{"id":14684,"date":"2022-09-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=14684"},"modified":"2021-06-19T15:02:13","modified_gmt":"2021-06-19T19:02:13","slug":"ssm-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2022\/09\/27\/ssm-1-2\/","title":{"rendered":"SSM -1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If anyone actually read this blog, this could be a controversial decision. I myself am somewhat torn about it. But this title says \u201cAll The Spider-Mans I Have,\u201d so this seems the most efficient way to handle them. As I return to the very beginning, I\u2019m mixing in the material that was added to Spidey\u2019s earliest days in the late 90s, starting with these Flashback issues. As luck would have it, they were all published during the previous block. In July-dated issues of 1997, most of the titles published a \u201c-1\u201d issue instead of the next numbered issue, showing what happened to some of your favorite characters before their series started. Also, every issue is \u201chosted\u201d by a cartoon Stan Lee. Enough preamble, let\u2019s get to it. This gimmick, called \u201cFlashback,\u201d worked a lot better for some books than others. Before that, starting back in 1995, there was the previously mentioned Untold Tales of Spider-Man, new stories carefully inserted into perceived gaps between classic issues of ASM (And there\u2019s a wild story about that). Even Untold Tales got a Flashback -1. And, also, related, the same writer of Untold Tales also did another retcon thing, which we\u2019ll see soon. All of this between 95-97. So while this block technically goes back to the 60s, it\u2019s also gonna be in the 90s. There have since been further retcons into Spider-Man\u2019s earliest days, but I didn\u2019t buy those and don\u2019t care about them. I\u2019m just covering what I got, starting with the -1s. But don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s not 5 issues of Peter Parker, 15-year old nerd. They come up with some different angles. One of them\u2019s very cool. This one\u2019s\u2026 pretty goofy. And kind of meta. Most of these are by the regular creative teams of their era, and such is the case here, so it\u2019s Todd DeZago, Mike Weiringo, Richard Case & Gregory Wright. This is weird, like I finished the last set, but didn\u2019t. Anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, yeah, that\u2019s the kinda thing we\u2019re doing here. The next morning, young Peter Parker wakes up excited for a day of fishing with Uncle Ben. Aunt May\u2019s made wheatcakes for breakfast, naturally. She sees his comics rolled up in his backpack and talks about how they\u2019re dreadful and she wishes he\u2019d read real books. Peter counters that they\u2019re good stories and use a lot of the vocabulary words he learns in school. The age-old argument about comics, really. Soon enough, the fellas are off on their trip. Uncle Ben tries to get Peter to tell him if he has any friends at school, but he doesn\u2019t, and tries to hide it. Then Stan shows back up to say they promised you monsters and it\u2019s taking too long to get to them, so he\u2019s jumping us ahead. Right to Peter getting a bite on his fishing line in the boat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The big monster causes a wave that pushes the boat ashore, and the Parkers run for it, but not far, because\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From the mid-50s to early 60s, Marvel pumped out a lot of generic, terrible monster comics. Even tho it was Stan Lee and many of the artists who\u2019d soon be creating the Marvel Universe, even Jack Kirby, it was just a paycheck, just churning them out to stay afloat. The monsters in this issue are all old Marvel monsters. Including Groot. He\u2019s now the most famous example of one of those monsters finding new life in the superhero continuity. Before him it was Fin Fang Foom, the dragon that\u2019s wound up fighting Iron Man a lot. But actually, the most influential of the monster books would be one about a scientist who accidentally shrinks himself and winds up trying to stay alive in an ant hill, who would go on to be Ant-Man once the focus shifted. There was one called The Hulk that was nothing like The hero Hulk, there was a guy who unturned into a spider, a lot of fun little things, but nothing the people who made them would say they were proud of. Anyway, Groot chases them a bit until\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Our boys try to hide from \u201cThe VanDoom Creature,\u201d but a snapping branch gets its attention, and they\u2019re on the run again. Peter tells Uncle Ben these monsters are all from his comics, and Uncle Ben says maybe May\u2019s right about him not reading them as they realize they\u2019ve run back to the lake, and to Gigantus, the fish monster. It starts fighting The VanDoom Creature, allowing The Parkers to flee into a nearby cave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This thing chases them back outside, and they\u2019re caught between the 2 fighting monsters and the other one. Peter has an idea, tho, grabbing one of their fishing poles, which is metal…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This zaps all the monsters in a strange splash that only takes up \u2154 of 2 pages, with the rest devoted to yet another monster grabbing Uncle Ben. A panicked Peter begs his uncle not to leave him\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, obviously. Can\u2019t have this be real continuity. But it also kinda feels like a cop out to promise stories from the past and then devote most of an issue to a dream that didn\u2019t really happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And that\u2019s that. Pretty wacky. Out of all of them, as I recall, this is the silliest. But there\u2019s only so much you can do with Peter Parker before he was Spider-Man. At least Fantastic Four had Ben & Reed\u2019s WWII service to work with, tho that was getting harder to buy by the 90s. In this month\u2019s Stan\u2019s Soapbox column, Stan Lee talks up the upcoming Blade movie, to be released in 1998. He also mentions they\u2019re making good progress on X-Men, which would of course see release in 2000. But then he mentions upcoming movies for the FF, Silver Surfer and even Venom, and those didn\u2019t seem to materialize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If anyone actually read this blog, this could be a controversial decision. I myself am somewhat torn about it. But this title says \u201cAll The Spider-Mans I Have,\u201d so this seems the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[35,275,1285,523,863,626,473,6,452,587],"class_list":["post-14684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-aunt-may","tag-gregory-wright","tag-groot","tag-mike-weiringo","tag-nightmare","tag-richard-case","tag-sensational-spider-man","tag-stan-lee","tag-todd-dezago","tag-uncle-ben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14698,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684\/revisions\/14698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}