{"id":21214,"date":"2024-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=21214"},"modified":"2022-09-06T19:27:01","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T23:27:01","slug":"sm-94","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/05\/01\/sm-94\/","title":{"rendered":"SM 94"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Perhaps he can\u2019t handle the truth. What truth, you ask? Must be a big one, The Watcher is here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Watching colorists figure out Photoshop is really something. Kind of oppressive on that 3rd page. I have blathered on about how John Romita, Jr. is the GOAT for awhile, but guess what, he is! That is the quintessential Spider-Man to me. Well, our hero goes to Arthur\u2019s house, only to find the door open and his Spider Sense going off. Then he\u2019s shot at out of the dark alleyway, and when he webs his assailant out of it, it\u2019s a badly beaten Arthur, begging Spider-Man to find Jill & Paul before collapsing. Spidey takes him inside and asks to know what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So those goblin guys who shot Jill were for Arthur, huh? And Arthur lived in Europe until recently. Gee whiz, what\u00a0a coincidence. Elsewhere, a very agitated hood is being told he failed to kill Arthur by an offscreen voice, and then yoinked into shadow by some giant hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DD 86 was \u201cmany months ago,\u201d indeed! And the original Ox died in it! We saw the new Ox take over TAC 19<\/a>. They\u2019re apparently saying the original\u2019s been alive the whole time, and working for Kingpin. That\u2019s wild. Well, Peter\u2019s over at The Bugle, and Betty is helping him dig through the morgue, saying Jill obvious did a better job than anyone there in diggin up info on Joey Z. She prints out some material that indicates he was a much bigger deal than he seemed and gives it to Peter so he can try to track down Jill. As he\u2019s leaving, he\u2019s harassed by JJJ for how bad his pictures of Plantman were, but he blows that off and keeps going. From here, we follow Spider-Man and Jill on Joey Z\u2019s trail in different ways. Jill somehow manages to run into The Thing stopping a robbery, who says he thinks Joey Z was in a rival gang when they were kids, and to stay away from him, \u201che\u2019s poison.\u201d I guess Ben hasn\u2019t heard the news.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is taking some turns. As usual, I don\u2019t really remember it. Peter tries to bluff his way into The Hellfire Club using his press pass, but that doesn\u2019t get him anywhere with the bouncers. Then Jill finds him on the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One wonders how on Earth there is a record of Mephisto in the Bugle archives, but whatever, it\u2019s time for these 2 to finally have it out. And they do it via a montage of them walking and talking, with captions describing how they talk about Gwen\u2019s life and death, strolling through places that had meaning for her & Peter, learning a lot about each other in addition to Jill learning more about her cousin. But their pleasant reverie is interrupted when a carload of goons pulls up, puts Peter against a wall at gunpoint, and kidnap Jill. Peter obviously would like to do something, but Ox is with them, and he puts a quick beating on Peter that probably would\u2019ve killed a regular guy, allowing them to escape. But only just, as Peter is soon skittering up a wall to pursue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ox helpfully tells us the guy currently in the Enforcers is his twin brother (I mean, that makes more sense, honestly), and Spider-Man continues making him angry until he gets Ox to punch him so hard he can sail right over the car to where the goons are holding Jill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A lot of Mackie\u2019s Spider-Man comics end with the promise of an interesting conversation we don\u2019t get to see. Kind of frustrating, but also more a sign of their time, I think. These days, both Peter & Jill\u2019s chat and Spidey and Jill\u2019s chat would\u2019ve been given a whole issue, I think. In the letters, a guy writes in to talk about how Lefty Donovan took the Goblin Formula back in the Stern run, but still died when Hobgoblin ran out of uses for him, and thus, it keeping Norman alive doesn\u2019t work for him. Which is pretty easily waved aside in comics, but it once again forces editorial to go to bat defending the choice to bring Norman back. I just find that funny. The ol\u2019 Life of Reilly column had Glenn Greenberg saying no one wanted to bring him back, but Bob Harras made them do it. Now they get to spend the rest of their careers in the Spider-Office trying to change the minds of fans who agreed with them that this was a bad idea. Comics can be a weird job sometimes. Next post, get ready for a detour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps he can\u2019t handle the truth. What truth, you ask? Must be a big one, The Watcher is here. Watching colorists figure out Photoshop is really something. Kind of oppressive on that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[617,275,415,13,976,118,100,21,1854,1242,417,883,316,2,151],"class_list":["post-21214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-arthur-stacy","tag-gregory-wright","tag-howard-mackie","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jill-stacy","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-kingpin","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-ox","tag-paul-stacy","tag-scott-hanna","tag-sebastian-shaw","tag-silvermane","tag-spider-man","tag-the-watcher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21214","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=21214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21215,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21214\/revisions\/21215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}