The weird retro cover copy for this story is baffling. I think they’re trying to reference ASM 121, specifically, but it doesn’t gel with the seriousness of the situation. It’s not 1971 anymore, comics are different. I don’t get why this story was serialized across the 3 titles. Especially given that the other 2 are canceled once it’s over. And especially since it’s 4 issues, not 3, requiring 2 ASMs. Why not just do 4 issues of ASM? I don’t make the rules, tho. The Amazingly Lumpy Spider-Man swings around, recapping for us, as Quesada continues to waste time drawing the most detailed spaghetti webs anyone’s ever done. Spider-Man knows Aunt May is beyond the help of medical science, and this is a J. Michael Straczynski comic (Sort of), so where else would he go but to Dr. Strange? He explains the situation to Strange, who recaps his origin at him/us to make the point that the Sorcerer Supreme couldn’t even fix Strange’s hands (Which, in retrospect, only gets more and more utterly preposterous as the depiction of Strange’s power and influence have gotten more and more outrageous over 40 years). Peter tells him May is not going to die, and Strange says we all die.
I do like that page layout, tho.
This is all very convoluted and seemingly unnecessary. What the “Hands of Death” do is let Spider-Man appear to a whole buncha people, maybe all at once or something, I don’t know… the Night Nurse (???), Beast, T’Challa, Reed, Curt Connors, Morbius, Doc Ock, Dr. Doom, the Wizard, and the girl from the weird weird X-Team called the X-Statix whose name is like Dead Girl or something, who’s a ghost, I think, I don’t know. We’re told they all say the same thing. He comes back and tells Strange no one can help. Strange gives a little speech about the cycle of life and death being essential to the universe. Then he goes to get Spidey a drink, and Spider-Man recites the spell Stephen did earlier to use the hands himself. Strange rushes back in as Spider-Man disappears.
That doesn’t work, so he tries to influence his past self to know what’s coming, but then spooky interdimensional monsters attack him, and he ends up just watching May get shot twice at the same time. Then the monsters catch him, and then Strange appears and banishes them.
Remember ASM Vol. 2 42? The world seemed so full of promise back then. Who could’ve known we were on the tipping point? Well, I could, because this is my 2nd time through all this, but you know.
So they get back to the present, and Strange gives Peter an impassioned speech about how the best thing he can do is be there for May in her final moments. That everyone dies and we all lose those we love, but he should be there for her in the moment. So, Spider-Man leaves, and that red bird from last issue is hanging around, and he’s replaying some of what Strange said in his mind, when a voice says, “He was right. YOU cannot change that.”
Now who’s this, then? Each of these issues is full of back matter. Last issue ran Peter’s very long Official Handbook entry, plus stuff about his various different costumes and even how his stupid organic webshooters work, and some process stuff on the art. This time out, we get Mary Jane’s handbook entry, and then a reprint of the first 5 pages of ASM 259, when MJ first started telling her story. Then the art process stuff this time is about Quesada using “digital tools” to layout the pages before drawing them traditionally, something he still does. I don’t know why they obfuscated. He’s using a drawing tablet, Photoshop or some other program, and importantly to me, SketchUp. I first recall seeing SketchUp in some process stuff posted by the artist Pete Woods, who’d created the city of Metropolis for his Superman run in 3D, so he could use it for backgrounds. But I think this was published before that. Since it also doesn’t name the software or explicitly say he’s using 3D models, I guess I wouldn’t have really known what I was looking at, but I sure do now. SketchUp is a super valuable tool for creating complex buildings and backgrounds. You can build your own pretty easily, and people also upload models to a free library. I used it extensively in Closed Galaxy, built the whole city like Pete Woods, as well as props and things. It’s become very widespread. And I’ll tell ya, Quesada uses it better than most artists. Most of the time, if you’re familiar with 3D programs, their use is really obvious. Even if you don’t know the software, you see comics with these too-perfect, plain, sparsely detailed backgrounds and you can instinctively feel the difference between that and hand drawn backgrounds using nothing but the artist’s instincts and a perspective grid. Additionally, for all that the models are geometrically perfect, the camera can really look warped and weird in 3D programs, SketchUp especially. So you wind up with these buildings you know for a fact are perfectly proportioned and in perfect perspective that just look… wrong. Quesada manages to absorb the models into his style, give them the same sheen as the figures. It doesn’t really look like he’s tracing 3D models. As someone who knows the struggle with that firsthand, I salute him for that one. I try to be fair when I’m talking about stuff I don’t like, after all.