Conveniently out the same month as the end of Doc Ock’s return, an issue of Unlimited that might be more useful than normal. Or it seems like it could just be a primer on Ock’s history that I don’t really need, I’ve not read it before. On hand to tell the tale, we have Tom DeFalco, Joe Bennett, Joe Pimentel, and John Kalisz. Still kind of wild to me how much my feeling about Joe Bennett’s art changed last block. To be fair, his art also changed, but still. He was not a guy I liked in 1997, and now I’m glad when his name’s on a book from this era (And in the contemporary era, too, he’s fantastic now). We open on a shot of Ock holding a newspaper with him on the front page, not unlike the recurring newspaper motif in ASM Annual 15.
Ock briefly lets us know Angelina is in a coma, saying he doesn’t even know what he did to deserve such devotion from her, or from Carolyn, and asks her to tell him why the world hates him. Now this is an interesting angle. It doesn’t really mesh with his depiction in ASM 427, but a Doc Ock whose memories are out of date is something you could run with (And conveniently lets him not know who Spider-Man is under the mask anymore). Speaking of Spider-Man…
But also…
Ok, that’s legit hilarious. Not enough fun is had with the endless cycle of death & rebirth in comics.
TORBERT! So are Peter, Carolyn and… whoever this is… gonna take turns telling us the story of Doc Ock? As excuses to do a recap of his life, it’s at least a little different. And, as I’ve mentioned before, this sort of thing was welcome before the internet and Wikipedia. New people could use a deep dive into an old character sometimes, especially one who’s been “dead” for 3 years. The book swaps to Trainer to continue the narrative, about how he eventually gave a lecture on how his metal arm harness was gonna revolutionize nuclear study. Her pop, our not-so-dear, departed Seward Trainer, took her to the lecture and introduced them. She goes on and on about how kind and generous he was, then we swap to Peter telling MJ his coworkers called him arrogant and nasty when he interviewed them. As Otto mentioned in ASM 3, people started calling him Dr. Octopus and making fun of him. MJ says it sounds kind of sad, but Peter’s having no sympathy night. As for Carolyn…
Her fixation on Ock is pretty creepy, and shoehorning it in here like it’s not brand-new info is kind of odious. No one cares about Carolyn Trainer, she is not a real part of this story. At The Bugle, the preposterously named Dilbert Trilby, who I’m told by the internet has only appeared in 2 other Tom DeFalco-penned comics and will never appear again after this, tells Ben that Ock threw himself into his work after this incident, becoming even more unpleasant at work. Then his mom started dating after forcing him to break it off with his lady, and it’s implied that his angry reaction caused her to have a heart attack and die, all 3 weeks before his infamous accident.
Carolyn describes how she was in college when it happened, and desperate for news of him. She also calls his doctor a quack for finding that he’d suffered brain damage. Ock should really be getting Dilbert’s version.
Carolyn gleefully recounts how Ock humiliated Spider-Man in ASM 3. Then…
There’s only so many ways to draw Spider-Man, realistically, but next block in this era, we’re gonna see a cover on which Mark Buckingham blatantly swipes panel 3. Trainer goes on to tell Ock he was represented in court by Matt Murdock, who got his sentence reduced with a temporary insanity plea (Why would Matt do that? That’s stupid).
Peter tells Mary Jane about Ock’s 2nd rampage, which we saw in ASM 11 & 12, and how he blamed himself for Bennett Brant’s death after all that. The Bugle boys tell us Ock for 20 years that time, and that the great superhero minds got together and figured out how to remove Ock’s arms. No one knew he could control them from a distance, so he broke out of jail pretty quickly. Carolyn gets to ASM Annual 1 and the formation of The Sinister Six, and Ock remembers this one. Peter tells MJ even he isn’t sure how he won the day in that one, but he gave it all he had, and it worked out. Ock takes over the narrative, detailing his next appearance, which I’m gonna skip over since it’ll be in the next block (Still having to dance because of the era hopping), then Trilby takes the story back up…
Joe Bennett is now drawing the best Spider-Man of this era behind Romita, Jr. Ringo is a close third, and will certainly surpass Bennett in the future, but Bennett is really coming into his own. Then we go back to Trainer for some retconning…
Every time we cut to Ock & Carolyn, they reuse that panel of his underwater base. It’s almost funny how many times it’s in this book.
It’s very funny to me that we covered Ock’s first 4 appearances and then jumped to whenever this is immediately. Presumably around 1994. I wonder if literally any of this was actually planned back then, Stunner’s origin and all. Seems unlikely, but who knows? Well, then we jump to Kaine killing Ock, which… kinda makes it seem like his memories shouldn’t be terribly out of date at all, and he could even still know Peter’s secret. Urich tells Trilby Ock’s death had to have been an elaborate hoax, and we’re done with them. So…
Weird silent panel there.
Chameleon gets no respect.
The establishing shot of the underwater base is in this book 8 times. An establishing shot of The Daily Bugle is in 5 times. Too bad for Joe that Peter & MJ kept changing locations, he coulda saved even more time. Pretty funny, really. Well, that wasn’t the best recap of Ock’s deal. Way too much time spent on Trainer retcons. I would’ve liked any of the narrators to try to explain the whole “Aunt May inherits a nuclear plant” story, or seen them tackle Doc Ock becoming so scared of Spider-Man he froze in fear. Ah, well. Only so many pages. But there are more pages.
Over the next 3 pages, they try to explain all the impossible stuff Ock can do. Then we got letters, and then the main creative team is randomly back for a kind of epilogue.
This whole business is mad uncomfortable. I mean, on the one hand, it’s sort of being sympathetic to a woman who doesn’t conform to social beauty standards, which is rare and nice, but then it frames her story as “her life sucked because she was fat, but then we jammed her into a dumb machine that let her pretend to be someone’s super specific fetish, and that was the only time she was happy and/or I really loved her.” Gross!