There’s that new logo type over here, too. I swore not to buy this. I really did. I think I even said something about it writing for MKSM 12. But… That made this arc of this title the only issues I was missing from any of these series until… well, later. Just 6 issues not in my boxes. And, what, like I don’t already have a ton of material, much of it from around this time, I’d just as soon rather not? What’s 6 more bad comics? This is the idiot mentality of the comic book collector. So, when I was ordering some other stuff, I went ahead and got them. The thing is, I just know they’re going to be a miserable experience. Reginald Hudlin came to comics from Hollywood, Bill Jemas’ dream come true. The director of such movies as House Party, Boomerang and The Great White Hype, he was obviously a natural fit for superhero comics. They brought him in to do Black Panther a year and a half after the always critically acclaimed but never commercially successful Panther run by Christopher Priest, Et al., finally closed up shop. Priest revolutionized the character, taking him back to first principles as the smartest man in any room, as Kirby and Lee had originally portrayed him, and created such familiar-to-movie-goers names as Okoye, Nakia, Zuri and Everett K. Ross along the way. Hudlin also has points on the board in the MCU, having created Shuri and reconceptualized Priest’s Dora Milaje as a military force (With John Romita, Jr. providing the designs as he drew the first arc. The guy’s everywhere). But his Panther run was terrible, top to bottom. Needless retcons, meandering, choppy plots that made it clear he’d never written for comics, and a tone like he was making fun of the character and comics in general much of the time. But he would stay on the book for years, somehow, never once turning in a story any better than “ok,” usually downright awful… Until his final project, a miniseries teaming Cap with the Panther’s grandfather in WWII drawn by the great Denys Cowan called Flags Of Our Fathers that, for some reason, was great. It was like someone else wrote it, it was night and day different. I still don’t get it.
For my part, I bailed on his Black Panther the minute Romita was done (#6), and didn’t read the rest of Hudlin’s run til more than a decade later, digitally. And that first arc with Johnny wasn’t even over when Hudlin got his brief stint writing this title alongside it. And given the amateur hour quality and seeming disrespect for the material on almost every page of those 6 issues of Black Panther, well, I did not want to see this guy’s Spider-Man, to put it mildly. But… he wrote part of the big, terrible crossover looming in the near future of this blog. So that left just 6 issues of this title that I didn’t have, like I said. Thus… here we are. I could not possibly be less excited. Not least because Hudlin is paired here with Billy Tan, an up and coming artist at Marvel who, frankly, was not very good. Not ready for primetime. How he winds up drawing New Avengers is completely beyond me, but that’s years in the future. So! Sure-to-be-bad writing AND bad art? And I bought these comics, anyway? Like, recently, like weeks before I’m typing this? The real villain of this story is me. This run has covers by Steve McNiven to hide the art inside from unsuspecting buyers. Inside, John Sibal inks and Avalon Studios handles color.
The bald guy shrank 2 feet between panels. Off to a rollicking start.
I mean come on. Yuck. But wait, let’s go see Peter Parker, high school teacher, at his job…
…where he suddenly has a MULLET and a weirdly feminine face and all the high school students are now little kids! What are we doing??? Peter reads in the paper that Absorbing Man got loose on his way home to Avengers Tower. Having moved in in ASM 519 a few weeks before this came out, they can just assume you read that and not spend much time explaining. He finds May and Jarvis hanging out, Tan having no idea what May’s hair is supposed to look like now, and is made nervous by them.
Everyone’s talking about polishing Iron Man’s helmet these days. Look at this art! Every visible part of MJ is a different proportion in that last panel, and none of it matches Wolverine! Sheesh, man.
Boy oh boy. I bought this on purpose. This comic sucks so bad! Billy Tan comes to Marvel from Marc Silvestri’s Top Cow imprint at Image, giving him something of the same lineage as Talent Caldwell. Both guys who were working in the general house style of that company, and you can see it. Caldwell is a lot better, tho. This entire scene is so lame and cliche and stupid, but also awkwardly paced, like Hudlin’s Black Panther. This is only part 1 of 6! I’m not even halfway through it! Uuuugh, the next day, Peter catches the subway to work when the car slams to a halt because Absorbing Man is tearing things up nearby for some reason. He was in a desert at the top of this issue, and now he’s in New York. I didn’t know he could teleport. So, Peter ducks out of and… I guess under the train? The images make no sense. And he loses his keys as he turns into Spider-Man in a 2-page spread that makes you turn the book sideways, like Romita, Jr. was really into in the late 90s, only this one looks bad. And guess what?
Tan draws Spider-Man’s mask eyes like Spawn’s. Awful. Absorbing Man came into this scene throwing a car. We only know he robbed a bank because Spider-Man says he did. A bank is pictured in the background of the 2-page spread prior to this, that’s all the setup we got. This typical Hudlin storytelling. Choppy, missing pieces. The two continue their fight, with Abs Man becoming pavement and then metal, but then… he gets an upset stomach and throws up a bunch of black top. That makes zero sense. He throws up A BUNCH of black top. He covers Spider-Man in a pile of rubble. How? Why? He just leaves. Spider-Man is apparently unable to dig out of a 6 foot pile of loose rocks in time to stop him. And then Spidey just gives up and goes to work. Where he is fired from teaching summer school for being late. An administrator tells him they overstaffed, and “we just figured whoever would make it here first would get the last job.” That is comically unprofessional. So, now Peter has to find another way to… pay the bills? He’s living for free in Avengers Tower, but he’s worried about money. Elsewhere, Crusher is indulging in some unspecified pills when some lady shows up and says her employer will keep him in drugs for special favors. One wonders where Titania is in all this. Hudlin probably doesn’t even know about her. Then we cut to Peter crawling back to the Bugle for work, where a giant man is in his way at Jameson’s door.
It’s a Superman analog. Not only is that beyond cliche, THE SENTRY JUST CAME BACK. Marvel doesn’t need TWO fake Supermans.
They didn’t even really explain what JJJ has them doing. Meanwhile, Crusher has been taken to see random lady’s boss. That was a job offer earlier, even tho it totally did not read like one. It’s the Owl. He wants Creel to kill a bunch of people in exchange for his drug habit. Creel says there’s “some capes” on the list, but agrees.
Ok, it’s straight up hilarious that Tan draws the Iron Man armor better than Finch does. That’s embarrassing. He’s got Cap with that tiiiiny wee shield and no star on his back, he’s apparently made up a new mask for Spider-Woman, and he’s drawing Iron Man better than Finch. Insane. Cap’s training plan allows Spider-Man and Wolverine to square off, of course, and that somehow goes this way:
I’ll give Tan this, he draws Wolverine with claws that could actually fit in his arm instead of swords like… almost everyone else by 2005. I am so mad at myself.