their entire bodies can disintegrate into their constituent respective elements. Where is the soul in a pile of sand? I would imagine that the easiest solution would be that each grain, each drop, was encoded with the fundamental information of the whole - each atom contains the entirety of Sandman or Hydroman's personalities. So what happens when those atoms are, through the admixture of water, made into something else? What if the personalities are also mixed into a psychic mud? To me, Mud-Thing stands still because there are two psyches mashed into one, unable to move or think or do much of anything. And given the destruction by drying this creature suffers at the end of the comic, I'm curious how Sandy, at least, managed to come back to become Silver Sable's back-up.

I might read a bit more Spider-Man over the next few days. I'm intrigued.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1598 - 1602: The Amazing Spider-Man #153 - #157, February - June, 1976

I was rearranging my Marvel collection yesterday, putting some things away, making space in the boxes, and I decided to just pull out random stuff and read it. I haven't done that with this project for a while. Up first is a run of five issues of Amazing Spider-Man from the 70s. I've under-represented the wall-crawler in the project, so it's time to remedy that. But I was away all weekend, so we're going to do them all together.

Let's do the art first, because it's handled by two of Marvel's famed old guard, Sal Buscema and Ross Andru. These are guys who defined the 70s house style for Marvel, a style that only significantly changes once the McFarlanes and Silvestris of the world joined the bullpen in the late 80s. Rather than the heavily-stylized depictions we start seeing in the lead-up to the great Image exodus, characters in this era of comics tend to move much more like actual human beings would in superheroic situations. There's a couple of ways to consider this. First, our heroes are human beings, so it makes sense that they would move like we do. Spider-Man may have the proportional strength, etc., etc., of a spider, but he utilizes these powers like a human would. Perhaps this helps us to place ourselves in his shoes when we see a pose that we, ourselves, could potentially strike had we the ability to stick to the side of a building or balance on a flag pole without fear of losing our balance. But I have to admit that it sometimes looks awkward, despite the talents of the artists involved. The other way to consider this is that Spider-Man, and other heroes, are enhanced, changed, or mutated human beings, so it stands to reason that their bodies wouldn't work the same way a base line human's does. Hence, when McFarlane comes along, Spider-Man's body starts acting more like a spider-inflected human, crouching a lot, flinging limbs about, and being a lot more crawly. That said, the over-stylization can be off-putting, especially for that identification we all love to have so much with our heroes.

I prefer, however, to think that what this is demonstrating, unwittingly, is Peter Parker becoming more comfortable with his powers and with the ways that those powers make his body want to move. Perhaps that's why he sometimes looks a bit stiff - he's fighting a more spider-like inclination that his body may be instinctually having. Once we get to the late 80s and 90s, we can pretend that he's had these powers for however long - ah, Marvel chronology - and has started listening to not only the obvious changes to his physiology (sticking to buildings, heightened strength, etc.) but also to the subtle changes that allow his body to use the powers to their fullest extent.

That aside, I enjoyed these comics. Writer Len Wein is really pretty great, and the stories are tightly-scripted and told, giving us all the requisite action and angst that one would expect from a 1970s Spider-Man comic.

"Mr. Osborn, I could kiss you."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 998: X-Men (, Uncanny) Annual #12, 1988

One thing I love about this era of Marvel is all of the Art Adams annuals we get. But, ye gods, Claremont's dialogue is just terrible. The use of the thought bubble has gone out of vogue in comics these days, and I really think that it was the Claremont X-titles that signaled its death knell. There's just too much. A comic panel is meant to move fairly quickly, especially an action one involving superheroes. So if we have a huge diatribe in thought holding our attention as someone is flying through the air, it makes all of the action seem like it's in slow motion. I'm sure have much more to say about this when I get to reading the voluminous run of Uncanny that sits in the collection.

But, y'know, on the other side of things, there's Art Adams. He's up there for me with Frank Quitely as one of the artists who really grasps the stylized ridiculousness of the superheroic form, but manages to tell compelling stories using it nonetheless. His Jonni Future stuff for Tom Strong's Terrific Tales is beautiful to behold (and self-consciously hyper-sexualized), and the ways he makes these characters move connotes a sort of grace that one expects of mythic figures - even when they're falling over or making fools of themselves!

Story-wise, there's a few more connections to the other annuals in the crossover, but not much. I'm glad to have read the Avengers issues recently in which Terminus destroyed the Savage Land, as this comic made much more sense this time around.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 997: Amazing Spider-Man Annual #22, 1988

Kind of a "meh" comic today, but really, the whole of the crossover so far has felt that way. It's a little weird, because it's definitely top name creators, at least as far as Marvel in the 80s goes, but the stories are just okay, not awesome.

The team-up of Spider-Man and Daredevil is nicely handled, especially considering that Daredevil was well into his dark years at this point. It's nice to see that he's still capable of levity - when a character is darkened like he was, sometimes writers forget that there's another side to human experience that isn't quite so bleak. But, then again, we're only 2 years from the 90s in this issue, and we all know how bleak the beginning of that decade was.

I'm off to see about getting the last two issues of the crossover from a local shop, the last one I can think of nearby that carries back issues this old. But if I can't find them...then I can't find them. At some point I'll have to stop trying to complete series that I read, otherwise this'll be come the 80 Years of Comics Project - and I'm not sure I have that long left in me!

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 648: Amazing Spider-Man #302, July 1988

Read this today.