{"id":20589,"date":"2024-03-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=20589"},"modified":"2022-07-27T22:19:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T02:19:52","slug":"smu-05","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/03\/21\/smu-05\/","title":{"rendered":"SMU 05"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As if Spider-Man hasn\u2019t gone through enough trauma recently, now he has to do this guaranteed-to-be-stupid story. Once again, shout out the guy at the local flea market for putting a single dollar on this one. I hope you\u2019re still out there (Not been since 2019). This story is called \u201cEstranged Tales.\u201d Woof. It\u2019s Tom DeFalco, Ron Lim, Jim Sanders III and John Kalisz. They open on The Human Torch, eager to tell us why he\u2019s become a sadsack lately\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We saw Ben scarred in FF 374<\/a>, where Johnny was on a rampage due to learning his bride was a Skrull. Compared to all this, what happened to Peter seems like Shakespeare. An egg!! Skrulls lay eggs!? The 90s really deserve their rep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I got a bad feeling about this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I knew it. The pun title raised the alarm. It\u2019s The Fox, last seen in Torch & Spider-Man\u2019s first ever team-up in Strange Tales Annual 2<\/a>. And by last seen, I don\u2019t mean on the blog, I mean at all. This is his 2nd and final comics appearance. And his name is now REYNARD SLINKER.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom DeFalco is 100% not qualified to write wallowing-in-misery Spider-Man. All he knows is superheroes, superheroes don\u2019t mope. Well, if yer lucky. Spidey beats on those guys until The Torch swoops in to chastise him for being too rough. Spidey, being of sound mind and body, throws a trash can at him. The baddies try to flee, but Torch stops them with a wall of flame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spider-guilt, activate! Fox tells his goons it\u2019s time to act, and Spider-Man heads home. He actually worries about how they might be able to afford their home now that MJ\u2019s role on the soap is being cut, which, I think, makes this literally the only place anyone talks or thinks about this problem, ever,so kudos to Tom for doing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Great stuff. Next page, we get to see Johnny\u2019s egg baby:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is so funny to me. Eggs! Whatever came of that? Reed, obviously, isn\u2019t dead, Ben\u2019s face grows back, Sue stops acting like a lunatic and dressing like an S&M supervillain, Lyja goes home to the Skrull empire (Returning in 2008), but I don\u2019t know what happens with the egg baby. Apparently the egg turned out to be a fake implant that hatched into a giant monster? Good grief! Tom DeFalco\u2019s run on FF has a bad rep, and what little I\u2019ve seen of it supports that, but wow. Well, Johnny\u2019s on the run, thinking he doesn\u2019t even know a good lawyer to call since Matt Murdock died recently. He, of course, only faked his death, as alluded to in TAC . What a rough time for comics. Then Johnny sees the Spider Signal coming from, where else, The Statue of Liberty, and flies over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The heroes go bother that guy, doing terrible banter the whole time despite us being promised them at the lowest point of their lives, and they learn where to go for his boss. Too easily, they think, so it\u2019s a trap. They\u2019re told it\u2019s Fox, and go to his old place, only to have a big concrete slab seal them in. In short order, a big fire extinguisher appears and does for Johnny, and then while Spider-Man\u2019s dealing with a more regular gun, he discovers he can\u2019t stick to one entire wall of this place. What a trap. The bad banter continues, also. Then, Fox fills the room with Spider-Man\u2019s archnemesis, gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cYou can\u2019t quit! You can never surrender to despair! I mean, I already did, and am acting wildly out of character here, but YOU can\u2019t!\u201d Also, think this counts as a variation on Spider-Man Must Lift A Heavy Thing; Spider-Man Must Break An Unbreakable Thing. Torch takes over, burning them free, and then the goons show up in fireproof suits with scifi guns. The boys take them apart, bantering all the while. Tom writes this book like Strange Tales Annual 2 was only a few months ago, and that\u2019s not a good thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWho wants to hear me complain? If it\u2019s you, be sure to buy all five of my titles for the next 2 years!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Johnny suggested earlier that \u201cwebs away\u201d could be Spider-Man\u2019s catchphrase) Well, that\u2019s that. Pure filler, as you like it. A speedbump on the way to Spider-Man\u2019s awful sadsack years. But wait, there\u2019s more! Wouldn\u2019t be SMU without a few more stories. Kurt Busiek is back, and one assumes about to do another sequel to one of his past comics? We\u2019ve done Corona and Bloodshed, what next? He\u2019s joined by Jan Duursema and John Kalisz, and they open with an image that hits me with a start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This particular Spider-Man got used in an ad I saw a lot of shortly after this, and I never knew where it came from or who drew it. Mystery solved!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wildly inconsistent Spider-Men from Duursema. Almost looks like a different artist every panel. Two days ago, Peter was making an extremely rare appearance in the chem lab when a Roger ranin and said someone stull 2 dozen nuclear triggers from \u201cEG&G.\u201d Roger? Certainly not meant to be Roger Hochberg? We don\u2019t find out, because only 3 panels later, the flashback ends, spidey having gotten some info and tracked the stolen nuclear parts to these guys. The battle continues and Spidey\u2019s about done when there\u2019s a crash above him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So many characters come and go and never get another shot, but \u201cThe Bobster,\u201d the guy in the Hypertrion suit from Web 83<\/a>, the guy whose battle armor was controlled by cassette tapes, gets another shot. He tries some new gadget in his suit, and the whole thing goes offline, making him fall out of the air and onto Spider-Man. The main guy gets away with the triggers, of course, and Spider-Man demands to know what\u2019s going on. Bob says he was looking for Spider-Man to make him a deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He does not pick up the tracer, but he does go back to ESU, where that guy is conformed to be Roger Hochberg! Shouldn\u2019t be be graduated by now? I mean, with the sliding time scale, maybe not, but if everyone else Peter went to grad school with the first time is gone by the 2nd, Roger must be bad at this. The government\u2019s set up shop at the school to coordinate the recovery for some reason, so Spidey tells all the SHIELD agents what he\u2019s learned and then goes home, having been up for 2 days on this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spider-Man gets some sleep, and then gets back to it, canvassing the city until he finds his tracer signal coming from an apartment building. And before he can do anything, naturally Bob shows up. He actually proves helpful, with a listening device that lets them hear that the deal is going down. He promises to do what Spidey says when they go in, so go in they do, and it\u2019s fightin\u2019 time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spidey convinces Bob to mop up goons while he races upstairs after the other guy, who he finds in an apartment, having taken a small child hostage. As Spidey tries to talk him down, Bob bursts in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m sure you will be surprised to know this is \u201cThe Bobster\u2019s\u201d final appearance. They can\u2019t all be winners. The rest of the issue is the origin of The Steel Spider, aka The Spectacular Spider-Kid more grown up. And I should probably cover it since I think I covered his next appearance 5 years ago, but I\u2019ve got less patience now than I did then, so too bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As if Spider-Man hasn\u2019t gone through enough trauma recently, now he has to do this guaranteed-to-be-stupid story. Once again, shout out the guy at the local flea market for putting a single…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[72,1313,1767,1626,442,1003,21,166,441,2,439,124],"class_list":["post-20589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-human-torch","tag-hypertrion-1-0","tag-jan-duursema","tag-jim-sanders-iii","tag-john-kalisz","tag-kurt-busiek","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-roger-hochberg","tag-ron-lim","tag-spider-man","tag-spider-man-unlimited","tag-tom-defalco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20589","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=20589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20590,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20589\/revisions\/20590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}