{"id":4994,"date":"2020-06-03T00:00:29","date_gmt":"2020-06-03T04:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=4994"},"modified":"2019-06-30T00:45:54","modified_gmt":"2019-06-30T04:45:54","slug":"asm-396","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/06\/03\/asm-396\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM 396"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The most shocking ending of all! Didn\u2019t a clone of Spider-Man show up recently? You\u2019re gonna top that? Ok. Look, Daredevil is here, wearing his worst costume by a mile! If you weren\u2019t reading comics in this era, you would probably be surprised how bad things are. We discussed DD faking his own death. Spider-Man is an emo now. Captain America is dying, poisoned by the Super Soldier Serum. Tony Stark is \u201cdead,\u201d or maybe just came back by now? But in a year, he\u2019ll be revealed to be the mind controlled puppet of Kang the Conqueror, murder some people, get killed himself, and then The Avengers will go back in time and bring a teenage Tony Stark to the present to be the new Iron Man. Really! I think this is when Hulk\u2019s wife died from gamma poisoning. The Avengers went through a debacle called \u201cThe Crossing\u201d that messed them up all up and turned The Wasp into an actual mutant wasp-lady, among other things. Asgard was destroyed and everyone in it seemingly died and Thor had no idea what happened, and I think he lost all his powers for awhile. Reed Richards \u201cdied,\u201d The Thing got all scarred by Wolverine, Johnny Storm\u2019s wife was revealed to be a Skrull. In X-Men, Colossus\u2019s whole family got killed and Professor X turned Magneto into a vegetable after he pulled all the Adamantium out of Wolverine, among other things. The West Coast Avengers were rechristened FORCE WORKS because they\u2019re TUFF now, ok??? Punisher almost got killed and got plastic surgery to make him look like a black guy as a disguise, now THAT was insane. Over at DC, Superman was dead, Batman got paralized, Wonder Woman lost her title to Artemis, Green Arrow was dead, Aquaman got his hand chewed off by piranhas, Green Lantern went crazy and murdered an entire American city. And so on! Comics in the 90s were a nightmare from which there was no waking! 
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We open on Daredevil doing what he does best: beating the blue hell out of some dudes hoping that will make them tell him where The Owl is. This has been his thing since Miller in the 80s, but if you think it\u2019s not ramped up in the super aggressive angry 90s, well, you\u2019ll be very sad. After he gets done beating up some hoods in an alley, he tells someone off-panel they can come out now. That they\u2019ve been following him for 3 days, and no one can do that without him noticing. Guess who?
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A shame we\u2019ll probably never get to see this moment on the big screen, right guys? \u201cI\u2019m dead!\u201d \u201cNo, I\u2019m dead!\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sad!\u201d \u201cWay sadder, bro!\u201d Elsewhere, the Owl internal monologues about people being mice (He\u2019s an OWL, you see) thinking about how he used to be dead inside, too (It\u2019s a JM DeMatteis comic, you see) when The Vulture shows up. He\u2019s young now. Don\u2019t ask, I don\u2019t even wanna talk about it, we\u2019ll see it eventually. They had a planned meeting, and they swoop away to go be green flying dudes together, finally, after all these years. Did they ever team up before? I can\u2019t say. But they are both green flying dudes, it only makes sense. Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, MJ is ruminating on her past. Even though she was really connecting with Gayle and things were going good in TAC, no one is allowed to be happy in ASM, so she can\u2019t sleep and she\u2019s thinking about how her childhood sucked, but Peter seemed so happy about his.
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I am running out of ways to scoff at this stuff. The age difference between MJ & Gayle sure seems to have changed since Parallel Lives<\/a>, huh? Back in New York, Spider-Man continues to reject DD\u2019s dumb story that he\u2019s not Matt Murdock, saying he\u2019s been following him to make sure. DD says he isn\u2019t Matt, and even if he was, he couldn\u2019t help Spidey.
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\/sigh. So they go to Matt\u2019s grave, and DD tells him if he really was Matt Murdock and he really did fake his death (OJ style!), he would tell Spider-Man to kill Peter Parker, bury him now, and forget he ever existed. Just a couple\u2019a dudes being bros! 
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I mean\u2026 what\u2019s supposed to be going on here? If they\u2019re so angry and sad and edgy all the time, what is this? I keep coming back to why would Spidey, and now Daredevil, be so committed to helping people after being willing to turn their backs on everyone who cares about them? What sense does this make? What\u2019s the endgame, dudes? Whatever it may be, we go see The Owl & The Vulture, also talking about killing and burying your old self (I have run out of snark)…
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Owl tells him to give the guy the antidote and threatens him with his now Wolverine-size claws, but Vultch says there is no antidote as he snaps the guy\u2019s neck.
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What a great plan! Owl flies away wondering if he was so repulsed because he was against what Vulture is planning, or so tempted by it. As hes pondering that, Sadsack & Saddersack show up.
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Oh, no! Spider-Man\u2019s gonna die! I guess maybe you\u2019re supposed to think he could die, and then Ben could take over? I don\u2019t think anyone would fall for that, but I guess it\u2019s a possibility. I maintain that Spider-Man facing certain for the 20 billionth time is not as shocking as his clone showing back up. Speaking of whom, let\u2019s see how that final battle with Venom goes next time.
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The most shocking ending of all! Didn\u2019t a clone of Spider-Man show up recently? You\u2019re gonna top that? Ok. Look, Daredevil is here, wearing his worst costume by a mile! If you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[9,253,58,125,461,339,21,152,2,98],"class_list":["post-4994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-bob-sharen","tag-daredevil","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-larry-mahlstedt","tag-mark-bagley","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-owl","tag-spider-man","tag-vulture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994","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=4994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5065,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994\/revisions\/5065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}