{"id":21439,"date":"2024-05-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-24T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=21439"},"modified":"2022-09-07T20:21:39","modified_gmt":"2022-09-08T00:21:39","slug":"chapter-one-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/05\/24\/chapter-one-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter One 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, the Spider-books all ended with the November \u201898 issues. The same month, they published this. What is this? Exactly what it looks like. Having brought you The Final Chapter, we roll back to Chapter One. Byrne is going to remake the original Spider-Man comics for a new generation. Is this a good idea? No! Did I buy all of them? Yes! So we\u2019re doing this mess before we move on to the shiny new number ones. More than anything, this is a fascinating study of John Byrne\u2019s hubris. He has become a stickler for the canon, holding things sacred and chastizing people for not respecting it\u2026except the parts he chooses to change himself. It\u2019s fine when he does it. This issue alone will offer contradictory examples of what I mean, because Byrne said at the time that his goal was to streamline the early material. In a magazine published about the relaunch (Which I just happened to re-read before this, can you imagine?), he said it\u2019s clear that the early comics are Ditko and Lee flying by the seat of their pants, just kicking an issue out the door every month, but if you were going to create the foundations of Spider-Man with purpose, you wouldn\u2019t do it that way. And, like, duh, but they did, too late. So he\u2019s decided he can change things, move things around, do whatever he thinks is necessary to make the original comics flow better. Several years from now, Marvel will publish a major event that recontextualizes a famous Byrne story, and guess what, it sent him into a rage! And it was nothing compared to what he\u2019s gonna do here. Except, at the same time, he\u2019s also going to continue to be weird continuity nerd. Anything he deems worth changes deserves it, anything he doesn\u2019t is sacrosanct. Byrne also said that this would try not to invalidate Untold Tales of Spider-Man while fully and intentionally overwriting Amazing Fantasy 16, 17 & 18. The megalomania\u2026 Ok, enough rambling preamble, let\u2019s get to the disappointment! Byrne writes, pencils, inks, even letters. John Kalisz colors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Time for more rambling preamble. Look at that drawing. This is how we start? The eyes are so far apart he wouldn\u2019t be able to see out of them! My feeling for Byrne\u2019s art in this period (And really, for the rest of his career) is it looks rushed, always. He inks himself, and there\u2019s a lack of polish. When we get past this mess, we\u2019ll see him inked by Scott Hanna, one of the finest inkers of his generation, and the difference is striking. Especially since most of this series was published concurrently with the relaunch. Anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m not gonna stop on every single change, I promise, but for one thing, it didn\u2019t have to change from a microscope to a computer. It may be the 90s, but people still need microscopes, and that microscope has been a plot element remarkably often since, as we\u2019ve seen. But also, we\u2019re calling this the past of 1998. Someone bought a little boy a computer in something like 1986??? What\u2019s that supposed to be, an Apple II? Look at that tower, computers didn\u2019t even look like that yet. And it would\u2019ve been prohibitively expensive!! It should still be a microscope!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here begins one of this series\u2019 biggest problems at the same time as its stupidest, most awful retcon. First, Byrne is something like 47 and thinks he can write teenagers. The slang, the fashion, nothing about this is going to work. He thinks they want to go see the Rolling Stones, he thinks a black<\/em> kid wants to see the Rolling Stones! It\u2019s like 199-something, that kid is listening to gangsta rap music! The white kids probably are, too! The Rolling Stones! As someone who turned 20 the month this was issued, I was still very much close enough to the demographic to read this entire series like \u201cHow do you do, fellow kids?\u201d Oh, man, I\u2019m only on page 3, this is gonna be my longest post ever. The other thing is, as implied on this page, Peter is about to get his Spider-Powers from a science demonstration by Otto Octavius using his metal arms. Byrne said the original open air experiment was just too absurd in 1998 (True!) and that 2 radiation-based accidents in the early days was too much of a coincidence. What? The FF are radiation accidents, Hulk and Daredevil are radiation accidents, a huge portion of Marvel villains are radiation accidents. Should all of them be here, too? Stupid. Well, anyway, in this version, Otto\u2019s doing his thing in a safer environment, but a spider gets in there, and it messes up the whole thing, causing the explosion that creates Doc Ock, and also\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ouch! A much more violent origin all of a sudden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now we\u2019re off to yet another retcon. Byrne said the burglar robbing the Parker home was too much of a coincidence, too. So he\u2019s added some background to the burglar, Ben & the cop to tie it more tightly together. And, of course, Marv Wolfman already tried to make it less random. He was immediately dinged for this, with nerds wanting to know about ASM 200, when the burglar comes back for the hidden treasure, and he was like \u201cWell, maybe he found out about that later.