We’ve found our way to the last completed Marvel project by Mike Weiringo. He had one more thing in progress when he died, which was completed as a charity thing, but this was finished. As with so many things we’re looking at in this block, it was published during Back In Black despite featuring the red & blue suit, so it goes here. My recollection is it’s not super great, storywise, but it’s 4 more issues of Ringo on Spidey and the FF, and that’s plenty to get my money. Jeff Parker spins the tale. Parker was a cartoonist who did a bunch of stuff around the industry and would continue to after this. This is 2 years after his Agents of Atlas, a comic bringing back the obscure, so-called “Avengers of the 1950s” as a new team. Ringo is inked here by Wade Von Grawbadger, longtime go-to guy for Stuart Immonen. Wade is a great inker, but Ringo not inked by Karl Kesel just doesn’t quite feel right. And Pete Pantazis colors. A perfectly fine creative team. So why do I not remember this being so great? Let’s see if I’m wrong.
Spidey just doesn’t seem quite as snappy as with Kesel.
It’s not really the Surfer, tho. As Spider-Man goes to confront him (With dialogue suggesting this takes place sometimes not long after the first Galactus story?), he learns iit’s the Impossible Man. Who’s that? Well…
He’s a very powerful, madcap intergalactic imp, not unlike DC’s Mr. Mxyzptlk, only usually obsessed with the FF rather than Superman. Well, he eventually gets around to saying he’s here with a dire warning for the FF, but forgot where their building is.
Impy turns into the Spider-Mobile and drives Spider-Man very poorly through the streets before Spidey tells him to turn into something that can fly, and he becomes a fighter jet. When they arrive at the landed craft in Central Park, Impy calls the lion-faced guy who’s emerged “the Imperator.”
Impy is very upset that his new friend just got zapped, and leaps into the fray. Upon proving much more difficult to injure, he gets hit with some kinda beams that seems to tear him apart, leaving him not much more than a green mist floating over an unconscious Spider-Man. Ouch! Then, finally…
“Made us watch a video” is pretty funny. Reed and Sue have taken the kids on an educational trip, which nukes my guess that this was the past, and we also learn the FF’s usual sensors to detect aliens invading were turned off so Johnny wouldn’t wake up and spoil Ben’s prank. Oops!
Ben & Johnny run at the guy again, but are repelled by some kind of force field that puts Johnny out. So Thing goes it alone.
That seems bad! This one seems like it’s more in the lighthearted realm Ringo wanted to be working in. It may seem light, but it’s a fine first issue. I don’t know if it’ll sustain 3 more, but I guess we’ll see shortly. Maybe I was just so caught up in the hype of this time period that this sort of thing didn’t make much of an impact. Post-Civil War, the Marvel U was so tightly connected, almost every comic telling the same story to some degree (Even the largely self-contained Brand New Day stuff we looked at still had plenty of references to registration and whatnot). And it was, no bones about it, exciting. Even if you weren’t super into the registration/anti-registration status quo. Everything being connected made it feel big and important. And things that weren’t connected, less so. But it’s been a long time, and I’m not caught up in the hysteria anymore. Maybe I’ll enjoy this more now than I did then.