{"id":24767,"date":"2025-01-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=24767"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:40:24","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:40:24","slug":"ppsm-57","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2025\/01\/26\/ppsm-57\/","title":{"rendered":"PPSM 57"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This issue saw print the same month as ASM 53, and it, too, has 4 pages slightly taller than the rest of the book. A systemic problem! This cover is about as mainstream normal as a Sam Keith drawing can get. Would\u2019ve fit right in in the early 90s. In but in the early 90s, and since, his work has typically been much wilder looking. We open on a guy walking some dogs in the city, when the get loose, run into an alley, and encounter the big violent Sandman. Meanwhile, back at the beach\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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30 demerits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I just can\u2019t get over what a Sam Keith story this is. I would easily believe Wells had nothing to do with these issues. It\u2019s interesting that he\u2019s writing in Sam Keith\u2019s mode so comfortably. Elsewhere, the evil Sandman is somehow controlling those dogs and making them attack people, ranting about how Mommy can\u2019t say it was his fault, it was the dogs. Meanwhile, Spider-Man and the Sand-Family are crammed into a cab, trying to find evil Sandman. Wells gets in his best Spider-Man joke when Lady Sandman says \u201cthis is the easiest way to find myself\u201d and Spidey says \u201cYeah, most people have to backpack through Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s getting weird in this cab!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ever since he melded with Hydro-Man? Like, back in ASM 217<\/a>? It\u2019s been a while! Spidey and the various Sands are all together now, and the 2 big Sandmen start fighting while Spider-Man tries to protect the female and baby Sandmen from the Sand dogs. It\u2019s a lot of sand. The battles are all overtly psychological conflicts turned into physical ones, and, again, this is such Sam Keith material. Then one of the Sand dogs explodes in front of Sand baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sand Lady begins merging with the evil one, who develops some compassion, bemoaning the bad he\u2019s done. He absorbs Sandteen and continues to deal with his feelings and such. It\u2019s all very weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There are 4 pages of ads between this page and the next, it\u2019s very strange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, uh, I guess Sandman is\u2026 back to normal? Closer than he\u2019s been in a very long time, at least. I assume in his next appearance he\u2019s just regular Sandman, but I don\u2019t rightly recall. Oh, man, his next major, in-continuity appearance (JLA\/Avengers doesn\u2019t count) is in a miniseries called Identity Disc, which seemed to only exist to annoy DC Comics when they had a big event called Identity Crisis, the kind of weird poking and prodding Joe Quesada loved. It was about a bunch of villains trying to steal something or something, I don\u2019t know, no one read it. But I doubt Sandman was dealing with any kind of existential crisis in it. We will see him again before too very long. It was nice to see Sam Keith at work again, it’s been awhile for me. A lot of artists with a loose, exaggerated style (Especially in the 90s) betray a lack of fundamentals. Their word is weird and wild because they couldn’t do anything more “straight.” Keith is an artist whose exaggeration and wildness clearly come from<\/em> strong fundamentals. He’s able to abstract things so wildly precisely because he knows what “realistic” looks like as a base. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s the crucial difference between good and bad cartooning, if you asked me. It’s the difference between this and Francisco Herrara, or like, Reb Brown in the 90s. You know, Picasso started out doing very realistic work, and from that basis, spent his life learning how to abstract reality. It makes all the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This issue saw print the same month as ASM 53, and it, too, has 4 pages slightly taller than the rest of the book. A systemic problem! This cover is about as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24739,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[2033,1871,2032,101,2,2017],"class_list":["post-24767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-avalon-studios","tag-peter-parker-spider-man","tag-sam-keith","tag-sandman","tag-spider-man","tag-zeb-wells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24767","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=24767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24768,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24767\/revisions\/24768"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}