\u201d Totally pointless! So, now Peter gets out of the hospital, and then \u201cone day,\u201d he\u2019s almost hit by the car from Amazing Fantasy 15, does the leap, discovers he can climb, crushes the pipe, etc. That night, he wonders what to do with it all, if the FF need another member, and then he sees Crusher Hogan\u2019s now $1000 deal on TV with the folks<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How is the Crusher Hogan from 1962 dressed more authentically like a 1998 wrestler than Byrne\u2019s 1998 wrestler? He looks like a supervillain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s a contingent of people who get way too worked up about how, they say, Ditko CLEARLY intended the blue parts of the suit to be black in AF 15<\/a>. And that might even be true, but he drew 38 issues of ASM with it blue, so who cares? Byrne cares. So, now it\u2019s red & black in the early days, officially. The spider on his back is also blue. It was blue in AF 15, but recolored for future printings. So Byrne decided it had to be blue here, and he had to come up with an in-continuity explanation for it changing to red. Really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I would like to watch a show called \u201cMan That\u2019s Weird.\u201d At school, Peter overhears Flash threatening to beat up a kid who doesn\u2019t like Spider-Man, and hears Liz saying he\u2019s dreamy, but quickly learns that doesn\u2019t mean anything for Peter Parker. But he\u2019s got a show tonight, the show. He\u2019s already spending the money in his head as he departs. His Spider Sense warns him that someone\u2019s watching as Spider-Man leaves his bedroom window, but he doesn\u2019t know he has a Spider Sense yet and just feels weird. It\u2019s the burglar, casing the house to steal Peter\u2019s new computer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So after the show, he doesn\u2019t stop the burglar. In fact, the burglar, assuming Spidey is \u201ca second story man\u201d like him and that he was robbing the Parkers, asks him for help, but doesn\u2019t get it. If the burglar thinks Spider-Man was robbing the house, why does he also try to rob the house? That makes this WORSE, not better! Then he wonders why a cop from Forest Hills is in Manhattan. Byrne says this always bothered him, but he also doesn\u2019t offer any kind of explanation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ok, so he\u2019s got personal beef with the burglar, that still doesn\u2019t explain why he was downtown! What is being fixed, here? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Occasionally, the dialogue is just like the original. Bu when Spidey arrives at the warehouse, the burglar is glad to see him. Says since he saw Spider-Man casing the house, he thought he\u2019d come back. But he wasn\u2019t casing the place, he was climbing out the window! That\u2019s some recon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And we\u2019re out. The story is longer and crappier, we did it. And things have only just begun to be bad! Now, to be totally fair, trying to make this stuff appealing to a younger audience is a 100% understandable and worthy goal. Not many teens in the late 90s are gonna click with Lee\/Ditko. I mean, I was able to enjoy what I saw of them even younger than that, but they also seemed weird and ancient to me. Making the early stuff contemporary is a windmill Marvel will tilt at repeatedly in the 21st Century, with varying degrees of success. I get it. And, as Byrne mentioned, he\u2019d developed a rep for this sort of thing. He did sort of \u201cright the ship\u201d for FF, writing and drawing what was and still often is considered the 2nd best FF run ever made (I put him at 3rd or 4th. We\u2019ll see issues from the runs I think eclipse him if I make it that far). But DC got him to create a definitive new version of Superman\u2019s history after they wiped out their multiverse, and what he chose to do in 1986 really did become the official canon from then on. So you can see why someone would think he should do this. But this series will offer ample evidence that they were wrong. It was not popular on release, and is stricken from the record pretty much as soon as it\u2019s done. I\u2019ve not read these since they came out. I have dreaded them. And here we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, the Spider-books all ended with the November \u201898 issues. The same month, they published this. What is this? Exactly what it looks like. Having brought you The Final Chapter, we roll…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[36,35,1859,1063,25,12,180,442,172,1293,2],"class_list":["post-21439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-aunt-anna","tag-aunt-may","tag-chapter-one","tag-crusher-hogan","tag-doctor-octopus","tag-flash-thompson","tag-john-byrne","tag-john-kalisz","tag-liz-allen","tag-maxie-shiffman","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21439","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=21439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21440,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21439\/revisions\/21440"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}