{"id":24716,"date":"2025-01-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=24716"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:40:24","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:40:24","slug":"asm-v2-52","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2025\/01\/22\/asm-v2-52\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM V2 52"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

No less an authority than Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has said that, during the Jemas era, the general cover mandate was single characters, even for team books, preferably female, preferably scantily clad. Classy! One assumes getting J. Scott Campbell to draw Mary Janes was seen as a major selling point under this regime. But the seeming randomness of who\u2019d drawing the covers to ASM will continue for awhile, he\u2019s a frequent but not permanent component. Behind that cover, we\u2019re right where we left off, Spider-Man and Digger sizing each other up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back in the old days, a whole bunch of people turned into Hulks or something like it via gamma rays. Bruce Banner of course, but then Emil Blonsky became the Abomination, the Leader turned green and got super smart instead of super strong, Doc Samson became a quasi-Hulk, She-Hulk obviously. Hulks everywhere. In a way, it\u2019s almost strange that it took this long for someone to make another one. Digger smashes our man into a wall, making him mad, so he charges in and socks Digger in the face. Much like in ASM 14, angrily punching a Hulk doesn\u2019t get him anywhere, and he gets punched across the room for his troubles. Spidey is briefly incapacitated, and when he gets up, Digger is gone and Detective Lamont is there. The 2 of them put together Digger\u2019s seeming to think it should be the 50s with the fingerprints from last issue, but still aren\u2019t sure what\u2019s going on. Spider-Man decides to keep the Hulk angle to himself until he\u2019s certain, and also decides to leave, when he\u2019s approached by a Forelli goon who says his boss wants a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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JMS really has a good voice for Peter. Everybody\u2019s is a little different, but he\u2019s got the right balance of wacky when it makes sense and serious when it makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now, we\u2019ve seen mobsters try to buy Spider-Man before, but this time is a little different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ol\u2019 sadsack Parker, who wouldn\u2019t even take money from Silver Sable half the time, finally wises up! But he starts asking Forelli why Digger would be after him, and Forelli recounts the situation preceding the hit from the beginning of last issue leaving out some crucial details and pretending he doesn\u2019t know where they all disappeared to. Spidey smells a rat and calls off the deal, only for Forelli to relent and say he\u2019ll get him the info he needs. He introduces Spider-Man to his daughter, Lynne, who proves an avowed Daily Bugle fan who doesn\u2019t trust him. Forelli also says there\u2019s one more condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The idea of him randomly finding a newspaper that would tell him Martin & Lewis broke up seems only slightly more plausible than a Hulk made of mobster parts. As Peter Parker teaches his students about the importance of observation in science, Digger reads a wealth of wet newspapers that somehow tell him about Vietnam, the rise of DVDs, 9\/11, the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, and the singer Madonna. The sewer is better than the library!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Straczynski\u2019s Spider-Marriage is as I remembered it. Sweet, supportive, a nice change of pace. It\u2019s not that hard, guys! We didn\u2019t have to spend the 90s yelling about cigarettes and doing \u201cI am the spider\u201d nonsense. Spidey is called to a pier, where Forelli is waiting. He says there was a boat here from one of his \u201coverseas operations,\u201d but a whole boat is curiously missing now. We see Digger dragging the whole thing to the bottom of the ocean as he narrates, killing everyone aboard. Forelli says many people on that boat had no idea what was on it, were innocent people. Then he does the familiar song & dance about how his daughter is also an innocent who doesn\u2019t know much about what he really does, and she shouldn\u2019t have to pay the price for who he is. He agrees to tell Spider-Man as much of the truth as he can, and tells him he now has weekend plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s pretty funny. Soon, Peter Parker is in a very expensive rental car, driving to a location on a paper map, looks like a pirate made it. But he drives into a big anti-gamma testing protest. He quickly learns his destination is the site of the bomb, but, switching to Spider-Man and sneaking into the military installation, he\u2019s still not sure how it all lines up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is not the last time unkillable Hulk body parts will be a plot point in a comic, believe it or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, now our man knows what\u2019s what. But how do you stop a zombie Hulk? I don\u2019t actually remember.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No less an authority than Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has said that, during the Jemas era, the general cover mandate was single characters, even for team books, preferably female, preferably scantily…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[1863,1982,2031,1981,118,1989,21,417,2],"class_list":["post-24716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-amazing-spider-man-vol-2","tag-dan-kemp","tag-digger","tag-j-michael-straczynski","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-lt-lamont","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-scott-hanna","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24716","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=24716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24718,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24716\/revisions\/24718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}