{"id":23744,"date":"2024-11-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-24T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=23744"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:41:06","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:41:06","slug":"asm-v2-38","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/11\/24\/asm-v2-38\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM V2 38"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Time to get into it! May is walking to Peter\u2019s place. Peter is worrying about what\u2019s about to happen. He imagines her coming through the door and saying she has 6 months to live. Or\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He tells himself to calm down, that it\u2019s probably nothing. But as she makes it ot his door, still gripping the scrap of costume, he thinks anyone or anything who would cause her pain will have to answer to him. He opens the door and asks her if everything\u2019s ok. She says it is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Instantly brings to mind the last page of ASM 257<\/a>, for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But this one is different. This is his Mom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It has been implied more than once that Peter kept Spider-Man from May more for himself than for her. I mean, the obvious reason is he never told her is to maintain the status quo, but the status quo is an endangered species at Jemas\/Quesada Marvel, so now we can really get into it. And Aunt May has been stronger than Peter gives her credit for since Roger Stern came around. And May calls him on that exactly on the next page, as he says he wanted to protect her, saying she believes him, but that she also believes he didn\u2019t want to have to choose between her and Spider-Man, so she avoided it all these years. Really nailing it. With the walls down, Peter says he knows, and May laments all the time they\u2019ve lost, and Peter says it\u2019s not all he\u2019s kept from her. And he tried to tell her about not stopping the burglar, but he says it really would kill her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, come on! This is the conversation everyone\u2019s always imagined, and it\u2019s happening! No deathbed confession, \u201cI knew and I\u2019m proud of you\u201d scene is touching this!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Home runs for everybody involved. I think it\u2019s weird that, in PPSM 34, Jenkins implied Uncle Ben died on the front porch, and now JMS has confirmed it, when I think it was pretty well established that he was shot inside the house, but that doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s just such a wealth of places to go from here. \u201cPeter hiding his secret because it would kill May\u201d has been exhausted and re-exhausted over 40 years. Now we can see something no one\u2019s ever seen before in a Spider-Man comic. It was this sort of thing, shattering expectations, going places you weren\u2019t allowed to go, that made Marvel comics seem so exciting in the 2000s. It was happening all over the line, and it would continue to do so. Eventually, in my opinion, it would loop around to being a problem. But right now, it\u2019s thrilling stuff. May says she always thought he was so fragile, and she\u2019ll have to get used to this. Then they get serious again. Peter asks where they go from here, because he can\u2019t give it up. He hits her with \u201cpower and responsibility,\u201d and she says she knows, that that\u2019s exactly why she was committed to raising him alone after Ben died. May says plainly that she\u2019s learned you have to let people go their own way. And even though she\u2019s not okay with any of this, she\u2019d never ask him to stop doing it. Then she wants to know how this happened, because \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any of this sort of thing on either side of your family,\u201d which is a great line. Then we\u2019re told the conversation goes on for over 2 and a half hours. Peter says May is taking all this very well, better than he ever expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As you can see, the allegory for \u201ccoming out of the closet\u201d continues, and it\u2019s a pretty shrewd one, I must say. It\u2019s a sort of \u201cX-Men tapdancing around the real issue of racism\u201d kind of thing, but the X-Men have made a whole lot people feel seen over the decades even though they were usually all or mostly white. A story you can see yourself in is always a good thing. And just like that, it\u2019s a whole new ballgame. I was so excited for this at the time. It felt like almost anything could happen. I couldn\u2019t have known what that really meant\u2026 But, that\u2019s getting ahead of myself. As usual. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time to get into it! May is walking to Peter\u2019s place. Peter is worrying about what\u2019s about to happen. He imagines her coming through the door and saying she has 6 months…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[1863,35,1982,1981,118,417,2],"class_list":["post-23744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-amazing-spider-man-vol-2","tag-aunt-may","tag-dan-kemp","tag-j-michael-straczynski","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-scott-hanna","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23744","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=23744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23745,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23744\/revisions\/23745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}