{"id":19695,"date":"2024-01-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-11T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=19695"},"modified":"2023-09-12T15:49:49","modified_gmt":"2023-09-12T19:49:49","slug":"uts-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/01\/11\/uts-25\/","title":{"rendered":"UTS 25"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here comes the big finale of Untold Tales. I guess there\u2019s no bigger way to send it off than with a Green Goblin story. But it still feels wrong to me. This month, Roger Stern co-plots, and, Ron Frenz does breakdowns for Bob McLeod to finish. One wonders why that happened, and I recently found out. Well, let\u2019s get to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Solid gag. A good choice of patsy for the reasons Crime-Master mentioned, and one Norman knows from the club, too. This is all prelude to an upcoming ASM story, which kinda sucks given the spoiler on the front page, but whatever. There\u2019s a new Crime-Master in town, and he\u2019s teamed up with The Goblin. We turn our attention to the campus of ESU, where, somewhat improbably, Peter Parker\u2019s high school science teacher has offered to give him a tour. Aunts May & Anna are there, too, but take their leave. Anna takes some drama department info for Mary Jane, saying she wishes MJ could have been here, but she had a modeling audition at Kingsley, LTD. Nice touch! And then Peter tells Mr. Warren that he looked into State U, but \u201ca ruckus\u201d put him off. Johnny Storm goes to State U, and this happened in a cameo in FF. A lot of nice references in short order. As Warren leads Peter into the science building, a certain Flash Thompson is dismayed to see them in passing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Peter\u2019s teachers in high school and college being Mr. Warren, solved neatly. And he\u2019s already creepy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It is, it\u2019s JJJ, helping Norman dedicate the new \u201cMulti-Environmental Test Chamber.\u201d Norman thinks he set all this up so Crime-Master\u2019s goons could get up to something, and sure enough, Peter sees some familiar goon faces in coveralls coming into the building. He slips away and gets into Spidey gear. The goons are after the ray, of course, and Crime-Master is directing them over a radio from a van outside, watching their progress through little cameras in their hats. And that\u2019s how he sees Spider-Man come barreling into his goons. They decide to turn the ray on him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Uh\u2026 why\u2019s Norman gray on that page? The battle is joined, pretty much picking up right where ASM left off. As they square up, Crime-Master is very frustrated that Goblin didn\u2019t just grab the McGuffin and get out of there. And then GG does grab it, but only to try to use it against Spidey. Worried about all the innocent people around, Spidey really cranks up the annoying banter and he sprints away, making The Goblin follow, and then tricks him into a locked room, the very room that was being dedicated earlier, so they can fight without hurting anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hilarious. The guard tried to shut down the ill-defined room they\u2019re in, but Crime-Master forces him to instead crank everything up, saying if GG can\u2019t keep his personal vendettas out of business, he deserves to die with Spider-Man. So this weird room starts generating powerful wind and snow, and then Spidey has to dive to save The Goblin from jets of fire. This is some testing chamber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hilarious. Crimey and his goons leave, and the room starts shooting lasers and flying steel rods at the fighting foes, which\u2026 I mean, what is this room supposed to test? This is pretty silly. The guard tells everyone to evacuate because the testing chamber is about to explode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And with that, Untold Tales comes to an end. Kind of a crazy idea to begin with, and it made some weird choices, but largely a fun book. But this wasn’t supposed to be the end! In one of his newsletters, Tom Brevoort revealed the behind-the-scenes on this. The book was still selling well, even as cheap as it was, and the plan was for it to continue, jumping ahead to Peter’s college years, with Roger Stern taking over for Kurt. Which sounds awesome to me. But E-i-C Bob Harras felt Marvel’s resources were better spent on books looking forward rather than backward, and decided the book should end. Which seems… strange. You cancel a good selling title that was to be made by creatives who, no offense intended, were no longer in demand, and therefore not going to be placed on some other assignment if this ended… it’s just throwing money away. Like Roger Stern had long since stopped being a regular fixture in Marvel’s writing pool, and Frenz is no longer a name, either (Again, no slight to either of them, I’m pretty vocally on record as a huge Stern fan, but times and tastes change). I could see killing this book if you just desperately needed them on X-Men or something, but killing this book just led to them not having any Marvel work for awhile. Seems wasteful. I guess that’s just how it goes sometimes. But\u2026 for some reason\u2026 this doesn\u2019t quite mean the end, either. The team of Busiek & Stern have one more bit of retconning to do\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here comes the big finale of Untold Tales. I guess there\u2019s no bigger way to send it off than with a Green Goblin story. But it still feels wrong to me. This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[35,11,1625,12,20,40,16,22,13,1298,1003,172,83,39,117,321,2,1288,1300,1287],"class_list":["post-19695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-aunt-may","tag-betty-brant","tag-crime-master","tag-flash-thompson","tag-george-stacy","tag-green-goblin","tag-gwen-stacy","tag-harry-osborn","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jason-ionello","tag-kurt-busiek","tag-liz-allen","tag-miles-warren","tag-norman-osborn","tag-roger-stern","tag-ron-frenz","tag-spider-man","tag-steve-mattson","tag-tiny-mckeever","tag-untold-tales-of-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19695","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=19695"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26608,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19695\/revisions\/26608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}