JM DeMatteis continues to haunt the margins of the Spider-Verse. I have the vaguest memories of this issue. It has no less than 3 artists. Seems like most of it’s done by Al Rio, inked by Dan Scaeter, but Liam Sharpe gets top billing. The differences will be obvious. John Kalisz and Liam Sharpe color. Has Sharpe come up here before? He came up in the 90s doing weird, over-muscled stuff with a lot of light & dark, and eventually became a really good artist. The only thing I really remember about this comic is this image of Man-Thing, and him being white, and that being weird.
It is, indeed, weird. Also, he’s a lot more buff and a lot less furry/mossy than usual. Maybe that’s because he’s “K’ad-Mon of the Fallen Stars,” I guess. An apostrophe AND a dash!
Al Rio is one of J. Scott Campbell’s earliest imitators, but seems to be trying to do a quasi-Romita, Sr. thing here. So it’s kind of like a reteaming of DeMatteis & Luke Ross.
There’s so much media in the years before 9/11 depicting the towers exploding. It’s kind of crazy. Peter remembers he’s Spider-Man and jumps, only to fall to his death, and then, thankfully, wake up from a nightmare. I don’t know if I could handle another alternate reality. Peter wakes up in a place that looks nothing like their apartment, but we’re told it is. Aunt May is in the kitchen, acting weird, saying she had a dream she can’t remember that makes the real world feel not right, just like him. Now it’s time for Liam Sharpe. But he’s doing something different here.
Ted Sallis was Man-Thing last I heard. I don’t know what’s goin’ on. But look at that early 3D art. John Byrne’s not the only one goofin’ around with computers. But while Byrne’s mostly doing Autocad-type stuff, Sharpe’s trying to be a digital Dave McKean.
Pretty wild. Meanwhile, in normal art, Spider-Man is swinging around, still feeling weird, acting on a tip that The Scriers are “in New York for some kind of secret conclave.”
Couldn’t let someone else have the last word on that, eh? Boy, do I not care about this!
“Scrier is some ridiculous, all-powerful being.”
“Actually, it’s just a bunch of guys in suits.”
“ACTUALLY…!” Blah, who cares? It was a bad idea the first time, it’s a bad idea now. Spidey jumps in, beats up all the Scriers, and then is mindwiped by the “real” Scrier and sent home to forget about all this. Then, some more familiar Laim Sharpe art, but not in a familiar context.
Ok, Ted Sallis is Man-Thing. And Zendaya is Meechie. Look how Sharpe renders those Scriers:
Boy oh boy. I’ve read a lot comics I was just trying to get to the end of for this blog, and a lot of them were written by JM DeMatteis, but this is some next level Who Cares? Since this Spider-Man comic has to get back to, like, having Spider-Man in it, Man-Thing appears to Spider-Man in New York, Al Rio doing a half-hearted rip of the Spider-Man on the cover of ASM 121, and M-T tells Spidey all about… whatever Scrier is doing.
Man, what would he do if he DID mean to be rude? Spider-Man makes a good point about this not being a Spider-Man story. We switch back to Sharpe’s abstract dreamscapes for awhile, as the 2 heroes go off to do their hero thing, ostensibly. It’s not like you can really tell what’s happening. And then Sharpe draws a Spider-Man, which seems worth noting…
Creepy. Then there’s this…
Seems like Outrider would try to give him a world he’d be happy in if he didn’t want Spider-Man to break right out of it, which he does on the next page, taking control and changing it to a world where he takes the bullet meant for Uncle Ben. As he lays dying in his mindscape, Man-Thing confronts Scrier.
So it’s Spider-Man’s decency for the fate of reality, like in ASM 274, only terrible and borderline unreadable, woo. Peter dies in that reality, sending him back to the Nexus to confront “Outrider” as Sharpe takes back over and the book becomes a series of his CG collages. They say good comic art could tell the story without the dialogue, and by that metric, this is among the worst comic art of all time.
This… was a chore. I read it in 2 sittings, which I think is a first for the blog. I could not care less. Glad it’s over.