{"id":30382,"date":"2025-12-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=30382"},"modified":"2024-03-05T19:23:47","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T23:23:47","slug":"fnsm-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2025\/12\/22\/fnsm-24\/","title":{"rendered":"FNSM 24"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The weird retro cover copy for this story is baffling. I think they\u2019re trying to reference ASM 121, specifically, but it doesn\u2019t gel with the seriousness of the situation. It\u2019s not 1971 anymore, comics are different. I don\u2019t get why this story was serialized across the 3 titles. Especially given that the other 2 are canceled once it\u2019s over. And especially since it\u2019s 4 issues, not 3, requiring 2 ASMs. Why not just do 4 issues of ASM? I don\u2019t make the rules, tho. The Amazingly Lumpy Spider-Man swings around, recapping for us, as Quesada continues to waste time drawing the most detailed spaghetti webs anyone\u2019s ever done. Spider-Man knows Aunt May is beyond the help of medical science, and this is a J. Michael Straczynski comic (Sort of), so where else would he go but to Dr. Strange? He explains the situation to Strange, who recaps his origin at him\/us to make the point that the Sorcerer Supreme couldn\u2019t even fix Strange\u2019s hands (Which, in retrospect, only gets more and more utterly preposterous as the depiction of Strange\u2019s power and influence have gotten more and more outrageous over 40 years). Peter tells him May is not going to die, and Strange says we all die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I do like that page layout, tho. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is all very convoluted and seemingly unnecessary. What the \u201cHands of Death\u201d do is let Spider-Man appear to a whole buncha people, maybe all at once or something, I don\u2019t know\u2026 the Night Nurse (???), Beast, T\u2019Challa, Reed, Curt Connors, Morbius, Doc Ock, Dr. Doom, the Wizard, and the girl from the weird weird X-Team called the X-Statix whose name is like Dead Girl or something, who\u2019s a ghost, I think, I don\u2019t know. We\u2019re told they all say the same thing. He comes back and tells Strange no one can help. Strange gives a little speech about the cycle of life and death being essential to the universe. Then he goes to get Spidey a drink, and Spider-Man recites the spell Stephen did earlier to use the hands himself. Strange rushes back in as Spider-Man disappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That doesn\u2019t work, so he tries to influence his past self to know what\u2019s coming, but then spooky interdimensional monsters attack him, and he ends up just watching May get shot twice at the same time. Then the monsters catch him, and then Strange appears and banishes them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Remember ASM Vol. 2 42<\/a>? The world seemed so full of promise back then. Who could\u2019ve known we were on the tipping point? Well, I could, because this is my 2nd time through all this, but you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So they get back to the present, and Strange gives Peter an impassioned speech about how the best thing he can do is be there for May in her final moments. That everyone dies and we all lose those we love, but he should be there for her in the moment. So, Spider-Man leaves, and that red bird from last issue is hanging around, and he\u2019s replaying some of what Strange said in his mind, when a voice says, \u201cHe was right. YOU cannot change that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now who\u2019s this, then? Each of these issues is full of back matter. Last issue ran Peter\u2019s very long Official Handbook entry, plus stuff about his various different costumes and even how his stupid organic webshooters work, and some process stuff on the art. This time out, we get Mary Jane\u2019s handbook entry, and then a reprint of the first 5 pages of ASM 259, when MJ first started telling her story. Then the art process stuff this time is about Quesada using \u201cdigital tools\u201d to layout the pages before drawing them traditionally, something he still does. I don\u2019t know why they obfuscated. He\u2019s using a drawing tablet, Photoshop or some other program, and importantly to me, SketchUp. I first recall seeing SketchUp in some process stuff posted by the artist Pete Woods, who\u2019d created the city of Metropolis for his Superman run in 3D, so he could use it for backgrounds. But I think this was published before that. Since it also doesn\u2019t name the software or explicitly say he\u2019s using 3D models, I guess I wouldn\u2019t have really known what I was looking at, but I sure do now. SketchUp is a super valuable tool for creating complex buildings and backgrounds. You can build your own pretty easily, and people also upload models to a free library. I used it extensively in Closed Galaxy, built the whole city like Pete Woods, as well as props and things. It\u2019s become very widespread.  And I\u2019ll tell ya, Quesada uses it better than most artists. Most of the time, if you\u2019re familiar with 3D programs, their use is really obvious. Even if you don\u2019t know the software, you see comics with these too-perfect, plain, sparsely detailed backgrounds and you can instinctively feel the difference between that and hand drawn backgrounds using nothing but the artist\u2019s instincts and a perspective grid. Additionally, for all that the models are geometrically perfect, the camera can really look warped and weird in 3D programs, SketchUp especially. So you wind up with these buildings you know for a fact are perfectly proportioned and in perfect perspective that just look\u2026 wrong. Quesada manages to absorb the models into his style, give them the same sheen as the figures. It doesn\u2019t really look like he\u2019s tracing 3D models. As someone who knows the struggle with that firsthand, I salute him for that one. I try to be fair when I\u2019m talking about stuff I don\u2019t like, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The weird retro cover copy for this story is baffling. I think they\u2019re trying to reference ASM 121, specifically, but it doesn\u2019t gel with the seriousness of the situation. It\u2019s not 1971…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864],"tags":[1863,35,2026,49,1981,350,1890,21,2130],"class_list":["post-30382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","tag-amazing-spider-man-vol-2","tag-aunt-may","tag-danny-miki","tag-doctor-strange","tag-j-michael-straczynski","tag-jarvis","tag-joe-quesada","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-richard-isanove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30382","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=30382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30383,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30382\/revisions\/30383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}