{"id":21385,"date":"2024-05-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-17T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=21385"},"modified":"2022-09-07T17:12:49","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T21:12:49","slug":"tac-263","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/05\/17\/tac-263\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC 263"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mackie writes, Ross & Milgrom get one more month of line art, and Mike Rockwitz does the colors. There\u2019s a splash of Norman zooming into the room as May looks on in confusion, and we\u2019re back in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ross has a kind of Rick Leonardi thing going in that top right panel. Goblin rambles about his being a deity and whatever blah blah, then he tells Spidey he\u2019s changed his mind, and to just take Aunt May and go. That he\u2019ll probably be dead by the end of the night, and he should spend it with \u201chis favored Aunt\u201d and that no one can say he\u2019s not a compassionate god. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, at the Parker home, MJ\u2019s agent is having her throw a party for a bunch of famous people, to restart her career as a celebrity. In\u2026 in a modest 2 story in Queens? So stylish! MJ says she has a feeling and goes upstairs to find her man digging through boxes. And he tells her it was a lie, that Norman didn\u2019t have the baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So he runs back to the FF, and soon thereafter, Reed confirms it: It\u2019s Aunt May. Impossible as it sounds, it\u2019s her. LUDICROUS as it is, it\u2019s her. But Reed says there\u2019s something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you can bring the FF, BRING THE FF, DUMMY! Weeeeeell he\u2019s soon smashing through the window of Norman\u2019s office, where he appears to be doing business in his Goblin suit, and there\u2019s a lot more rambling about godhood and Spider-Man dying and all that, and then Norman finally tells him if he wants answers, all Spider-Man has to do is come look through this window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, this is pretty ridiculous. I know they felt like they had to go big, but jeez. Goblin throws Spider-Man out the window, then dives out after him on his glider and saves him, saying their battle can\u2019t end with him just a smear on the pavement, and that they should move to a location that will provide a more fitting climax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What on Earth is with that wacky flailing arm in panel 1?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Strap in, here\u2019s the inevitably terrible retcon:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Absolutely ridiculous. RIDICULOUS! People still make fun of this to this day! An ACTRESS? Hoo boy. And, look, let\u2019s be real here: Killing May was a stupid mistake, the worst of the many times JM DeMatteis thought sacrificing a pivotal character for a couple pages of pathos was worth it. Undoing that is, ultimately, not a bad thing. But what an explanation! Is there anyone in the world who\u2019d be satisfied by this? Why not take a page from ol\u2019 JM\u2019s book and say she was just so drugged she might as well have been dead and then Norman stole her out of the hospital or something? An ACTRESS willingly got mutated into another woman! For the rest of her life! Ye gods. No one involved will ever live this down. Well, anyway, on the next couple pages, Norman throws Spider-Man to the ground, yells a bunch of nonsense, unmasks him in public while yelling \u201cPeter Parker is Spider-Man,\u201d and then blows him up with a pumpkin bomb, killing him instantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hey, they said they were ending the books, right? Spider-Man\u2019s dead! All the letter columns have had brief, glib acknowledgements of the end of their titles and of an era, but this one gets the whole page, and is a lot more sincere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ya know, good for Luke Ross. I may not have liked his stuff to start, but he won me over, to my surprise, by the end. I never liked his stuff as a kid, but in my old age, I appreciated watching him grow and evolve over the run. Too bad he\u2019s going to spend the rest of his career chasing whatever art trend is in fashion instead of sticking to something he could call his own. Oh, well. Come back next time for Spider-Man\u2019s funeral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mackie writes, Ross & Milgrom get one more month of line art, and Mike Rockwitz does the colors. There\u2019s a splash of Norman zooming into the room as May looks on in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[153,35,288,40,415,72,629,21,1089,39,247,121,2,1710,663],"class_list":["post-21385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-al-milgrom","tag-aunt-may","tag-fantastic-four","tag-green-goblin","tag-howard-mackie","tag-human-torch","tag-luke-ross","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-mike-rockwitz","tag-norman-osborn","tag-reed-richards","tag-spectacular-spider-man","tag-spider-man","tag-sue-storm","tag-the-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385","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=21385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21386,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385\/revisions\/21386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}