Hey, ASM 38 and PPSM 38, back to back. It’s like old times, briefly. That “NUFF SAID” banner on the cover announces the arrival of Jemas & Quesada’s latest stunt: They allegedly challenged all their writers to do a silent issue. It was supposed to all be the same month, but schedules were all over the place in this period, so it was more like 2 or 3 months. Some writers really stuck to the letter of the challenge and put not a single word in their books. Some cheated a little. Grant Morrison memorably did a silent adventure only for people to talk on the last page of his New X-Men issue. And, as you can see, Jenkins has leaned all the way into it to make Spider-Man fight a mime gang. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t cheat a little. We open on a mime getting on stage in front of a bunch of other mimes to do a presentation on Spider-Man.
Bucky doing recycling even in these tiny images.
Good credits. Peter Parker, meanwhile, is walking down the street carrying a comically large stack of… I guess books? They look very thin. Maybe booklets put together by his students?.. When Barker the dog bowls him over, out of control, being chased by a winded Caryn. Peter gets home to grade papers, but is visibly bored, and so…
Scooby Doo gags, even. Spider-Man goes on to find a lady with a baby carriage being held up by the mime gang, but when he saves them, he finds the baby is fake.
This is one goofy comic. This is sub-Mantlo silly. But I guess when you’re already working under a pretty bizarre gimmick, why not get silly? And boy, do they, as the mimes’ VM bug pulls up ot a stop light along side… the monks from PPSM 36 in THEIR VW Bug. Tensions mount, and they race off the line at the greenlight. Followed by the tank. But the effort apparently makes the monks’ car implode? All silly, all the time. The mimes continue to turn their ludicrous arsenal against our hero, and the tank also seems to blow up a line of police cars, with the cops bailing out none the worse for wear like this is an 80s GI Joe cartoon.
Many recycled Spider-Men do some webbing, some welding, and who knows what else, but he is soon annoyed the mimes aren’t coming in after him. He finds them still fighting the cops. He makes a giant web arrow pointing down at himself, and then, dear reader, something no one has ever seen in a Spider-Man comic, guaranteed:
No dignity.
Man, this is something. The mimes are led out by the cops, who try to take a statement from dudes who refuse to speak, much comedy business, day saved.
My God, Magnum, Buckingham even recycled that MJ head from PPSM 23, where he recycled it from PPSM 20. I mean come ON, man. The rest of this oversized issue, like every issue in this Nuff Said stunt, runs the writer’s script, so you can see what went on behind the scenes (And maybe to let the writers feel like their contribution won’t go unnoticed). This was maybe the best part of the stunt, as it let you see the dramatic differences in how writers compose their scripts and communicate with their collaborators. No matter what you thought of the Jemas & Quesada Show, you had to give them that they were really trying to shake things up.