{"id":1644,"date":"2019-09-13T00:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-13T04:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deweybass.com\/spiderman\/?p=1644"},"modified":"2022-01-25T13:49:45","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T17:49:45","slug":"asm-259","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2019\/09\/13\/asm-259\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM 259"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back on MTU 140, I said I had 2 beefs with Ron Frenz, but only described one. The 2nd one wouldn\u2019t be completely obvious until now. He draws just like Sal Buscema\u2026 except for Spider-Man, for whom he does a Steve Ditko impression. It feels weird and vaguely disrespectful to just ape the original master. He was sort of doing it with the black suit, but it was obviously harder to tell that way. He did Ditko\u2019s thunderthighs, Ditko-style fight choreography, and even Ditko\u2019s little \u201cbop\u201d punch effect, but it was harder to compare without the classic outfit. It\u2019s coming back, though, so it\u2019ll be obvious for a bit. But not yet, because as promised last issue, it\u2019s time for A Real Adult Conversation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MJ has a point. The ladies of Spider-Man (And most other comics) weren\u2019t exactly fleshed out, 3D characters in the old days, and MJ hadn\u2019t been a major player for 4 years until Roger Stern brought her back (and then she vanished for another 6 months when the new team came on). Now she\u2019s back, in an era with somewhat more realistic writing, and her days of being a ditzy party girl with rare moments of real humanity are over. That begins with telling Peter her backstory, which incredibly, has never been explored. This is 1984! MJ has been a character for damn near 20 years and all we know about her life, family and history is she has an aunt named Anna. She tells him her parents met in college, and her Mom wanted to move to New York to be an actor, but her dad insisted they stay in their small town because he had a teaching job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Comics are full of bad dads, and they really proliferated in the 80s. This is about when The Hulk suddenly became the product of an abusive father, also, if memory serves, and it seems like every single villain started getting an abusive father backstory, too. Dad started moving the family from town to town and job to job, which made it hard for MJ to make friends, so she became a class clown and started developing her big personality to cope, while her sister got serious about studying dance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And so was born Mary Jane Watson, the girl who never has a bad day. Her Mom finally left her dad, taking her & Gayle and fleeing while he was being honored by his college. After a messy divorce, MJ & her family lived with different relatives around the country because they didn\u2019t have much money, but they were mostly resentful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As they continue to revisit the past, we shift our focus elsewhere, because even though this issue\u2019s focus is a Real Adult Conversation, this is a superhero comic, so something\u2019s gotta blow up. In this case, the side of an illicit casino housed in some old train cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hobby cuts himself in for 10% of this operation, even though Hudson says he\u2019s already giving Kingpin a cut. But Hobgoblin says he\u2019ll make life miserable for Hudson and his patrons if he doesn\u2019t get what he wants, and just leaves. He makes a good argument. Back in the park, Peter asks MJ what happened to her dad. She says he lives in Oregon, but they have no contact. She tried to write him a few times, but got no answer. Meanwhile, she and the rest of her family found a more permanent home with her Mom\u2019s cousin, a Frank Brown, who let them live with him as long as her Mom would take care of his 3 kids. Having some stability improved their lives, and her sister Gayle flourished as a dancer and dated the captain of the football team and all that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I just really love that panel of the play. Gayle & Timmy moved away, while MJ kept acting and got pretty good at it. Then Gayle had a kid, still in her late teens, and her husband didn\u2019t seem too happy about it, seeming \u201clike a desperate caged animal\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Not too far away, The Hobgoblin hits another illegal gambling den, this time behind a bakery. These guys are dumb enough to fight, but\u2026 that\u2019s dumb. He offers the owner the same deal as before and takes off again. Back in the park, MJ continues her story\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Things went from bad to worse when MJ\u2019s Mom continued to weaken until they learned she was dying. MJ dropped her acting to get a part-time job to help with bills, but her Mom was gone before her sister could have her second child. At the funeral, her sister tried to reassure her\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pete thinks about how Aunt May once told him he & MJ had a lot in common, but he never realized she\u2019d suffered a lot of loss in her life, same as him. This leads him to thinking about how he hasn\u2019t fixed things with Aunt May. MJ says she didn\u2019t mean to dump all her grief on him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Best friends! That\u2019s a welcome development for them after all these years. We pause for an interlude at The Baxter Building, where Reed has been trying to use a \u201cthought transmitter\u201d to communicate with the suit, but it\u2019s refusing to talk to him. It\u2019s mad at being trapped. Then we go see The Rose with The Hobgoblin, back from his day of terrorizing bookies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Old friends?! How literal should we take that? Who is The Hobgoblin? Funny thing is, at this point, I\u2019m not sure anyone knew. Roger Stern\u2019s choice had been vetoed when he left, and I don\u2019t know if DeFalco had told his plans to editorial yet, but they weren\u2019t going to be received well when he did. The behind-the-scenes story of The Hobgoblin is kind of a rollercoaster itself, and bound to keep popping up as we look at 80s comics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The news is about The Hobgoblin\u2019s campaign of terror today, and all Peter’s other plans get cancelled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It takes Peter a whole 2nd page to finish getting his kit on, they really milked the whole \u201chero suiting up\u201d bit\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And thus did the classic suit return. Real classic, the early 1960s suit. For the moment. Reading this one as one of my earliest exposures to Mary Jane surely played a big role in my affection for her as a character. When I started reading monthly comics, they were already recently married (Spoilers?), so I just took it for granted that she was the co-star of Spider-Man, anyway, but firming up her backstory really gave her depth and made her seem like a complex person. Even though they didn\u2019t discuss it much here, this issue did a great job of letting you feel the weight of the history these two share. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The back of the book has a 2-page letter column with the first reactions to Spidey\u2019s new (old?) costume shown in ASM, and they\u2019re pretty hyperbolic in both directions. None more hyperbolic than a letter ending with \u201cit makes me want to puke!\u201d from one Tony Starks. Is that Ghostface? Not one but two ladies get printed saying it was sexy, one guy says he\u2019ll never buy the comic again, and one guy said ASM 252 can replace the definition of \u201cgenius\u201d in the dictionary. Overall, though, it seems like people mostly loved it, and uh, they just got rid of it. Seems like an awkward situation\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back on MTU 140, I said I had 2 beefs with Ron Frenz, but only described one. The 2nd one wouldn\u2019t be completely obvious until now. He draws just like Sal Buscema\u2026…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[9,253,163,278,21,321,2,325,124],"class_list":["post-1644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-bob-sharen","tag-hobgoblin","tag-joe-rubenstein","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-ron-frenz","tag-spider-man","tag-the-rose","tag-tom-defalco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644","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=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17213,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions\/17213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}