{"id":10288,"date":"2021-08-31T00:00:21","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T04:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=10288"},"modified":"2020-07-17T21:50:28","modified_gmt":"2020-07-18T01:50:28","slug":"sm-04","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/08\/31\/sm-04\/","title":{"rendered":"SM 04"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I may have been a relative newcomer to comics at this point, but one of the only comics I owned was ASM 313<\/a>, so I knew enough to wonder \u201csince when is The Lizard immortal?\u201d upon reading that caption. Ol\u2019 Liz\u2019s mouth keeps getting bigger and bigger in this series. Soon he\u2019ll be able to swallow Spider-Man whole. In this issue, McFarlane takes over as the colorist, too. Highly irregular for the time, and even for today, really. But as I said, even the most industrious cartoonists don\u2019t wanna letter anything, so Rick Parker is hanging in on that part of the job. This issue\u2019s first page text runs over various closeups of parts of Kraven\u2019s now bone white body drilling with blood (This is way extreme for 1990), and the 2-page spread with \u201c–rise above it all!\u201d shows Kraven saying his hunt is over, he\u2019s found his friend, Spider-Man, with The Lizard at his heel like a dog. Todd taking over on color explains a lot about the extreme color choices on these pages. The hallucinating Spider-Man imagines he\u2019s been buried alive again, and it\u2019s presented as a flashback to Kraven\u2019s Last hunt. He thinks of Mary Jane, and that gives him the strength to dig himself free again. In his mind, he sees himself smashing up out of his grave in his black costume. In reality, he\u2019s just flailing around in the trash.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For once, a woman in a skimpy costume isn\u2019t all that gratuitous, considering her version of Kraven\u2019s outfit isn\u2019t much smaller than his was. A lil\u2019, tho. This stuff was prrrretty confusing to me as a kid. I didn\u2019t know about Kraven\u2019s Last Hunt yet, and I imagine most people reading this didn\u2019t know who Calypso was, myself certainly included. Buried alive? What? But I went along for the ride. She has The Lizard pick up the unconscious Spidey and they take off, the captions implying even (the still unnamed) Calypso doesn\u2019t know how long she can keep this bloodthirsty new incarnation of The Lizard from eating Spider-Man. We check in on MJ to see her come home, find Peter not there, and just head back out for more partying, and then we cut to Spidey waking up in Calypso\u2019s lair, which is obviously Kraven\u2019s house from Last Hunt, thinking she seems familiar, but he can\u2019t pinpoint it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Of interest to me, right off the bat, this is completely in keeping with Denny O\u2019Neil\u2019s version of Calypso in ASM 209, and ignoring Bill Mantlo\u2019s totally different portrayal in TAC 65. In response to Spidey, The Lizard tries to eat his head, but once again, Calypso stops him, and he freezes in his tracks. Then she starts mixin\u2019 up the medicine again. We cut ot MJ literally powdering her nose before she goes back to the dancefloor, then return to the superbusiness. Honestly, why is MJ in this? Spidey is trying to figure out what\u2019s going on as The Lizard sits, jaws still wide, right in front of him. Meanwhile, Calypso is flashing back to her newly minted origin, which totally sucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cOh, that evil magic of those weird savages in the Carribean!\u201d Just wild racist. Aaaaanyway, the drums finally stop, The Lizard licks some blood off our hero, and in a trance, Calypso says it\u2019s time. Spidey thinks if he\u2019s gonna do something it better be…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, that\u2019s it, guys. I know I\u2019ve been fooled before, but I\u2019m pretty sure Spidey\u2019s dead this time. Guess we\u2019ll see his funeral next issue. Meanwhile, in the letter column, Todd says he\u2019s read over 3,000 letters about Spider-Man #1. It was very unusual for a creator to answer the mail in this period as opposed to an editor, and I think it\u2019s cool he chose to do so. He prints some positive ones and some negative ones, and also this one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You ok, buddy? The 5th one on his list refers to the 2-page, comic-style ads for the TubrGrafix 16 game Bonk’s Adventure that interrupted the flow of many books in this time, including Spider-Man #1. Not quite as random as it looks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I may have been a relative newcomer to comics at this point, but one of the only comics I owned was ASM 313, so I knew enough to wonder \u201csince when is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[220,21,2,43,274],"class_list":["post-10288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-calypso","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-spider-man","tag-the-lizard","tag-todd-mcfarlane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10298,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10288\/revisions\/10298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}