{"id":23656,"date":"2024-11-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-17T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=23656"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:41:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:41:25","slug":"ppsm-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/11\/17\/ppsm-33\/","title":{"rendered":"PPSM 33"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This month, the PPSM crew is back to single issue stories for awhile. Which are generally what they did best and what this run is remembered for. Villains like Typeface and Fusion weren\u2019t necessarily setting the comics world aflame, but stories like this one really stuck with people. We begin with a distraught Spider-Man letting us know today is the day Uncle Ben died. As we have seen, he usually goes to Ben\u2019s grave for the occasion, but this year, he\u2019s downtown. A 2-page montage details how he died and how Peter still blames himself, and how this day hits him pretty hard every year. Peter might not be keeping up tradition, but May is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I think it\u2019s funny when comics get to a point where they don\u2019t bother to put years on tombstones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, you have gone with her before. TAC 68<\/a>, for example. And they were accidentally there at the same time in ASM 181<\/a>. But anyway, as of this issue (and probably not for long after it), Peter\u2019s tradition for this day is to go to a Mets game. Peter has never exactly been portrayed as a sports fan, but here he is riding a train to the game among his \u201cfellow baseball cognoscente,\u201d calling all the assembled Mets fans \u201cmy team, my extended family of misfits.\u201d Uh-huh. Seems to me like being a baseball fan would\u2019ve helped him fit in with the kids in school.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In a fun page, we see Peter approach and enter the ticket office, and Uncle Ben and a very young Peter emerge, as we\u2019ve gone back in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The revelation of Peter Parker: Baseball Fan is kinda hard to swallow for me, personally. As this story is sentimental and touching in an era where people were used to Spider-Man being empty spectacle, it had a big impact on readers. But if anything, it\u2019s harder to swallow now, having read literally everything that came before, than it was at the time. We have not previously even known Peter to own a hat, let alone be a huge Mets fan. But, whatever, I guess. Peter details how he fell in love with the game, how Uncle Ben taught him typically crazy fan rituals to make the team win, trying to catch pop flies and all that, and then how, after all that, his team lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And so, Ben & Peter continued to go to one game every year (Which is a nice touch, since it\u2019s not like they should\u2019ve been able to afford season passes or anything), and every game they attended, the Mets lost terribly. The Ol\u2019 Parker Luck hit a whole baseball team. We see Peter getting older with the games, until one year, when he went to catch a ball and got hit right in the head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We\u2019re told Peter getting hit was the highlight of the game, which the Mets lost terribly. He says he still swings by sometimes when the city is quiet over a figure that suggests Buckingham is going back to Romita, Sr. for swipes now. He says when he looks down at the crowd, he\u2019s always reminded of one very important day\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, if Buckingham can do this great acting, SURELY he can draw Spider-Man without stealing it from somewhere sometime\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The amount of poignant things that have been added to Peter\u2019s life in the days leading up to Ben\u2019s death borders on comical, but I guess most people won\u2019t have seen all of them in a relatively short period like I have these last few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But it\u2019s a sweet issue. And with almost no Spider-Man in it, a good looking one, too. Jenkins was really trying to get to the soul of Peter Parker, and he did some really interesting things. What I like most is how he has Peter remember Uncle Ben joyfully<\/em>. Yeah yeah, he blames himself, pathos, but Ben & May represent everything good in his life up til Ben died. These fond remembrances instead of just wallowing in guilt are fun to read and frankly more realistic. Anyone who’s lost a loved one will tell you, sometimes the memories are sad, sometimes they’re happy. It’s not one thing all the time. But it’s basically been one thing for 40 years before this, so I appreciate it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month, the PPSM crew is back to single issue stories for awhile. Which are generally what they did best and what this run is remembered for. Villains like Typeface and Fusion…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[35,1927,915,1911,1871,2,1978],"class_list":["post-23656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-aunt-may","tag-jung-choi","tag-mark-buckingham","tag-paul-jenkins","tag-peter-parker-spider-man","tag-spider-man","tag-wayne-faucher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23656","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=23656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23657,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23656\/revisions\/23657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}