Suddenly, out of nowhere, John Byrne appears. His involvement in all this seemed random at first, but it becomes so pervasive that he must’ve been part of all the planning. By this point, Byrne is slowly becoming an awful old curmudgeon. He has already started looking backward rather than forward. At DC, he’s doing a series of comics called Superman/Batman: Generations, rolling it back to 1940 and having the characters age in real time. Which I quite enjoyed, but which isn’t trying to move anything forward. For Marvel, he will soon embark on X-Men: The Hidden Years, a project claiming to show what the team was up to in the years when their comic was just reprints in the 70s, and he’ll follow that with The Lost Generation, a series about secret, early heroes in the Marvel U, before the FF. He is getting weirder and more stringent about comic book characters, demanding they be taken seriously, making up rules he thinks everyone should follow (Like you can’t say they wear spandex, and that it’s disrespectful to call Superman and Batman “Supes” and “Bats” even though literally everyone does). By the time news breaks in the early 2000s that Jessica Alba has been cast as Sue Storm in an FF movie, Byrne will post on his forum “Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino women with blond hair look like hookers to me, no matter how clean or “cute” they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don’t work for me with lighter shades. Like I said — personal prejudice.” He kind of exiles himself from mainstream comics, refusing to work on Marvel or DC product even when people are dying to work with him, deriding the work of people who become popular, and generally seeming like a bitter, rotten old man. At the turn of the century and beyond, he seems hellbent on destroying any good will he built up as a beloved artist & writer in the previous 3 decades. Me, playing armchair psychiatrist, I’ve always thought he couldn’t handle the world changing. He was more or less the most popular artist in comics until the Image guys started popping at Marvel in the late 80s, and I think you can kind of see the degeneration start there. As he continues to perceive the comics industry moving further away from what he’s used to, he becomes more unpleasant and backward looking, and the comics industry only continues to look less like the one he remembers. We will soon be looking at a project that will eventually lead to one of his most transparently bitter grudges, and let me tell you, my dread for revisiting it is about on par with knowing I’d have to re-read Maximum Carnage.
But! That’s all for later. For now, it’s Gathering of Five part 2, and Ringo has done the cover of ASM! Anything can happen! And for interior pencils, we have Rafael Kayanan, recent ASM fill-in artist, back in the saddle, with 4 different people credited with inks and 2 colorists, all credited last name only. Spider-Man is trying to catch up to someone he heard was rampaging on the news.
I know he’s The Molten Man and all, but he hasn’t seemed like he was hot to the touch since the 70s. Just shiny. We’ve seen him wearing sweaters. He’s plowing through a department store, setting off the sprinklers, which is creating scalding steam as Spider-Man tries to get everyone out. While he’s doing that, MM mysteriously vanishes. A guy who’s been cutting a path of destruction through town seems hard to lose, but these are strange days.
This thing sounds more un-Spider-Man with every scrap of detail, but these are strange days. Spidey figures out MM disappeared into the sewer through a hole in the floor, and gives chase… until he gets close enough, and that scalding steam becomes a problem again. He guesses it’s getting up to 200 degrees, and has to break off and try to escape before he’s cooked. But the nearest manhole has a truck on top up on the surface. One might think he’d just scurry back whence he came but…
Spider-Man procures a map of the city to better estimate where MM is going. Since he was traveling in a straight line, Spidey reasons he can head to the furthest possible point and work backwards. Meanwhile, Robbie has arrived in America by boat with Alison Mongrain. They agree that it was too risky to take a plane, but then Molten Man comes up out of the dock beneath them. Where on Earth is Martha Robertson in all this? Raxton is clearly after Alison, swatting Joe out of the way like he’s nothing. Joe tries smashing a beam over his head, but that only makes him mad. Lucky for him Spidey got that map…
Very Ditko-y top panel. As the regular folk dip, the whole place crashes into the water due to MM’s heat. Spidey claws his way to the surface just in time to almost get killed by a boat. But he survives, and afterward, can’t find any trace of Molten Man.
Well, there’s the premise laid out, finally. So who all’s gonna take this ride with Norman? If you try to guess, you’ll be disappointed. In the letters, that weirdo who was threatening to quit reading comics altogether because no one respects Man-Wolf is back, not talking about Man-Wolf, but being made fun of for loving Man-Wolf by editorial, and honestly, I’m on their side.