When Bob Gale disappeared from the monthly ASM lineup, I thought I was free. I was wrong. While Gale wasn’t working on ASM, he was writing something called The Amazing Spider-Man Digital, a web-exclusive series running 10 installments, back when Marvel was doing free original content on their website. Those 10 shorter installments were then collected in print as the 5-issue Peter Parker series further on up the road, and then those went back to digital, and that’s how I’m reading them, back where they more or less took place in the timeline. To my regret. Pat Olliffe draws at least this first story, with colors by Antonio Fabela.
I gather that, on the web, these pages were quasi-sorta-semi animated, forcing you to click to get figures and word balloons to appear. Trying to make it more interactive, I guess, but it sounds annoying.
Feels weird to reference ASM 106 again so soon, but… ironic indeed! Spider-Man heads home to find Michelle is having the apartment repainted. He asks why he wasn’t consulted, and there’s frankly far too much business about them arguing about it. Also, Peter thinks she’s hot. I guess Peter haplessly puppy dogging at every girl he sees is at least more believable than every woman he met throwing herself at him for 30 years. Also she tells him he has to split the cost of the painting, and his cut is $600, due Monday. Seems like a good time to cut to basically anything else, so we cut to JJJ using language that would not fly in a Marvel comic today to disparage a celebrity influencer type who wants to make NYC her home base in exchange for JJJ naming a day after her. He’s not into it, his assistant keeps trying to explain the revenue it would bring in.
The assistant has won, and JJJ does the announcement, accidentally saying her name wrong. We then go she the Terri Hillman in question, who’s not terribly in to this, either, but her manager is. Maybe he’s in cahoots with JJJ’s guy. Is this seriously going to be a plot line in this? Then we cut to 3 pages of heretofore unknown to us teenager girls in a high school cafeteria debating the merits of JJJ doing business with this woman before having an altercation with popular girls in some sort of D-grade Mean Girls knockoff? Are you serious? What is this comic? And then Peter Parker starts calling around looking for info about a photo op for JJJ and Hillman, hoping to sell pics. We learn Glory Grant is now JJJ’s press secretary (Random!), and then all of a sudden, Dexter Bennett hires Peter back to get photos of JJJ looking bad. What a whirlwind of total nonsense. Always nice to see Glory, though.
They just keep letting Bob Gale do things. Spider-Man learns this dopey new villain’s name is Spectrum. Spider-Man leaves the area on a hunch that this guy’s dumb powers have a max distance, which he proves, but then the Anti-Spider-Man Squad shows up to shoot at him a lot. Spider-Man informs them that the acronym for Anti-Spider-Man Squad is ASS and makes a bunch of jokes about that, then borrows a mic from a reporter to do this…
What a cliffhanger. Some random high schooler is gonna turn up the heat on your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man! The rest of this issue is Fred Hembeck comics, squarely out of continuity and my personal realm of interest. I assumed this series would collect the digital comics 2 per issue, but I guess not? I guess I don’t know how long the digital ones were. I just know there were 10 of them and 5 of these. At any rate, more of this… whatever it is… next time.