It’s our first look at a “Marvel Graphic Novel” since The Death of Captain Marvel. These were slightly oversized (Like halfway between a regular comic and a Treasury Edition), extra-long, squarebound comics meant to seem fancy. While the format often showcased big events (Like DoCM), or gave creators a place to do something special (The famous X-Men story God Loves, Man Kills, for example), they were more often just big comics. This one, though, is a bit different, in that it seeks to recap and sum up Peter & MJ’s lives together. Like ASM 259, only with a broader scope and bigger pages. But don’t worry, there’s still room for superheroing. Improbably, this is by the whole creative team of Web of Spider-Man except inker Keith Williams, replaced here by Andy Mushynsky. They just crammed this into the schedule, I guess. It’s dedicated to Frank Giacoia, who must’ve just died as it was going to print. He’d been inking the covers to Web, and inked Saviuk’s back cover illustration to this, even. As we’ve seen, Frank had a long history with Spidey, so it’s nice that they did that. Bob Larkin did that slightly off cover. Due to the kind of project this is, it’s gonna revisit a lot of existing material, some of it already posted about here, some of it in the future, so I may not get too detailed this time. We’ll see. It begins with dueling prologues for Peter & Mary Jane from their earliest days. The first page of Peter’s is a moment I’m not sure I’ve seen elsewhere…
It’s funny that people insisted on rendering Aunt May & Uncle Ben as old their entire lives. Peter is 15 when he gets bit by the spider. This is 15 years before that, and they already have white hair. Ben & May Parker: Born 65 years old. Where his folks ran off to is dealt with in ASM Annual 5, which will be seen here someday. MJ’s similar page establishes her Dad as a raging jerk, as we’ve seen elsewhere, but it does give us this funny image of baby MJ:
Then we hop ahead closer to Peter’s fateful spider bite, with Peter’s voiceover talking about how he always had a feeling his parents never came back because he wasn’t good enough over a scene of Aunt May & Uncle Ben doting on him for his report card as he rakes the yard. We see him lie and say he hardly thinks of his parents anymore and only wants to make May & Ben proud. Little did he know, MJ was next door at the time…
…which I don’t think lines up with the events of her life as laid out by Defalco & Frenz years prior, but sure. That ends our prologues. Chapter 1: The Spider’s Bite is about, guess what, Peter’s origin. It happens largely as it has a million times before, reproducing most of Stan’s dialogue and only adding a little more. The spider bite, discovering his powers, fighting Crusher Hogan, designing his webshooters and sewing his costume, you know the story. And if you somehow don’t, we’ll cover the original one day. As for MJ, well…
As discussed in ASM 259, she’s living with her mom’s cousin Frank, and her sister Gayle has married Timmy, and they are expecting a child. They come for a visit, but MJ is scared by how haggard and unhappy Timmy looks and declines an invite to dinner, saying Tuesday is her TV night.
Ok, hang on a sec. Spider-Man was on Johnny Carson and “Celebrity Olympics?” How? He rather famously couldn’t cash his first check as a celebrity because it was made out to Spider-Man and, like, duh. It makes more sense if he was on that one TV show as depicted by Ditko and that was it. Anyway, Peter picks the narrative back up to talk about his fateful decision not to stop that burglar, and then there’s this nice scene with Uncle Ben…
As it happens, MJ was visiting Anna on Thanksgiving break (Oh word? I guess he needed some excuse for her to be here at this time), so when poor Uncle Ben ran afoul of that burglar and Spider-Man swore revenge, Aunt May was taken to Anna’s house, and MJ was freaked out by her sorrow and watched Peter out the window as he ran into their house.
