{"id":22786,"date":"2024-09-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=22786"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:42:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:42:09","slug":"usm-008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/09\/18\/usm-008\/","title":{"rendered":"USM 008"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alright, we\u2019re back, and it\u2019s time for our 2nd arc. From now on, Bendis is the sole writer. Marvel came to him with USM, and Bill Jemas had the major beats hammered out more or less in an outline that was eventually printed in a collection, but that ended with #7. Now it\u2019s the Bendis & Bagley Show for\u2026 a lot longer than you might expect. They begin their reign with a beloved classic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ladies & gentlemen, Ultimate Shocker. His being a loser is a well Bendis will return to more than once, including in the Ultimate Spider-Man video game he will eventually write. Which is\u2026 sort of in continuity. My goodness, do I have to replay that game for this blog? Well, anyway, that\u2019s Kong telling Flash he was in Brooklyn when Spider-Man beat up Shocker, and he could\u2019ve gotten the money \u201cthe paper\u201d is offering for Spidey pictures. Flash ridicules him for not having a camera and being scared when Green Goblin attacked, but Kong is adamant that someone\u2019s gonna make that money. And Peter overhears all of this, so guess what, later he\u2019s in an alley getting automatic camera photos of himself. My comic is interrupted here by a bound-in plastic bag with a trading card advertising new Marvel trading cards. Not even a real card, just a card-shaped ad. Annoying. Kinda nice that comics don\u2019t really sell ads like this anymore. Peter thinks if someone\u2019s gonna make money off Spider-Man, why not him? So, later, he\u2019s at the Daily Bugle for an appointment with a \u201cJoe Robertson.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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JJJ flicking through the photos will be reproduced in the 2002 movie, the Spectacular Spider-Man TV show, and probably a bunch of other places. It\u2019s just great. That\u2019s Betty Brant, Associate Book Editor, having a very bad time working on the Bugle\u2019s website. Let me tell you, I can relate. JJJ says they paid for her to go to a class for this, but she says it was a one-day class. As people begin complaining the site won\u2019t load, she gets angrier, until Peter sees the problem. He fixes it while talking about recursive loops and page renders. This is the farthest thing from 20th Century comics\u2019 traditional \u201cUh, you know, science\u201d speak you could possibly have. It\u2019s real. Maybe 98% real. I remember being SHOCKED by this at the time. Bendis went to the trouble of asking someone how to write a real web development problem. Specifically, the guy who ran the site that hosted Bendis and other comics folks\u2019 forums at the time, Justin from World Famous Comics (Credited in issue 9\u2019s letter column). Think about all that \u201ccyberspace\u201d crap in the mid-90s. Shocked, I say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And with THAT instant classic moment, yet another problem with modernizing Spider-Man is easily solved. Peter Parker, 15-year old action news photographer, is pretty deranged. Peter Parker, 15-year old intern web admin is a whole other thing. And it keeps him at the paper for all the breaking news things he can do there, and it keeps the best supporting cast in comics on the table. Simple, but so smart. It\u2019s pretty jarring page turn from that to a sequence that\u2019s fully digitally painted like the covers, where Spider-Man swings through the night, hears trouble, and is confronted by Uncle Ben\u2019s killer. The burglar shoots him in the chest, but the bullet passes through him and hits Uncle Ben.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The next day, we see Peter not able to think about school at all, and then at work, he uses the info on the burglar\u2019s driver\u2019s license to look him up. He finds a picture of him getting arrested in a story about a club that was a front for organized crime being broken up. This leads our man to the owner of that club, Wilson Fisk, and soon, Peter has the Bugle\u2019s info on the Kingpin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And we\u2019re off. This month\u2019s mail remains mostly positive, although there\u2019s a letter rightly calling out everything wrong with Ultimate Green Goblin. But even that letter says everything else is fantastic. And he\u2019s right!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alright, we\u2019re back, and it\u2019s time for our 2nd arc. From now on, Bendis is the sole writer. Marvel came to him with USM, and Bill Jemas had the major beats hammered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[498,35,113,11,1922,12,13,26,1927,1925,339,21,1456,2,1923],"class_list":["post-22786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-art-thibert","tag-aunt-may","tag-ben-urich","tag-betty-brant","tag-brian-michael-bendis","tag-flash-thompson","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-joe-robertson","tag-jung-choi","tag-kong","tag-mark-bagley","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-shocker","tag-spider-man","tag-ultimate-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22786","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=22786"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22799,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22786\/revisions\/22799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}