{"id":2018,"date":"2019-10-17T00:00:44","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T04:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deweybass.com\/spiderman\/?p=2018"},"modified":"2019-05-26T00:49:14","modified_gmt":"2019-05-26T04:49:14","slug":"asm-294","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2019\/10\/17\/asm-294\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM 294"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ya know, the funny thing is, I\u2019ve read this at least twice before, maybe three times. All in a trade. And I was never a big fan. But something about its pretentious emptiness, its laziness, its childish eagerness to seem mature during this readthrough is just grating every nerve in my body. Maybe I\u2019m just getting old. Also, based on how he chose to get into the writing game later, I can just imagine Todd McFarlane reading this and being like \u201cNow THAT\u2019S how you write a Spider-Man comic!\u201d But that\u2019s getting ahead of ourselves.
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We roll the clock back a second to see Vermin testing his cage and Spider-Man getting to Kraven again, this time with Kraven narrating some more about how they said his mom was insane, but she wasn\u2019t, and how it\u2019s Russia\u2019s fault she killed herself. When Spidey shows, he also reiterates that he\u2019s decided Spider-Man is just a man. BUT\u2026
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\u2026 he IS still responsible for Russia\u2019s turn to communism. In a story full of dumb stuff, that is easily the dumbest part. Kraven tells Spidey he can hit him a hundred times, but he has no reason to fight back, because he\u2019s already won. Time for a victory strip!
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And right there is where this farce fully collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Why didn\u2019t Kraven kill him? What reason could there be, if his stated goal was \u201ckill you, take your place, be a better you?\u201d How does that require a living Spider-Man? The only reason Kraven didn\u2019t kill him is he\u2019s not allowed to kill the title character, and that\u2019s just crap. Kraven puts on his regular outfit and beckons Spider-Man to follow him, narrating that the man is confused, but The Spider understands and submits. Yeah, ok. The logistics of this scene begin to elude me at this point. Spidey certainly seemed to travel to a building in the city to find Kraven last issue. A cutaway here seems to confirm that\u2019s where they are. Yet Kraven leads him to some kind of underground cavern containing a big stuffed elephant and Vermin in his cage. Is this cavern under Manhattan? Where are we? Is not bothering to have any of the locations and distances make any sense supposed to be some intentional surreality? I dunno, man, I just work here. Kraven says Vermin is a perfect fusion of man and beast\u2026
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Seems like the fact that Spider-Man\u2019s easily defeated Kraven a bunch of times should play into his calculus here, but of course, it does not. Spidey tries to help Vermin, but Vermin can\u2019t tell the difference between him and Kraven dressed as him, understandably, and starts zapping himself on the cage trying to get away from him. Kraven watches, narrating that it\u2019s a monumental joke that Spider-Man thinks all this is Kraven\u2019s fault. Guys, I THINK he might be a little crazy.
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Only one and a half more issues. I can do this. Kraven lets Vermin out of his cage, and uses his hoodoo to rile him up and get him to attack Spider-Man. Spidey doesn\u2019t want to fight, but it\u2019s way past that.
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If you say so! That slash gets Spidey mad enough to fight back, and Kraven narrates about how tired he is now that this game is almost over. But Spider-Man is Spider-Man, and he can only attack Vermin for so long before he realizes he\u2019s just beating up a confused animal, and looks at Kraven and refuses to continue. Vermin has no such compunction, though, and keeps wailing on Spidey until\u2026
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The beaten Spidey protests, says Vermin has killed before and will again, but he\u2019s in bad shape. Kraven helps him up, the narration babbling about The Spider and how he\u2019s only just now realized that Spidey is a good man.
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Literally nothing in their past encounters indicates Kraven is a man of his word. Kraven has, in fact, established rules and then immediately broken them for most of their encounters. But hey, don\u2019t let that stop you. Spidey swings off, finds the nearest manhole cover and drops in. Kraven watches him go. Still raining, by the way.
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You\u2019d think a shotgun blast to the face was the kind of death even a supervillain couldn\u2019t come back from. Oh, how I wish that were true. Kraven stayed dead for 21 years, all told, which is pretty good in superhero comics. But everybody comes back sooner or later. In subsequent years, creators would try to replace Kraven. They would produce a never before mentioned son, have him take up his dad\u2019s business (We\u2019ll see him eventually). Then produce a totally different son who also took up his dad\u2019s business (I think we\u2019ll see him too, briefly). Then a daughter and a wife, who hatched a plan to resurrect him. A lot of people you\u2019d really think would\u2019ve appeared in past Kraven stories. He loves hunting. You ever met someone who loves hunting? 20+ years of Spider-Man comics featured a man who\u2019s dedicated his life to hunting with 3 kids that we never saw him take hunting with him? Kraven getting super powers from soup is more believable than that.
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Ya know, the funny thing is, I\u2019ve read this at least twice before, maybe three times. All in a trade. And I was never a big fan. But something about its pretentious…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[9,191,270,125,45,394,213,2,165],"class_list":["post-2018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-bob-mcleod","tag-janet-jackson","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-kraven-the-hunter","tag-kravens-last-hunt-2","tag-mike-zeck","tag-spider-man","tag-vermin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018","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=2018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4559,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions\/4559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}