Now that’s a good McKay’s price! Not a great background on that cover, Tony Salmons! Welcome back to 1986. A famously big year for comics, with the release of books like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Crisis On Infinite Earths and American Flagg, to name but a few books that really did change comics forever, but for Spider-Man… not the best year. The inside front cover of Marvel Fanfare is always a comic strip of editor Al Milgrom talking to you called Editori-Al. He says the art in both stories this issue is “unorthodox” and calls Tony Salmons’ stuff “designy, graphic storytelling.” The main feature in this issue of Fanfare is a DD story by Salmons and Bill Mantlo. His page construction is perhaps a little unusual (Tho not really in the realm of, like, a Frank Miller), but “designy” here seems to mean “anything he doesn’t want to draw is barely sketched in” in both the story and the cover. Ok! It’s followed by a New Mutants gallery by original series artist Bob McLeod, which is pretty cool, and then the reason we’re here, a Spider-Man story by Marc Hempel. Al said his stuff is “positively off-the-wall-crawler.”
Kind of a proto-Darwyn Cooke vibe. It’s always interesting to see the rare line artist in comics who also colors their own stuff. There’s just a wholeness to it. Anyway, our man falls further into the depths of boredom, first making little web sculptures, and then putting on his costume and shouting about how Peter Parker is Spider-Man, thinking it will be thrilling, but it’s not.
That’s gonna be one weird message for The Osborns. Our bored hero thinks there’s only one person left to call, but even he’s not that desperate. Who? He heads out swinging around looking for trouble, but nothing is happening, and then he sneezes so hard he falls on a rooftop.
A wacky one. I would certainly say Hempel’s stuff seems more “designy” than Salmons’. Pretty slick all around. He has a nice back cover, too:
Wel, not the most consequential start to this block, but it was fun. Next post, things get weird.