Sam Keith! His stuff is just plain weird, very loose and very cartoony, and you either like it or don’t, but what’s rather fascinating to me is how big he got in the 90s. He became the main artist on Marvel Comics Presents, and made that a hot book as a result. He went to Image and launched the Maxx, hands down the weirdest, least-”Image” Image book of its era, and that got adapted into an animated series on Mtv. His stuff is as un-mainstream as possible and somehow reached pretty impressive mainstream heights. The 90s really were the weirdest decade in comics. Sam Keith is here to help Zeb Wells close out PPSM. And also tie up a dangling subplot that Wells didn’t start, but was the last to touch. Colors this month are simply credited to “Avalon,” one of the many competing color houses of the period.
Really nobody who’s art looks much like Sam Keith. It’s constantly morphing, sometimes kind of realistic, sometimes extremely cartoony, with a unique vibe from the first panel. The guy on TV babbles about dealing with your life over some images of Jones Beach, as we sink into the water and see…
…something we’ll never be able to unsee. Then there’s one of the comic strip page ads for Altoids they got Charles Burns to do around this time. Always jarring. His art style is so strong, stark black & white, that it brings you comic reading to a screeching halt. And then the idea that beloved indie comix darling Charles Burns is hocking Altoids at you sinks in, and it’s just… very weird.
Meanwhile, back in the comic, Peter is being mesmerized by the infomercial (I’m not at all clear what this guy is selling), before snapping out of it and deciding he needs to get out. He is, of course, still single here, 3 months after ASM 50 came out. These are really filler comics, no need to bother with continuity. Just trying to maintain quota and have 2 Spider-Man comics on shelves every month until the new plan goes into effect. It feels pretty unfair to Wells and his various collaborators to have them just spin the wheels for 7 months, but then, I doubt the books would’ve been much better if they “counted.” At any rate, this comic gets much more Sam Keith…
This kind of weird metaphysical psychodrama is so in his wheelhouse I wonder if Wells collaborated with him on the plot. Meanwhile, Spider-Man has found some very weird looking people huddled around a hot dog cart in the rain, listening to a cop describe his prostate exam, when a police scanner says the Sandman has been sighted in Jones Beach with a kid.
I mean this is so far removed from the dopey slapstick of Wells’ previous issues, and so at home in Keith’s body of work. Meanwhile, at another stretch of beach, some cops have found what looks to be a giant sand egg, and then a big, monstrous version of Sandman pops out of it and starts smashing, barely able to keep himself together. He spends 3 pages trashing cops before one of them asks him what he wants, and the answer is “I want to kill something!” We have 3 very different parts of Sandman on the loose here. Speaking of which, back with the other two…
I wonder if that one comment was about how poorly received the terrible Mtv story was. I hope so. I can’t really remember, but I hope Wells was rakes over the coals for that dumb, weird junk.
The archetypal Sam Keith female appears. Hopefully this won’t prove as offputting as the transphobic material in the Mtv thing…