A paper comic book! It happened! I don’t remember buying this, but I assume I got it when I decided to get every Roger Stern Spider-Man comic in the period where I quit buying. Because this one features a first story by Roger, Val Semeiks, Mike Getty and Andres Mossa. We begin with Spider-Man arriving at Aunt May’s house, thinking about how he always loves coming back here.
Yes, we’re strolling down memory lane with May. She says her friend’s boyfriend brought a friend, and guess what, it was Benjamin Parker. May and Ben hit it off immediately as the 4 of them played on the beach in the day and went dancing at night, but May reveals that, when Ben went back to war, she got involved with another guy, a Tony Stark lookin’ guy called Johnny Jerome, who took her dancing one night when she heard a familiar voice…
Of course, we know all about Johnny Jerome, and Peter should, too, since we read and he starred in TAC Annual 4. And Roger must have read that to write this, so why isn’t Peter bringing it up? Maybe he’ll get there. Well, anyway, Ben there told her Jerome was nothing but trouble, a crook, but she had hearts in her eyes. Internally, Peter compares that to him dating Black Cat. Then May relates and Stern recreates the scene from the TAC Annual where Johnny wants May to run away with him, but Ben shows up and tells her he and his buddies just robbed a jewelry store. He doesn’t use the original dialogue or anything, which feels rather un-Roger Stern to me.
Val Semeiks is doing some weird faces in this. He’s gotta be getting up there by now. Looking over my post about the original annual (Added to this blog some 6 years ago as I type this!), I guess Peter and May didn’t interact too much in that story, so I guess she wouldn’t mention his involvement. In another time, Peter sure would, with a footnote leading back to it, but I guess not in 2009. Well, anyway, May said yes, and tells us it was her idea to bring Richard along to play the song, even, because she knew Ben had been carrying that ring around and she wanted it. Very fun. Richard, younger than Peter is now, was the best man at their wedding, and Ben returned the favor years later.
ASM Annual 5, of course. May goes on to drop the bombshell that the reason she was so overprotective of Peter as he was growing up is she’d already lost one child. She and Ben had tried to start a family, but she miscarried, and Dr. Bromwell, the same Doc she saw well into old age, said she may not be able to survive having a kid, so they gave up. And then they got Peter. Which is actually a pretty easy way to sweeten their relationship in just a few panels, dang. Peter then segues into his origin and Ben’s death real quick, in case you don’t know.
If anyone was gonna bring up Nathan, even in this continuity-averse era, it would be Roger!
There you have it. Always sweet to get one like this. The rest of this issue is split between a story about the perpetually on the cusp of cancellation but somehow still in print Spider-Girl story by he regular team of Defalco and Frenz and some Petey comics by Fred Hembeck, and I’m not going to cover them. Next post, we go digital again. With a couple exceptions, I don’t think there’s anymore paper ASM-related comics coming up for a long time.