It’s 1994 now, and man, things are different! As I’ve mentioned, I’m making these jumps to roughly the start of each ASM writer’s tenure, and David Michelinie was on for a loooong time! Between his 100 issue run (give or take) and the fact that the Spidey titles have exploded in his time to 4 monthlies and a quarterly, his era is going to take the most posts to cover, by far, so we’ll be seeing it the most often. This section will include issues of ASM, TAC and WEB, plus The Adjectiveless Spider-Man (Hereafter referred to as SM), the quarterly Spider-Man Unlimited (SMU), and a miniseries. With 4 monthlies, there’s at least one new Spider-Man on the shelf every week. Publication order every month is WEB, ASM, SM, and TAC. The Spider-Office was kinda out of control by now. But so was the rest of comics.
By 1994, comics are insane. A perfect storm of weirdness took over. The big artists at Marvel started making comics that looked crazy, and the kids went crazy for them. At the same time, speculators came into the picture. A buncha rubes from the real world got told if they found a comic with a #1 on the cover, it’d put their kids through college. So people were buying “hot” comics by the truckload. Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 sold a million copies. Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 sold 8. For a brief stretch, comic book artists were minor celebrities. X-Force artist Rob Liefeld was in a Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee. The world was upside down. Then they and Marvel’s 4 other biggest star artists quit the company and started their own, Image Comics, making the speculator boom even crazier and supplanting DC as the #2 publisher. In a panicked response, DC killed Superman. Sales through the roof. So they broke Batman’s back. One by one, all the DC heroes fell, temporarily replaced by new characters. Marvel started to pick up on how that sold, so their books started to get more gimmicky, too. On top of all that, the trend toward darker, more violent comics that began in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns is now in full effect, so all the heroes have to be meaner, darker, tougher. It’s a catastrophe. In a few years, the speculator bubble will burst, the bottom will fall out of the comics industry, and Marvel will be bankrupt. But right now, comics are, generally speaking, terrible.
And Spider-Man? He’s among the worst. This is an unusual jump in another way, in that we’re not going to see an issue of ASM for awhile. I had no real choice but to cut it here. David Michelinie’s last issue is part of a crossover that ended in tragedy that is simultaneously extremely silly and one of the most terrible things that’s ever happened to Peter Parker. I don’t think I can get through this without spoiling it, but I’m gonna wait and see. In response, Spider-Man is about the become the grim and gritty tough guy Marvel has decided you want. So what better time for JM DeMatteis, champion of depressing Spider-Man comics, to take the reins of ASM? He’d done 25 issues of TAC at this point, where he did a bunch of real serious and sad comics, and now it’s time to really max the sadness out, because somehow they think that’s what the kids want.
I did not want it. I was a lad of 15. I was buying most of this crap as it came out. Sure, DeMatteis’s sadsack storylines in TAC were a bummer, but I often skipped those, I usually liked the other titles. Then the above-mentioned tragedy happened, and suddenly, all the comics are dark and sad and miserable all the time. I was hating this stuff. But I was also an idiot, and held out hope that things would get better. They would not. We’re more than 2 years away from Spider-Man comics I could even call decent, let alone good. It’s just wall to wall sadness and suffering for awhile, and then… well… something even stupider than that. The worst Spider-Man story in history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t read this stuff in decades. In a strange way, I’m kind of excited. It’s been so long. Do I still hate this material? If anything, I probably hate it more, but who really knows? Only one way to find out. Just keep reminding yourself we have plenty of classic stuff to get back to later.
SO MUCH has changed from the previous period. Where to start? Venom became so popular they had no choice but to soften him up a little and make him an “anti-hero” who’s been starring in his own comics. Hobgoblin is… whew, that’s a whole thing. Harry Osborn is dead, courtesy of JM DeMatteis. Carnage, the serial killer in a Venom symbiote, is a thing. Things are extremely weird. But we’re doing this, so we’re doing this, and we’re starting with this issue of TAC, taking place in the aftermath of the above-mentioned tragedy.
Ann Nocenti is back for this one, and while Sal Buscema is still the regular artist on the series, this one’s drawn by James Fry with inks by Sal and Rodney Ramos and colors by Chia-Chi Wang (Whose name is misspelled in the credits). It’s actually been 10 issues since DeMatteis’ last, with a series of fill-in writers in the interim, and the new regular writer isn’t here until 215, so Ann Nocenti’s doing a 2-parter. Another characteristic of comics of this era is gimmick covers. All the Spidey titles have a shiny metallic solid color background this month, and all of them came polybagged with promotional material for the upcoming Spider-Man animated series. This cover is courtesy of Joe Madureira, who was the star X-Men artist of this time. Enough preamble already, let’s get to it.
