It’s the gang from last issue, with Rodney Ramos helping Dan Green ink. That guy sure is doing a lot of emergency work in the Spider-Office lately. He is also inking Darick Robertson on the beloved Vertigo series Transmetroplitan at this time. Jenkins’ radically different approach becomes ever-more apparent as we open on Peter and Randy looking in the fridge, where they’ve each marked their own food with post its, except Peter has almost nothing.
This is shades of things to come. This book is slowing down, focusing on characters, and all of Marvel (and then all of comics) is heading in that direction. And it’s nice! You spend your whole life following a character like Peter Parker, and he gets so few opportunities to be a real person. All aided & abetted by Buckingham’s less bombastic, more people-focused style. And it’s a good thing he has that going for him, because as Spider-Man breaks up a mugging in the next 3 pages, I’m pretty sure he’s still swiping Spideys, mostly from John Byrne. He’s even drawing the eyes too far apart.
Peter heads out to May’s, where they share happy memories of Uncle Ben as he puts on a record and asks her to dance.
As comics moved in this direction, a lot of old heads got mad. “There’s not enough action!” and so forth. And I really kinda wonder how someone could read comics for decades and have that complaint. I mean, you don’t… well, a reasonable person doesn’t keep coming back to Spider-Man for decades because they can’t wait to see him beat up Rhino for the 500th time. You come back because you love Peter Parker, and Aunt May and MJ and JJJ and everyone else. And this new approach is giving you more quality time with them. Now, I I could say a lot about how this “decompression” approach and Marvel’s editorial choices have gone wrong in the last decade or so, mostly by keeping the stories as “decompressed” while all-but ignoring the people inside the costumes, but that would be getting way ahead of myself. In this period, it’s a breath of fresh air. And still not skimping too much on action, as Spidey leaves Aunt May’s to later find himself involved in a shootout between the cops and mime-themed gang.
Solid quips! Spidey thinks to himself this is the perfect time to try out some new material, as he lets the mimes have with both his fists and his quips until the fight’s over. And then, later, he meets up with Johnny Storm, as promised on the cover. They’re just catching up, and it’s intimated that Spider-Man disappeared again after Peter came to terms with MJ’s death (Not that you’d know it reading ASM, with its strange feeling that too much is happening but nothing’s really happening). Spidey is will to admit he’s lost someone important to him, and asks his old pal for advice.
And we close on that thing, which Peter has been fretting over all issue, and it’s something people have talked about around Spider-Man for yeeeeears up to this point:
People have always said, since Spider-Man was more or less the only hero known for being funny before Deadpool came along, Peter Parker could be a comedian. And I seem to recall as a young man, I thought it was lame that he bombed here, but as an older fellow, I think it’s a shrewd point that a lot of people who’re funny in the moment wouldn’t necessarily be the same trying to do prepared material. Also: The Old Parker Luck. But, man, this stuff feels as refreshing and pleasant now as it did back then. What a nice change of pace. ASM is going to get there, too, but… we have a ways to go yet.