{"id":22313,"date":"2024-08-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-06T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=22313"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:43:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:43:09","slug":"ppsm-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/08\/06\/ppsm-14\/","title":{"rendered":"PPSM 14"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Who\u2019s gonna draw you better Hulk than Romita, Jr.? Who\u2019s gonna draw a more massive, Earth-shaking Hulk? Nobody. It\u2019s still Mackei, Romita, Jr., Hanna & Wright over here, and we begin with something way, way better than ASM 14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Flash is just an acquaintance? Crushing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s the goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In a weird bit of Spidey-blog convergence, the current Hulk title had been written by one John Byrne until issue 8, and after some fill-ins (including the above mentioned #11), gets handed to none other than soon-to-be-Spidey scribe Paul Jenkins as of #12, the beginning of an excellent and underrated run that had a profound impact on the character, and even some influence on the 2004 Hulk movie. Well, the 2 of them keep thrashing each other for 2 more glorious pages, and then we get back to the more somber side of this issue, as Aunt May has prepared a veritable feast for a memorial at the Parker residence. She gets distracted thinking about her grief and accidentally sets some napkins on fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I think the saddest thing about all this is the only friend of MJ\u2019s here is Jill. Sure, sure, all Peter\u2019s friends and coworkers are friendly with her, but Jill is the only person they\u2019ve bothered to give HER, personally, now that Chantal has been lost to the annals of history. Where\u2019s all MJ\u2019s work friends from before (And presumably now)? It\u2019s a truly damning portrait of how they completely removed MJ\u2019s whole life when she got married. It\u2019s a familiar soapbox for me, but while people say the marriage didn\u2019t work, I would argue the character of Mary Jane was so thoroughly sabotaged during the marriage years that the marriage didn\u2019t get a fair shake. All she did was nag and worry and sometimes smoke. She was often a burden to Peter, and that\u2019s not the MJ we saw in the decades prior to the wedding. On the rare occasion their marriage is written well, they\u2019re partners and co-conspirators, and it may not be the freewheeling single Peter all these married creators insist is more relatable (…..), but it\u2019s at least a healthy relationship. Would that more people had gotten that. Well, elsewhere, the battle rages on, and after Spidey webs up Hulk\u2019s eyes, Hulk swats him a long way into a newsstand, where he lands on a pile of Daily Bugles pronouncing the death of his wife, and that sends him into a rage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This right here is the only thing about this story that I like. Why would Peter Parker ever believe Mary Jane is actually dead? What, like Norman Osborn was? Like AUNT MAY was? You half expect Uncle Ben to walk in the door these days. That\u2019s not even taking into account all the superpeople, friends and foes, he\u2019s seen die only to come back. Why would he ever believe MJ is dead? Why would anyone in the Marvel Universe ever assume anyone\u2019s really dead, for that matter? His denial is the only thing that makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The wives have it! Romita keeps doing these amazing 2-page spreads that won\u2019t photograph easily. Spidey is yelling at Hulk about how many times people have tried to kill him, or the people he loves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here comes the punchline. Which isn\u2019t meant to be a punchline, obviously, but\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s true Hulk\u2019s wife, Betty Ross, was recently killed. Wanna guess whether she got better? But, yeah, this moment\u2026 I get what they were trying to do, but \u201cHulk\u2019s wife dead, too\u201d is such an INSANE sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And we\u2019re off. IS MJ alive? Did the people making this comic at the time think she was? I wish I knew the answer to that one. But regardless of what was originally intended, what comes next is pretty insane\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who\u2019s gonna draw you better Hulk than Romita, Jr.? Who\u2019s gonna draw a more massive, Earth-shaking Hulk? Nobody. It\u2019s still Mackei, Romita, Jr., Hanna & Wright over here, and we begin with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[617,36,35,113,11,12,308,275,415,59,13,976,26,118,172,287,1871,417,2],"class_list":["post-22313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-arthur-stacy","tag-aunt-anna","tag-aunt-may","tag-ben-urich","tag-betty-brant","tag-flash-thompson","tag-glory-grant","tag-gregory-wright","tag-howard-mackie","tag-hulk","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jill-stacy","tag-joe-robertson","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-liz-allen","tag-martha-robertson","tag-peter-parker-spider-man","tag-scott-hanna","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22313","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=22313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22326,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22313\/revisions\/22326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}