So edgy! Deep into the post-McFarlane era now, style-wise. The Image guys have caused a revolution, and now people can kinda draw however they want, for good and for ill. If Marvel has a house style anymore, it’s ripping off Jim Lee, but not everyone is doing so. Spidey say he hasn’t gotten out of costume in “a dog’s day.” He wonders if he still has a job. He decides to drop by the crime scene he’s just discovered as Peter Parker, just in case, and uses his press credentials to be let into the scene of a grisly murder, the cops warning him he might get sick. Speaking of the cops, the detectives on the scene are the guys from then-very popular TV show NYPD Blue.
Delightful! The cowering woman says she saw the whole thing. How the killer read off the guy’s list of physical abuses toward his girlfriend, and then recreated them all, one by one. She says she just arrived in NY from Wisconsin, has no friends and no job. Peter says she needs someone to talk to, suggests Mary Jane, and invites her to dinner at their house. She says her name is Mary.
Did people in this era really use the answering machine as a message board the way Peter & MJ do? I never saw anyone do this, but it’s been a thing in the books pretty much as long as they’ve been married. At an unspecified location, Mary looks at her vast collection of pill bottles before flinging them all across the room and declaring she doesn’t need them anymore. Pretty sure ya do, pal. She’s an artist, and gets freaked out when she finds some horrible drawings among her own, and way more freaked out when she finds a rifle in her suitcase.
Ya see, Mary is Typhoid Mary, Ann Nocenti’s most lasting contribution to the Daredevil mythos. I guess some terrible version of her appeared on that wretched Iron Fist TV show, but I sure wasn’t coming back for a 2nd season of that garbage, so I couldn’t tell you. She’s got a split personality, and Mary doesn’t know about Typhoid, but Typhoid does know about Mary. Typhoid is a vicious killer with psychic and telekinetic abilities. She was Kingpin’s assassin for awhile (While Mary was dating Matt Murdock, oh, the irony!). She’s very much a product of her time, I think. And here she is! Later, at the Parker residence, MJ complains that Peter is late for dinner as she gets a phone call from “Mary Walker”… but it’s really the Typhoid personality. MJ hopes she’ll be fun as they arrange for her to come by.
Goodness. Peter finally comes home to their trashed apartment, and after MJ tells him what happened, decides Typhoid is the killer he’s hunting, and she’s trying to silence Mary (I mean… kinda?). He wants MJ to go to Aunt May’s, but she wants to wait for Mary, because MJ is great. She says Peter has been out on the streets too much. He reassures her that he’s ok and heads back out. He is not. At the moment, Typhoid is in a bar nearby, trying to decide which of the leering drunks to beat up first. Spider-Man swings by just in time to see some of them go through the window onto the street and drops in. Typhoid does her flirty thing, lowering his defenses before kicking him in the face, saying she bets he’s the kind of guy that would never hit a girl.
But as much as Typhoid loves to fight men and have them fight over her, she says she didn’t commit these murders and, telekinetically pinning Spidey to a wall with girders, flees. She wonders who really did these killings. She runs into an alley without knowing why, and as Spider-Man watches, she collapses to the ground, and then a bunch of stuff from a dumpster begins swirling up, and…
Another symptom of this era is a lot of blatant art swiping. These new guys like the Image founders so much, they straight up copy their work. And Marvel, floundering and desperate to replace the Image guys, just looks the other way. Fry has already nicked a couple of Mark Texiera drawings for MJ and Typhoid earlier in the issue, and now, as Spidey and Marys 3rd personality get into it, a Jim Lee copy fights a Todd McFarlane copy.
That bottom Spidey close-up is from a McFarlane panel, too, except he had a web in his fist in the original, so it made sense. James fry can obviously draw. These swipes are just embarrassing. Spidey is freaked out that this isn’t the same woman at all. She’s much tougher, looks different, acts different. And she finally says her name is Bloody Mary. Very 90s. And when Spider-Man webs her up, she reveals another difference: she’s PYROkinetic, manifesting fire to burn herself free. Spidey gets a tracer on her and smothers the flame with his web, knowing she’ll be gone when he’s done. As he wonders where he went, he finally puts together that that was Mary Walker, and begins to run home in a panic as we’re To Be Continued.
Welcome to the grim new world of Spider-Man. And if you think this was notably darker, you ain’t seen nothing yet, I’m sorry to report. This month’s Marvel titles carry tributes to the master, Jack Kirby, who died earlier in the year. Jack didn’t die for y’all to turn every hero into The Punisher, guys. Sorry for the extra-super-long post. Things will be more normal next time with all the prologue outta the way.