{"id":3360,"date":"2020-03-06T00:00:45","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T04:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=3360"},"modified":"2019-06-03T00:27:05","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T04:27:05","slug":"mtu-122","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/03\/06\/mtu-122\/","title":{"rendered":"MTU 122"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

That\u2019s right, the shambling swamp is back! Except due to my weird posting schedule, I\u2019ve read his previous appearance in MTU 68, but not yet posted about it. That\u2019s frustrating. At any rate, we\u2019re back in the era where JM DeMatteis was writing, Kerry Gammil was drawing & Mike Esposito was inking. Man-Thing is wandering in the Florida swamp as he always does, surrounded on all sides by a ton of purple prose by DeMatteis. Kind of a holdover from the 70s, this much text all over a page. This bit of swamp is, improbably, \u201cthe nexus of all realities,\u201d so interdimensional craziness is always happening around The Man-Thing, and today is no different, with a disheveled dude looking like an old school magician stepping through a tear in reality to walk into the swamp.
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So much text! The guy says his name is Fate (First name? Last name?) and launches right into his life story. Turns out he\u2019s a villain from DeMatteis\u2019 Defenders run (That just keeps spilling over into this book). He was a reporter whose family was killed by gangsters because of his work, so he did what anyone would do and learned \u201cthe dark arts\u201d and became a supervillain. The guy who killed his family is apparently the super-person called Devil-Slayer, he and The Defenders fought this guy, this guy lost, as you might expect. He was put under psychiatric care by Dr. Strange, and how now broken loose.
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I guess you gotta aim high when you\u2019re a crazy sorcerer. Meanwhile in New York, inspired by the events of last issue (Remember that?), Peter has been doing a photo series on the elderly, about people who don\u2019t have a support network living an increasingly isolated life as they age. Robbie\u2019s into it, JJJ is\u2026 JJJ. He stomps in and talks about how he hates poetry, snatching the photos out of Pete\u2019s hand.
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Who knew? Peter\u2019s so lost in thought he walks into traffic, executing an amazing triple-flip to avoid getting hit, and then trying to play it off as \u201cthe benefits of joining a health spa\u201d to onlookers before running off.
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A MITE SUSPICIOUS, you say. Just a LITTLE BIT. He notices the SLIGHTLY SUSPICIOUS big guy is leaving a slime trail and runs into a restaurant to become Spider-Man. Meanwhile, \u201cFate\u201d and Man-Thing are in The Bugle, the former hoping to see JJJ. And he does\u2026
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This was a great plan! What could possibly go wrong? As you may know, \u201cwhoever knows fear burns at the touch of The Man-Thing.\u201d This bizarre and difficult to measure metric is, like, his entire thing. He\u2019s drawn to fear. So The Daily Bugle city room has just become the craziest place in the world for Man-Thing. Fate\u2026 freezes everyone in time except him, JJJ & Man-Thing\u2026 so they can talk\u2026 I can\u2019t with this. Spider-Man crawls up the side of the building just now, so he sees the next bit. Fate says the world is full of suffering and it sucks and tells JJJ he wants him to use the paper to \u201cencourage people to be decent to each other.\u201d JJJ rightly says he can\u2019t fix that with a newspaper. How does Fate react?
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This is ridiculous. Spidey starts trying to fight magic with his web, which works about as well as you\u2019d expect. Then while ol\u2019 dude is babbling about whatever he\u2019s babbling about\u2026
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Things fall apart quickly. Spidey starts trying to save Fate from Man-Thing, but can\u2019t get much of a grip on the monster. JJJ sees all this happening and understandably freaks out, and his fear draws Man-Thing\u2019s attention. Spidey dives into Manny and accidentally smashes them both right through the wall, so now they\u2019re dropping to the street and Spidey\u2019s hands are stuck in Man-Thing\u2019s goopy body. He frees himself with seconds to spare, and Man-Thing explodes on the pavement.
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Man-Thing starts going after the panicked crowd, Spidey tries his best to stop him but doesn\u2019t fare too well, and back upstairs, Fate is feeling abandoned by his new friend, Man-Thing, because he is clearly not ok.
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Sheesh. Man-Thing starts trying to fight the cops, Spidey does his absolute best, all the while feeling extreme pity for Man-Thing, knowing none of this is his fault, and the way Man-Thing feeds on emotions, this causes him to just kinda melt into a puddle.
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Abrupt! Spidey\u2019s in a bad place, and it sounds like this issue will continue right into the next one, so I\u2019ll see ya there.
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That\u2019s right, the shambling swamp is back! Except due to my weird posting schedule, I\u2019ve read his previous appearance in MTU 68, but not yet posted about it. That\u2019s frustrating. At any…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[13,125,26,127,126,71,52],"class_list":["post-3360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-joe-robertson","tag-kerry-gammil","tag-man-thing","tag-marvel-team-up","tag-mike-esposito"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360","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=3360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3426,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360\/revisions\/3426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}