Skip to content
Menu
  • Secret Origin!
Menu

ASM Annual 13

Posted on March 3, 2022January 27, 2021 by spiderdewey

They guarantee it! Let’s see how that goes. After a brief return to reprints for Annual 12, the book is back with all-new material this year. We got Marv Wolfman with the classic X-Men art team of John Byrne and Terry Austin on deck. This is happening near the end of their time on X-Men, I think near the beginning of The Dark Phoenix Saga, tho I’m not sure exactly when this was published. I think I’m placing this way out of sequence, actually, but the long stretch of uninterrupted ASMs last Marv block really threw things off. Anyway, this one’s got a prologue and chapters and everything. PROLOGUE: A mysterious guy who apparently works for “the Feds” get ambushed and killed by another guy! Who are they? No idea.

Aw, no, not Jimbo! How could you, Jimbo? So Jimbo must be the guy who got killed in the prologue, or the other guy. We switch our scene to… well, to Marv Wolfman dissing sitcoms… 

Jimbo! He must be the one who killed the other one, then. He orders the goons to fight Spider-Man, which goes about as well as you’d expect, and Jimbo escapes. Then a mystery man appears and tells Spidey that Jimbo killed a government agent named Kent Blake last night, but the Feds believe it was a suicide, and he wants Spider-Man’s help proving otherwise. He tells him to attend Blake’s funeral and he’ll understand why. So he does.

Rude! Why is Peter going along with this? For whatever reason, he decides to help in the weirdest way he can: by magically growing a day’s worth of stubble between panels and showing up to Jimbo’s place as Kid Parker, wannabe goon. He demonstrates his skills by beating up all the other goons.

WHAT? So they go steal something or other off a ship. Peter manages to keep Jimbo from killing a guard without blowing his cover, and away they go. CHAPTER 2: Doc Ock harasses people all throughout the underworld trying to find out where Jimbo is. And when he finds Jimbo’s hideout, which Jimbo is not in, he recognizes Peter Parker and outs him as a newspaper man. He says he’s only returning the favor for Peter blowing his cover when he was “trying to con your old biddy of an aunt with my phony marriage proposals!” So, Lee, Romita & Conway presented Ock as purely using May, Wein decided he really loved her, and Marv says, “Not so fast.” Poor Doc Ock must be really confused. Anyway, he bats “Kid Parker” across the room while insulting his aunt. 

But before he can switch to Spider-Man, Peter is pulled out of the river by the mystery agent, who tells him where to find Doc Ock. Ock is at Jimbo’s house, beating him up. Naturally, it’s fightin’ time, but in the space of a page, Ock has already thrown Spider-Man off a roof.

This mystery man is getting annoying. CHAPTER 3: The mystery man has sent Spidey to a construction site where Jimbo hid the plans. Spider-Man and Ock have a big fight, as they do.

“I’ll crush you then find my own physician!” may be the funniest thing Doctor Octopus has ever said. But ya know, if he really is mentally bonded to the arms, ripping one off is really brutal. Spider-Man would never pull someone’s actual arm off. Kind of a moral gray area, there. Anyway, the mystery man is here to settle with Jimbo. He scares him so much he accidentally backs off a ledge on the construction site, letting Byrne do a fun little sequence of Spidey rescuing him. 

He drags Jimbo back to the agent, Doc Ock having run off, and then we see Spidey drop Jimbo off with the cops, to whom he’s all-too happy to confess after the night he’s had.

Sure, sure, I’d just assume it was a ghost, too. That’s way more reasonable than a spy faking his own death. But I guess we’ll see one way or the other in the next annual. This was, in no way, the strangest Spidey story of all. Like, not even close. This is weirder than Mindworm? No, sir. Aside from the mystery agent, this was meat’n’potatoes superheroin’. The next feature in the issue is “a gallery of Spider-Man’s most famous foes!” that’s mostly jobbers like Silvermane and the Kangaroo and doesn’t feature, you know, Doc Ock or Green Goblin. Weird choices. Then there’s some layouts and floor plans of famous Spidey locations, like Peter’s apartment (which is completely incorrect, and actually inspires a new version of the feature showing Peter’s real apartment in ASM Annual 15), the offices of the Daily Bugle & Daily Globe, and the campus of Empire State University, which are kinda cool. None of the villain pin-ups are credited. The layouts imply Keith Pollard drew them in a caption credited to “Marv & Keith,” but don’t confirm it. Odd. And that’s it for this one.

  • Amazing Spider-Man
  • Annual
  • Doctor Octopus
  • John Byrne
  • Marv Wolfman
  • Spider-Man
  • Terry Austin
  • Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    Recent Posts

    • ASM 363
    • ASM 362
    • ASM 361
    • ASM 360
    • ASM 359

    Archives

    • February 2023
    • January 2023
    • December 2022
    • November 2022
    • October 2022
    • September 2022
    • August 2022
    • July 2022
    • June 2022
    • May 2022
    • April 2022
    • March 2022
    • February 2022
    • January 2022
    • December 2021
    • November 2021
    • October 2021
    • September 2021
    • August 2021
    • July 2021
    • June 2021
    • May 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • April 223

    Categories

    • 1960s
    • 1970s
    • 1980s
    • 1990s
    • Uncategorized

    Tags

    Alex Saviuk Al Milgrom Amazing Spider-Man Aunt Anna Aunt May Ben Reilly Ben Urich Betty Brant Bill Mantlo Black Cat Bob Sharen David Michelinie Doctor Octopus Flash Thompson Frank Giacoia Gerry Conway Glory Grant Gregory Wright Gwen Stacy Harry Osborn Hobgoblin J. Jonah Jameson Jim Mooney JM DeMatteis Joe Robertson John Romita John Romita Jr Keith Williams Kevin Tinsley Kingpin Len Wein Liz Allen Marvel Team-Up Mary Jane Watson Mike Esposito Nathan Lubensky Roger Stern Ross Andru Sal Buscema Scarlet Spider Spectacular Spider-Man Spider-Man Stan Lee Tom DeFalco Web of Spider-Man

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org
    ©2023 | Design: Newspaperly WordPress Theme