So, the Spider-books all ended with the November ‘98 issues. The same month, they published this. What is this? Exactly what it looks like. Having brought you The Final Chapter, we roll back to Chapter One. Byrne is going to remake the original Spider-Man comics for a new generation. Is this a good idea? No! Did I buy all of them? Yes! So we’re doing this mess before we move on to the shiny new number ones. More than anything, this is a fascinating study of John Byrne’s hubris. He has become a stickler for the canon, holding things sacred and chastizing people for not respecting it…except the parts he chooses to change himself. It’s fine when he does it. This issue alone will offer contradictory examples of what I mean, because Byrne said at the time that his goal was to streamline the early material. In a magazine published about the relaunch (Which I just happened to re-read before this, can you imagine?), he said it’s clear that the early comics are Ditko and Lee flying by the seat of their pants, just kicking an issue out the door every month, but if you were going to create the foundations of Spider-Man with purpose, you wouldn’t do it that way. And, like, duh, but they did, too late. So he’s decided he can change things, move things around, do whatever he thinks is necessary to make the original comics flow better. Several years from now, Marvel will publish a major event that recontextualizes a famous Byrne story, and guess what, it sent him into a rage! And it was nothing compared to what he’s gonna do here. Except, at the same time, he’s also going to continue to be weird continuity nerd. Anything he deems worth changes deserves it, anything he doesn’t is sacrosanct. Byrne also said that this would try not to invalidate Untold Tales of Spider-Man while fully and intentionally overwriting Amazing Fantasy 16, 17 & 18. The megalomania… Ok, enough rambling preamble, let’s get to the disappointment! Byrne writes, pencils, inks, even letters. John Kalisz colors.
Time for more rambling preamble. Look at that drawing. This is how we start? The eyes are so far apart he wouldn’t be able to see out of them! My feeling for Byrne’s art in this period (And really, for the rest of his career) is it looks rushed, always. He inks himself, and there’s a lack of polish. When we get past this mess, we’ll see him inked by Scott Hanna, one of the finest inkers of his generation, and the difference is striking. Especially since most of this series was published concurrently with the relaunch. Anyway.
I’m not gonna stop on every single change, I promise, but for one thing, it didn’t have to change from a microscope to a computer. It may be the 90s, but people still need microscopes, and that microscope has been a plot element remarkably often since, as we’ve seen. But also, we’re calling this the past of 1998. Someone bought a little boy a computer in something like 1986??? What’s that supposed to be, an Apple II? Look at that tower, computers didn’t even look like that yet. And it would’ve been prohibitively expensive!! It should still be a microscope!
Here begins one of this series’ biggest problems at the same time as its stupidest, most awful retcon. First, Byrne is something like 47 and thinks he can write teenagers. The slang, the fashion, nothing about this is going to work. He thinks they want to go see the Rolling Stones, he thinks a black kid wants to see the Rolling Stones! It’s like 199-something, that kid is listening to gangsta rap music! The white kids probably are, too! The Rolling Stones! As someone who turned 20 the month this was issued, I was still very much close enough to the demographic to read this entire series like “How do you do, fellow kids?” Oh, man, I’m only on page 3, this is gonna be my longest post ever. The other thing is, as implied on this page, Peter is about to get his Spider-Powers from a science demonstration by Otto Octavius using his metal arms. Byrne said the original open air experiment was just too absurd in 1998 (True!) and that 2 radiation-based accidents in the early days was too much of a coincidence. What? The FF are radiation accidents, Hulk and Daredevil are radiation accidents, a huge portion of Marvel villains are radiation accidents. Should all of them be here, too? Stupid. Well, anyway, in this version, Otto’s doing his thing in a safer environment, but a spider gets in there, and it messes up the whole thing, causing the explosion that creates Doc Ock, and also…
Ouch! A much more violent origin all of a sudden.
Now we’re off to yet another retcon. Byrne said the burglar robbing the Parker home was too much of a coincidence, too. So he’s added some background to the burglar, Ben & the cop to tie it more tightly together. And, of course, Marv Wolfman already tried to make it less random. He was immediately dinged for this, with nerds wanting to know about ASM 200, when the burglar comes back for the hidden treasure, and he was like “Well, maybe he found out about that later.” Totally pointless! So, now Peter gets out of the hospital, and then “one day,” he’s almost hit by the car from Amazing Fantasy 15, does the leap, discovers he can climb, crushes the pipe, etc. That night, he wonders what to do with it all, if the FF need another member, and then he sees Crusher Hogan’s now $1000 deal on TV with the folks
How is the Crusher Hogan from 1962 dressed more authentically like a 1998 wrestler than Byrne’s 1998 wrestler? He looks like a supervillain.
There’s a contingent of people who get way too worked up about how, they say, Ditko CLEARLY intended the blue parts of the suit to be black in AF 15. And that might even be true, but he drew 38 issues of ASM with it blue, so who cares? Byrne cares. So, now it’s red & black in the early days, officially. The spider on his back is also blue. It was blue in AF 15, but recolored for future printings. So Byrne decided it had to be blue here, and he had to come up with an in-continuity explanation for it changing to red. Really.
I would like to watch a show called “Man That’s Weird.” At school, Peter overhears Flash threatening to beat up a kid who doesn’t like Spider-Man, and hears Liz saying he’s dreamy, but quickly learns that doesn’t mean anything for Peter Parker. But he’s got a show tonight, the show. He’s already spending the money in his head as he departs. His Spider Sense warns him that someone’s watching as Spider-Man leaves his bedroom window, but he doesn’t know he has a Spider Sense yet and just feels weird. It’s the burglar, casing the house to steal Peter’s new computer.
So after the show, he doesn’t stop the burglar. In fact, the burglar, assuming Spidey is “a second story man” like him and that he was robbing the Parkers, asks him for help, but doesn’t get it. If the burglar thinks Spider-Man was robbing the house, why does he also try to rob the house? That makes this WORSE, not better! Then he wonders why a cop from Forest Hills is in Manhattan. Byrne says this always bothered him, but he also doesn’t offer any kind of explanation!
Ok, so he’s got personal beef with the burglar, that still doesn’t explain why he was downtown! What is being fixed, here?
Occasionally, the dialogue is just like the original. Bu when Spidey arrives at the warehouse, the burglar is glad to see him. Says since he saw Spider-Man casing the house, he thought he’d come back. But he wasn’t casing the place, he was climbing out the window! That’s some recon.
And we’re out. The story is longer and crappier, we did it. And things have only just begun to be bad! Now, to be totally fair, trying to make this stuff appealing to a younger audience is a 100% understandable and worthy goal. Not many teens in the late 90s are gonna click with Lee/Ditko. I mean, I was able to enjoy what I saw of them even younger than that, but they also seemed weird and ancient to me. Making the early stuff contemporary is a windmill Marvel will tilt at repeatedly in the 21st Century, with varying degrees of success. I get it. And, as Byrne mentioned, he’d developed a rep for this sort of thing. He did sort of “right the ship” for FF, writing and drawing what was and still often is considered the 2nd best FF run ever made (I put him at 3rd or 4th. We’ll see issues from the runs I think eclipse him if I make it that far). But DC got him to create a definitive new version of Superman’s history after they wiped out their multiverse, and what he chose to do in 1986 really did become the official canon from then on. So you can see why someone would think he should do this. But this series will offer ample evidence that they were wrong. It was not popular on release, and is stricken from the record pretty much as soon as it’s done. I’ve not read these since they came out. I have dreaded them. And here we are.