So, MJ has known literally the entire time. Before she ever even officially met Peter, before “Face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot,” she knew. Which is a big stretch, but as I’ve said before, it really makes reading her every appearance before ASM 259 entertaining in a different way. As Spidey swings off to finish his origin, Saviuk draws a figure that’ll wind up in a lot of ads later…
…and once he’s learned that with great power, there must also come great responsibility…
Very different evenings. Here Conway does an interlude to show Doctor Octopus’ origin. I’m not sure that works, timeline-wise, but ok, sure, the same night Uncle Ben died, due to a freak accident, Doc Ock was born. Then we start moving forward. We see the moment in ASM 15 where Aunt May first tells Peter she’s arranged a date with Mary Jane for him, and he’s not into it at all, but now we get to see MJ’s side of that for the first time…
Rough. Spidey fought Kraven the Hunter for the first time in ASM 15, and once the battle was wrapped up, he came home to Aunt May saying MJ had a headache and couldn’t come. He was in the process of trying to date Betty Brant at the time, so that suited him fine. Again, we see MJ’s side of this:
Two years, eh? It was almost 30 issues, and back then, these characters were aging in real time, but whatever. Peter recaps his life through ASM 33, Saviuk dutifully recreating the original “Spider-Man lifts a heavy thing” page…
Then MJ takes over the narration, as Saviuk does recreations of a few Spidey covers and she says she couldn’t get her mind off him in the 2 years since they almost met. As her sister’s marriage fell apart and her Mom became sick, she saw Spider-Man stories on the news all the time and assumed he had a simple, uncomplicated life she was jealous of. Then Saviuk gets in another Spidey that got reproduced a lot before recreating the moment MJ ran out on her family as shown in ASM 259…
But she’s wearing the famous outfit from ASM 42, so you know that’s the day she and Peter finally meet, another famous scene Saviuk recreates. Then we have another Doc Ock interlude, about the time he almost rented a room at Aunt May’s house, and how he actually liked her, but Peter Parker ruined that, and he blames Peter for losing a chance at a normal life. That characterization is wildly suspect when compared to the actual comics, but why not? And then, suddenly, we rocket almost to the present! You might think they’d take a look at some great Peter/MJ moments (To say nothing of the many Spidey/MJ moments) and really craft a definitive look at their history, but I guess they felt this had to be a superhero comic still, so we jump to the recent past to see Doc Ock go back to the wrecked site of the accident that made him, looking for something to help him in his revenge. Revenge against Peter Parker, rather than Spider-Man. Why’d he wait this long? Something put Peter back on his radar:
Ok, I buy that. Conway actually shows the ceremony the wedding issue didn’t make any time for.
With Conway being the one who worked really hard to get them together in the first place (Still more stuff we’ll see later), it’s cool that he got to be the one to write the wedding. And then we jump ahead to right now, True Believers (1988, that is), with MJ, Peter & May having dinner as MJ narrates that the first few months were challenging, including how they just lost their condo, but they’ve made it work, when Doc Ock’s robot smashes through the window zapping at everyone.
The exploded robot has a note inside telling Peter to give Ock Spider-Man or his family dies (How was that supposed to work? If it killed them all, who would read it?), and Peter switches clothes and follows the directions over MJ’s protests. The directions lead him to The Master Planner’s underwater hideout, the very site of the “lifts a heavy thing” moment, and when he gets inside, he’s immediately attacked by lasers in a sequence that reminds me of the Superman prologue to Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, written by one Gerry Conway. Speaking of Superman, behold Doc Ock’s inexplicable new Lex Luthor-inspired outfit:
Ock says it’s Spidey and Peter’s fault that he’s been denied a normal life, that he’s been friendless and unloved all these years…
Ock says his lil ball there will level Manhattan tomorrow at noon, but then Spidey tricks him into smashing a hole in the wall during their battle, letting the river pour into the room. Our man swims for the surface, but Doc Ock’s new suit has a faceplate for just such an emergency, so he has no problem wrapping Spidey in his tentacles and going for the kill. Spider-Man manages to kick him close enough to a passing ship that his tentacle gets stuck in a giant propeller, freeing Spider-Man to swim away.
Not sure why MJ’s mullet from the Ron Frenz era popped back up here, but there you go. And they lived happily ever after. Except for the mid 90s. And the early 2000s. Until they didn’t.
I got this one many years ago. I’ve read it a couple of times. It’d been long enough that I forgot we actually learn Mary Jane knew Peter’s secret from the very beginning here instead of in ASM 259. I still can’t believe that wasn’t part of their discussion that day. Or at least a part we saw. This isn’t the last Spidey Marvel Graphic Novel we’ll see on this blog, but the others will be markedly different. Much like our next post, which will take us back to the sad, sorry days of 1994 for more “I am The Spider” garbage and more clone antics. I’m sure you’re excited. At least doing this blog this way means I don’t have to read all that crap in one long slog.