This cover has made me laugh for 30 years. This cover just feels fed up to me. “I’m sick of drawing this crap, WHATEVER, Carnage face!” I can’t know where Sal was mentally of course, but if it really is how I interpret it, who could blame him? Colors this month are credited to “Matthys/Andreani,” and I’m not sure who either of those people are. Alright, so, they managed to whittle Hero Team back down to just 5 people to Evil Team’s 5, so it’s a fair fight, but the heroes should still have won this thing already, when suddenly, Cloak & Dagger show up. Dagger’s blinding light has frozen everybody in their tracks. For some reason? Page one is everyone staring in shock across 2 tall panels, page 2 is a full page splash of Dagger just standing there. This moment is really not as impressive as they seem to think it is.
Not what Shriek will be saying by ASM 390…
A “lot” of “quotes” around “words” on this page. Dagger talks about how echoes of Shriek’s pain were in Cloak and she felt how terrible the world had treated her and starts zapping her with light, saying it can heal her, and after 2 pages of this, Shriek just tries to kill her, anyway. Spider-Man swings her away, barely conscious after expending so much her energy, saying that pointless display was not a failure, but proof they can win. Uh, ok!
Technically, he’s never stopped Shriek before, but whatever. The sheer number of splash pages in the TAC issues of this makes it feel like Sal knows just how slight this story is. Conjecture, of course, but he’s not one for a bunch of unnecessary splashes, and his 3 issues are full of them, and 2-panel and 3-panel pages. A reasonable response to “everyone fights and no one wins for 14 issues.” Shriek herself points out that Spider-Man’s never beaten her, and then he proceeds to battle all of Evil Team, the same stupid D-list losers who’ve somehow defeated all comers multiple times in this story, by himself, and do ok for a few pages. Then Carnage tags him in the side, and he starts getting hit by Shriek’s blasts and Demo’s bombs, all while yelling about they can’t kill what he believes and Dagger showed them the strength of one person’s heart an dblah blah blah. This is idiotic.
“He’s faced his pain time and time again, at least twice a year in stupid hallucinatory stories in this very title…”
Behold, the Deus Ex Machina! It’s the stupidest possible climax for this story on multiple levels! “It was Spider-Man’s idea, that’s why he sent literally everyone else to get it made, hastily, and a convenient nearby super science facility!” “A good bomb!” This is garbage. Demogoblin escapes the field, but Spider-Man pulls him out of the sky, and he collapses on the ground. Which, Spidey thinks, is good, since he can’t fight anymore.
You know, all this is stupid enough on its own, but the fact that Shriek is immediately back to being a brutal psychopath the next time we see her, written by the same writer, no less, reeeeeeeeeeeeeally undercuts whatever power it’s alleged to have. Which, to my eye, is zero. It’s only fitting that the worst Spider-Man story of all time have a climax beyond absurd and unsatisfying. The explosion was Carnage’s consciousness fighting against the wave, whatever, he’s lying on the ground with his symbiote in tatters. Because he’s dead! Spider-Man is deeply upset that the guy who’s been slaughtering half of NY is dead, but Deathlok and Cap assure him he killed himself by fighting the ray, that they, the noble heroes, didn’t kill him. The End! Right? It’s not like this goes to a 14th issue, right? Spider-Man is later watching the sun set in Central Park, reflecting on all that’s happened.
Golly, what a surprise. But in actual surprises, the letter page runs the first mail about Maximum Carnage, and it’s 2 letters about how it sucks! About how it’s boring, about how they should never do something like this again, about how Carnage is already overexposed and unrealistic in only his 2nd story! I salute them for printing that, but of course, editorial disagrees. But there’s an interesting tidbit in their first response:
So was this debacle DeMatteis’ idea, or are they only defending the title in which the letter appears? There’s a trail of logic one could hypothesize from there. If he had a Carnage idea, but editorial was like, “Well, Carnage is an ASM thing,” and then the proposed solution was a chance for all 4 titles to use Carnage, and what JM possibly proposed as a relatively tight TAC storyline became this mess where nothing can actually happen for 12 out of 14 issues, soundtracked by the thrilled cheers of the marketing department… you can see how that could happen. But if Maximum Carnage is really his fault, that is a massive strike against him when he didn’t need anymore. The 2nd unhappy letter is from someone who says they’ve been reading 15 years and never been moved to write in before now, but this is so bad they had to tell someone. One Jeff Gutman points out that this rampage not bringing in the national guard, or even many cops, is absurd. Points out how insane it is that all of NY’s superheroes aren’t involved, points out that nothing much happens in the first 7 issues, just gives them all their mistakes in plain text. They tell that guy he should wait to see the incredible climax of this one-of-a-kind story before passing judgment. This idiotic stance would become commonplace in the 2000s, as storylines got longer in general. As if someone who’s already spent $12 in 1993 money on the story isn’t entitled to an opinion unless they buy the rest! You spend your money, you take the ride, but you sure are entitled to tell the operator how it’s going. They can’t possibly think these unhappy fans will change their tune when they get to THE GOOD VIBES GUN. Ugh. I hate this so much. One more comic.