Finally for this block, a look at 2 more titles with Spider-Man in them that are not Spider-Man titles. Marvel Comics Presents is back. This was the 2nd try. But, the truth is, anthologies just don’t seem to sell too well, and MCP has never managed even a fraction of the run of Vol. 1 in subsequent tries. This issue saw print the same month as parts 1 & 2 of One More Day, and it contains a Spider-Man short. The cover by J. Scott Campbell is a wraparound, and the back is way weaker for some reason:
Man that guy draws weird faces. The big news in this title for me was the Hellcat story by the wife/husband team of Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, a wacky bit of business about Hellcat being made the sole Initiative superhero for Alaska, and hijinks ensuing. It ran for the first 4 issues, then segued into a Hellcat mini by Kathryn and the great David LaFuente. But here on the ol’ blog, our concern is a Spidey joint by Stuart Moore, Clayton Henry, Mark Morales and Sotocolor.
Unsurprisingly, I guess, I completely forgot about this. At the time, this would be riffing on the established notion that all Captain Britains in the multiverse were part of the Captain Britain Corps probably, but from 2024, it looks like nothing so much as the prototype for all the Spider-Verse material that’s yet to come. Huh.
This is short enough I’m just gonna run it.
Pretty wacky. Honestly, by the time we hit the real Spider-Verse material… Well, I think this might’ve been a better setup. Anyway, that brings us to…
When Grant Morrison left X-Men after revolutionizing the property for the early 2000s, Marvel was looking for another big name. They sort of found one in Joss Whedon. He’d made well-liked nerd shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and Firefly. He wasn’t a massive name in the real world, but for nerds, he was huge. Smarting from the content of the Star Wars prequels, nerds took to wearing t-shirts that said “Joss Whedon is my master now,” a thoroughly insane sentiment. And now, Whedon has pretty thoroughly disgraced himself and you still own that shirt. Maybe be your own master, pal, I don’t know. Anyway, Whedon was paired with star artist John Cassaday, and they did a bunch of increasingly late issues of this new title, Astonishing X-Men. So late that eventually, a new creative team took over, with the promise that Whedon & Cassaday would finish their story in a special later (And this would not be the last time that happened in the coming years, either). And this is that. We’re actually skipping ahead a little, for a change in this block, as this is published the month after ASM 557, but that’s fine. Spider-Man is in this more than I remembered despite not figuring into the rest of the run. This run saw such events as the introduction of the perennial fan favorite X-Man, Armor, the blossoming of the romance between Cyclops and Emma Frost, the much needed return from the dead of Colossus, and the absolutely terrible idea to have the Danger Room be sentient and enslaved by Professor X. Along the way, Kitty Pryde got trapped in a giant bullet flying through space. Look, these things happen. So, now, it’s time for Whedon and Cassaday and the great colorist Laura Martin to get her out. But, like, these are the first pages:
It doesn’t just have Spider-Man in it, it’s from his perspective to start! Unusual choice. And not a great voice for him. Man, the Whedonism. His brand of humor became so overexposed after the first Avengers movie. The backlash is intense. We cut to Kitty stuck in her giant bullet, then Colossus confronting the bad guy, who I barely remember. These aliens had kidnapped Colossus and faked his death as some kinda prophecy, and now it’s turning out that was all a lie pushed by this guy who wants to use the unique metal in Colossus’ skin to kill the aliens’ entire race. It’s a whole thing. Also Emma Frost and Cyclops are there fightin’ people. Meanwhile, Wolverine, Armor, Danger, who is the personified Danger Room, Beast, and Agent Brand (The leader of the newly created SWORD, the space agency version of SHIELD, get it?), who Beast is also dating, I think, are hijacking a spaceship to go help them. I think. Also Armor says Colossus doesn’t know about Kitty. I am really coming in blind after not having seen or thought about this series in 17 years.
Oh, ok, the next page is where Brand reveals she has a thing for Beast, ok. See, I sort of remember things. Well, Colossus fights his guy and then the guy who I think was originally the bad guy helps him and they kill the current bad guy, so he can’t use Colossus to commit genocide anymore. Hey, that’s nice. Back at Earth, the FF heroically combine their powers to send the big bullet to the Negative Zone so it can’t hit Earth, saving the day. But then we learn some kinda mind control or something is on them, and also every other hero with them is living out a fantasy where THEY save the day, with 3 others offered as examples:
Colossus forces that guy to tell him the big bullets weakness, or else Piotr will declare himself ruler of that guy’s planet, which he can do, for reasons. Look, this is the end of a 25-issue story, I can’t get into everything. Then the X-Men learn Storm and Spider-Man haven’t been able to wake anyone else up. Storm says “the most powerful seem to be the most powerfully hit,” but if that were true, he never coulda gotten through to her. I’m to believe that Storm’s less powerful than the various junior X-Men in that room? C’mon. Well, things are looking bad, and Emma and Kitty realize they’re not gonna be able to pull off any last minute saves, for her or for the planet Earth.
Across the next 4 pages, Kitty phases a giant bullet through the entire planet, the most insane use of her power she’ll ever pull off. And then… there’s a bunch of people reacting to her loss! Whoops!
I thought this is where they got her out, but this is actually where she got “permanently” stuck! Shows what I know. Man, so who got her out? Ah, it was none other than Magento, in the hands of future X-Writer Mr. Matt Fraction, some 3 years hence. A comic I didn’t even read! Boy, my memory really turned to mush on this one. Well, anyway, Spider-Man’s part ended back there before the phase, so that’s it. The End! The X-Men will continue to do incredibly insular things that mostly ignore the rest of the Marvel U elsewhere.
That does it for this block. Now that all that old business is out of the way, next time, we’ll continue into the new status quo.