{"id":9771,"date":"2021-07-16T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T04:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=9771"},"modified":"2020-06-23T16:25:58","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T20:25:58","slug":"lost-years-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/07\/16\/lost-years-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Years 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lost Years! Probably shoulda stayed lost! But this does continue John Romita, Jr.\u2019s return to the fold, so that\u2019s cool. And it\u2019s the 90s, so it\u2019s a shiny foil cover! Comics never met a gimmick they didn\u2019t like at this time. We\u2019ve seen foil, holograms, \u201cchromium,\u201d there was glow in the dark, trading cards, you name it. There was an Image comic with squishy fake blood in the cover. DC did a Superman book with a cover like a Colorforms set, that was kinda cool. Anyway, yeah, we\u2019re looking at what kinda stuff Ben Reilly got up to out on the road, with tour guides JM DeMatteis, Romita, Jr., his most frequent inker Klaus Janson, and colorist Christie Scheele. The book opens with a sequence of a guy losing consciousness driving a semi truck on a crowded road at night, and Ben leaping into action to save him and the cars around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The mullets only get more powerful as JR goes on! Ben gets the truck stopped and gives the guy CPR on the side of the road, then vanishes. As state troopers interview the mom & daughter from that car, Ben\u2019s narration lets us know he\u2019s been traveling the world for 3 years, and has come to enjoy pushing himself to the limit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ben was traveling to Salt Lake City, and we cut to there, where Kaine is sitting in a bar, thinking about Ben, who he\u2019s hounded all over the world. A prostitute comes and hits on him, and when he says nothing, her pimp gets involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Man this book looks great. So, then. We have Ben and Kaine in SLC, Kaine has met Jacob Raven\u2019s partner, and we know what happened to her, so now we\u2019re gonna see it all go down.  That Tannen guy pays a guard in the jail to get a hit carried out for him, and then Ben uses a letter from Trainer and some fake credentials to ace a job interview, and now he\u2019s going to be a TA at a college, like Peter was in the 70s. But he knows it won\u2019t last. He knows his fake credentials will be found out, and he\u2019ll flee for a new town. It\u2019s how he\u2019s been getting by since he left New York, and Trainer is in on it. So Ben just plans to make as much money as he can before he has to leave. After the job interview, he goes for breakfast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A Peter Parker smitten with a redhead? What were the odds? Note her face coming up off the hand she was resting it on as she turns to look at Raven in panel 4. Those natural details delight me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nothing good can be in Janine\u2019s future, eh? Meanwhile, Louise is busting a drug dealer under cover when more goons show up and overwhelm her. But Ben isn\u2019t the only Peter Parker in Salt Lake City recently smitten with a local girl, and Kaine comes crashing through the window to save her. He brutalizes all the goons, but leaves them alive at her command. She is obviously into him, too, as we cut to Jacob Raven being kidnapped by that Tannen guy\u2019s goons. A lotta goons in SLC!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ben follows his Spider Sense to a house which immediately explodes. He rushes into action, rescuing a mother & child inside and then disappearing, as usual, internal monologuing about how he didn\u2019t want to admit he loved this stuff, and in moments like this, he was Spider-Man. Guess whose house that was?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alrighty. The stage is set for the rest of the series. This is easily the best issue I\u2019ve read this whole block. After all the awfulness I just read before, anything would seem like a masterpiece, but it\u2019s a perfectly good little thing. Nothing earth shattering, but it\u2019s not supposed to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lost Years! Probably shoulda stayed lost! But this does continue John Romita, Jr.\u2019s return to the fold, so that\u2019s cool. And it\u2019s the 90s, so it\u2019s a shiny foil cover! Comics never…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[455,332,595,125,118,488,435,942],"class_list":["post-9771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-ben-reilly","tag-christie-scheele","tag-jacob-raven","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-kaine","tag-klaus-janson","tag-lost-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9771","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=9771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9784,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9771\/revisions\/9784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}