{"id":17645,"date":"2023-07-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=17645"},"modified":"2022-02-06T23:23:23","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T03:23:23","slug":"web-030","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2023\/07\/11\/web-030\/","title":{"rendered":"WEB 030"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The year of the reader! Anyone reading after 1987 is wasting their time! I have no idea what that means. A blurb on the splash tells us this comic takes place after ASM 289 and WEB 29, before ASM 290 and TAC 128. Really pinning it down. Also 5 people pitch in on inks and another blurb tells us this issue will give you the origin of The Hobgoblin, after the cover promised one for The Rose, so I guess it\u2019s got its work cut out for it. Yet another blurb tells us Spider-Man\u2019s just had his fight with the new Hobgoblin, and has returned to Foreigner\u2019s office to look for information. A 2-page sequence recaps last issue, ASM 289, Spider-Man Vs. Wolverine, and so on. Then we cut to Dina and Alfredo, Dina worried they haven\u2019t seen Richard in days, the ever-unflappable Alfredo saying he has to lay low due to all the recent events. That Priest has turned so much of his attention to these 2 nobodies during and after the climax of a 4-year mystery of The Hobgoblin and 3-year mystery of The Rose is baffling. Who cares about Alfredo and Dina!? Literally no one! Then it\u2019s time for that origin material we were promised. Richard goes to confession in a church and decides to tell the whole tale, starting with Ned Leeds coming to his house in the Hamptons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Then Priest uses news of some events in Daredevil, wherein his mom was almost killed in an explosion, got amnesia, and was homeless until DD found her and used her as a bargaining chip to stop one of Kingpin\u2019s schemes, as the moment Richard decided to take a stand against his father. So he bought what would be The Rose\u2019s penthouse, and Alfredo, of all people, suggested they work with Ned, who Richard notes Alfredo never liked. They meet for lunch, and the Ned wants to show them something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I just don\u2019t buy it. Ned going mad with power would sell better for me than \u201cThe Hobgoblin was actually an elaborate, ridiculous attempt to bring down The Kingpin for the good of the people.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, Ned came up with the idea of The Rose, and they were off. Varley and Johnston hired a bunch of muscle and then had a meeting to introduce The Rose, and voila. The priest taking all this in is getting understandably uncomfortable. Then Priest tries to recontextualize the characters\u2019 first meeting in ASM 253, when Hobby flew up to Rose\u2019s balcony and offered to team-up to kill Spider-Man, as some kind of show for his goons, which makes no sense whatsoever. And so they began their alleged war on crime while pretending to be criminals, both Richard and Ned totally heroic. It does not work. But then, Richard says, things started to go bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Apparently all the fights Hobgoblin had with Spider-Man prior to ASM 253 didn\u2019t happen or something? Was anyone buying this? Again, why not just say Ned found The Green Goblin\u2019s stuff while investigating him, became fascinated with it, power corrupts, etc? Why all this ridiculous hero garbage that makes the last 4 years fall apart? Well, anyway, RIchard\u2019s story detours into explaining some of the Daredevil story Born Again, and how that led to destabilizing Kingpin\u2019s hold on his organization, then to some of the Daredevil graphic novel In Love And War to explain his mother leaving and returning the country, and then we\u2019re more or less up to Gang War. Rather than talk about Hobgoblin and The Rose\u2019s activities, we\u2019re talking about Daredevil. I guess because this backstory doesn\u2019t leave much to talk about. They don\u2019t even mention Hobgoblin\u2019s mad quest for Norman\u2019s strength formula. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Then Richard gets to the part where he shot that cop, and is overcome with grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He won\u2019t, actually. Richard Fisk doesn\u2019t appear in another comic until Web 84, where he and Alfredo once again did the whole Rose bit, and we saw how that went. But the dangling plot thread I am most concerned with, which also gets no resolution: What the hell was Lance Bannon up to? Stern and DeFalco made Lance a possible suspect, but Priest pushed REALLY hard to make you think he might be Hobgoblin, showed him clearly plotting something. He\u2019s tied off the Keating angle and the Kingsley angle, however unsatisfying it may have been, but no word on Lance Bannon\u2019s mysterious comings and goings and seeming beef with Flash Thompson, a guy he didn\u2019t even know. Messy, messy, messy. Much like Ricahrd, Lance completely disappears, small cameos his only appearances until the story in which he dies in Web 113 and 114, some 7 years hence. And  the career of The Hobgoblin, the best new Spider-Man villain since the 60s, is brutally retconned into a bunch of nothing, and a character with a lot of potential in The Rose is brought down with him. No one wins! And this is where they left it. In yet another similarity to The Clone Saga, once the mess was finally finished, people were really keen to just move on. As we know, Macendale will have a bumpy ride as Hobgoblin. But at least he didn\u2019t have a mystery hanging like an albatross around his neck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The year of the reader! Anyone reading after 1987 is wasting their time! I have no idea what that means. A blurb on the splash tells us this comic takes place after…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[1594,1497,253,322,215,55,224,2,711,282,325,265],"class_list":["post-17645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-alfredo","tag-art-nichols","tag-bob-sharen","tag-christopher-priest","tag-lt-keating","tag-ned-leeds","tag-roderick-kingsley","tag-spider-man","tag-steve-geiger","tag-the-arranger","tag-the-rose","tag-web-of-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17645","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=17645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17655,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17645\/revisions\/17655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}