Just when I get to stop putting the awkward “V2” on ASM, I have to start doing it here. After the highwater mark of ASM 500… this. Not excited! I have never read this. I passed on this book. Between Ramos and Venom, it wasn’t selling anything I wanted. But, here we are, this blog has inspired me to buy plenty of other bad comics, why not these? Maybe they’ll surprise me. Bet they won’t! That is one early 2000s lookin logo. Weird font choice, lots of effects, a glassy finish, stuff going on inside the word “Spider-Man”… The kinda logo you can tell which Mac OS it was made with. Well, anyway, it’s basically just issue 58 of PPSM, with Paul Jenkins, Humberto Ramos, Wayne Faucher and Studio F all on hand. First, we see a woman walking alone at night until she’s accosted by a vaguely Venom-shaped shadow. Then…
I think those misshapen creatures are Randy, Glory and Caryn Earle, seemingly unaware the status quo has changed and they’re not around anymore.
“Big John Anderson” is a legitimate lower primate as drawn by Ramos. I hate this so much. And look, Jill is also there. This story is so obviously meant to have run a long time ago in PPSM instead of the 7 months of filler that book ended with. Peter has gone home largely to get a break from the crowd, and laments that sometimes, socializing seemed easier when he was playing D&D around the lunch table with friends in high school, which he OBVIOUSLY DIDN’T DO BECAUSE HE HAD NO FRIENDS IN HIGH SCHOOL, PAUL. Meanwhile, the cops have found that woman from the beginning, with all her stuff still in her purse and “puncture marks above her kidney,” which identify her assailant as “their guy.” Also meanwhile:
Yeah, yeah. Now it’s 2 hours later, and Peter and May have gone to the hospital to see Flash. Remember Flash being in the hospital? Another thing Zeb Wells was forced to just spin his wheels on while they all waited for Jenkins’ material to start getting published again. I sure wonder what the deal was with this. Liz is also there, as Jenkins still doesn’t remember she & Flash no longer mean anything to each other and Betty should be here, as the doctor takes the bandages off his face. Everyone is expecting a horror show (For some reason? They don’t seem to have had any forewarning that he’d be all messed up)…
This is really ridiculous. This book is 5 months behind the status quo. It’s so obvious it was meant to be published sooner. Meanwhile, different hospital, the lady attacked at the top of this issue is alive, but in a coma, and the doctor tells a cop her injuries don’t make sense, that they must’ve been done by a wild animal or a vampire. Cut to Big John waxing poetic about how “The Vampire,” as the killer is now dubbed in the papers, is a dumb name. He and Randy are hanging out with some unnamed guys, with Big John ogling Caryn as she hangs up laundry, while Peter is off swinging around as Spider-Man, looking as awkward and terrible as usual under Ramos’ pencil in a 2-page splash. His Spider Sense leads him to a train tunnel, where someone is screaming, and he descends into the darkness so this dumb story can presumably finally get underway.
Ramos’ action staging continues to be so bad it borders on incomprehensible sometimes.
Hard-to-follow action and really fancy monologuing continues. I think they both barely avoid being hit by a train, but Venom could also have picked it up, it’s hard to tell.
No matter what this story ends up being about, that’s categorically untrue, so yay, this’ll be fun. This volume of TAC runs 27 issues, most of them written by Jenkins, mercifully less than half drawn by Ramos. The ones Jenkins did not write, I know without reading them, are going to be an absolute chore.I have no excitement here. I have previously read 7, maybe 8 of them, not sure about the final issue. We’ll see.