From the soaring highs of the return of Spider-Man’s 2nd best writer to… The most superfluous book in the line. Wham! I mean, no slight to anyone working on it, either, but I, a person who was buying 2-5 Spider-Man comics a month at this time, had no idea this even existed when it was coming out. Tom Peyer continues as writer, but has a 3rd penciler in 4 issues in Josh Hood. Not usually a good sign for a new book, but maybe they planned to rotate people since it’s a different kind of comic, I dunno. Andrew Pepoy inks, Tom Smith colors. Things begin hard to describe.
Did that guy just turn into a Man-Thing? Is that possible? I don’t know much about ol’ Manny, last seen around here in MTU 68 or 91, depending on whether we go by posts or chronological order. We continue through this guy’s life in a jumbled order that I must say I am finding it hard to care about. I think he somehow swapped bodies with Man-Thing, who is at his job, burning people who fear him? Here’s Spider-Man:
This is a very late-90s looking book. Cut to this “Authority” being helped by various techno-looking goons, much more techno-looking himself, preparing to dea with Spider-Man learning a little about who he is. This is also very confusing. His goons hypothesize about why it’s raining all over the world simultaneously (It’s Heroes Return, the event ending the Heroes Reborn stunt, which has Spider-Man in it and maybe should be on the blog, but I gave my copies away years ago, and I wasn’t gonna re-buy it) for a whole page before someone finally explains something going on in this comic. Sort of.
Maybe I’m just not in the mood, but this comic is really putting me off. It’s half over and most of it has been barely comprehensible stuff about characters we don’t know. No wonder this series didn’t last 12 issues. That trend continues as Random Guy/Man-Thing walks through the subway, while Man-Thing/Random Guy hides in an alley so as not to scare anyone and make them ignite. Meanwhile, Spider-Man’s heading to the address on the card he was given, and goes in through a window to find himself in a pitch black room with a spotlight. Man-Thing-in-Random-Guy’s-body arrives home as one of his coworkers is there trying to see if he’s ok since he’s been acting weird. Then he senses the guy in his body nearby and just jumps out a window, scaring his wife and his coworker.
Ol’ dude and Man-Thing unite as Spider-Man tries to project good vibes at them. I have no idea what’s going on.
Ok! This was an aggressively unpleasant comic book! No one even told us why Man-Thing and Carl’s predicament was so dangerous! Was it, even? Did The Authority lie about that? This is tremendously frustrating. And there’s more of it next post…