{"id":22015,"date":"2024-07-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=22015"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:44:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:44:25","slug":"ppsm-annual-1999","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/07\/12\/ppsm-annual-1999\/","title":{"rendered":"PPSM Annual 1999"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

JM DeMatteis continues to haunt the margins of the Spider-Verse. I have the vaguest memories of this issue. It has no less than 3 artists. Seems like most of it\u2019s done by Al Rio, inked by Dan Scaeter, but Liam Sharpe gets top billing. The differences will be obvious. John Kalisz and Liam Sharpe color. Has Sharpe come up here before? He came up in the 90s doing weird, over-muscled stuff with a lot of light & dark, and eventually became a really good artist. The only thing I really remember about this comic is this image of Man-Thing, and him being white, and that being weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It is, indeed, weird. Also, he\u2019s a lot more buff and a lot less furry\/mossy than usual. Maybe that\u2019s because he\u2019s \u201cK\u2019ad-Mon of the Fallen Stars,\u201d I guess. An apostrophe AND a dash!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Al Rio is one of J. Scott Campbell\u2019s earliest imitators, but seems to be trying to do a quasi-Romita, Sr. thing here. So it\u2019s kind of like a reteaming of DeMatteis & Luke Ross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s so much media in the years before 9\/11 depicting the towers exploding. It\u2019s kind of crazy. Peter remembers he\u2019s Spider-Man and jumps, only to fall to his death, and then, thankfully, wake up from a nightmare. I don\u2019t know if I could handle another alternate reality. Peter wakes up in a place that looks nothing like their apartment, but we\u2019re told it is. Aunt May is in the kitchen, acting weird, saying she had a dream she can\u2019t remember that makes the real world feel not right, just like him. Now it\u2019s time for Liam Sharpe. But he\u2019s doing something different here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ted Sallis was Man-Thing last I heard. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s goin\u2019 on. But look at that early 3D art. John Byrne\u2019s not the only one goofin\u2019 around with computers. But while Byrne\u2019s mostly doing Autocad-type stuff, Sharpe\u2019s trying to be a digital Dave McKean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pretty wild. Meanwhile, in normal art, Spider-Man is swinging around, still feeling weird, acting on a tip that The Scriers are \u201cin New York for some kind of secret conclave.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Couldn\u2019t let someone else have the last word on that, eh? Boy, do I not care about this! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cScrier is some ridiculous, all-powerful being.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cActually, it\u2019s just a bunch of guys in suits.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cACTUALLY\u2026!\u201d Blah, who cares? It was a bad idea the first time, it\u2019s a bad idea now. Spidey jumps in, beats up all the Scriers, and then is mindwiped by the \u201creal\u201d Scrier and sent home to forget about all this. Then, some more familiar Laim Sharpe art, but not in a familiar context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ok, Ted Sallis is Man-Thing. And Zendaya is Meechie. Look how Sharpe renders those Scriers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Boy oh boy. I\u2019ve read a lot comics I was just trying to get to the end of for this blog, and a lot of them were written by JM DeMatteis, but this is some next level Who Cares? Since this Spider-Man comic has to get back to, like, having Spider-Man in it, Man-Thing appears to Spider-Man in New York, Al Rio doing a half-hearted rip of the Spider-Man on the cover of ASM 121, and M-T tells Spidey all about\u2026 whatever Scrier is doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Man, what would he do if he DID mean to be rude? Spider-Man makes a good point about this not being a Spider-Man story. We switch back to Sharpe\u2019s abstract dreamscapes for awhile, as the 2 heroes go off to do their hero thing, ostensibly. It\u2019s not like you can really tell what\u2019s happening. And then Sharpe draws a Spider-Man, which seems worth noting\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Creepy. Then there\u2019s this\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Seems like Outrider would try to give him a world he\u2019d be happy in if he didn\u2019t want Spider-Man to break right out of it, which he does on the next page, taking control and changing it to a world where he takes the bullet meant for Uncle Ben. As he lays dying in his mindscape, Man-Thing confronts Scrier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So it\u2019s Spider-Man\u2019s decency for the fate of reality, like in ASM 274<\/a>, only terrible and borderline unreadable, woo. Peter dies in that reality, sending him back to the Nexus to confront \u201cOutrider\u201d as Sharpe takes back over and the book becomes a series of his CG collages. They say good comic art could tell the story without the dialogue, and by that metric, this is among the worst comic art of all time.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This\u2026 was a chore. I read it in 2 sittings, which I think is a first for the blog. I could not care less. Glad it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JM DeMatteis continues to haunt the margins of the Spider-Verse. I have the vaguest memories of this issue. It has no less than 3 artists. Seems like most of it\u2019s done by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[1897,35,1898,125,442,1899,126,1871,462],"class_list":["post-22015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-al-rio","tag-aunt-may","tag-dan-scaeter","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-john-kalisz","tag-liam-sharpe","tag-man-thing","tag-peter-parker-spider-man","tag-scrier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015","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=22015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22016,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015\/revisions\/22016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}