{"id":22491,"date":"2024-08-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-24T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=22491"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:42:28","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:42:28","slug":"asm-v2-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/08\/24\/asm-v2-19\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM V2 19"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, well, look who it is. Since he\u2019s been doing work around Marvel in this period, it was probably only a matter of time. And still writing, drawing & inking Savage Dragon the whole time, too. But this is a weird thing. Most of the Image guys have done work for Marvel and DC since their flashy shake-up of the comics biz, but Larsen was the first to return to the book that made his name like this. Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri did crossovers with X-Men. Rob Leifeld would eventually do all kinds of Deadpool and X-Force stuff. But this is Larsen back on ASM less than a decade since he left. This would technically be ASM #460, and he left with 350, and then did 7 issues of SM before truly leaving. Not that long in the comics biz! And he gets to draw a character he famously didn\u2019t like right off the bat. We\u2019ll note that he\u2019s not doing the big stupid tongue. One wonders whether that\u2019s to conform to how Romita\u2019s been drawing him, or if both of them were following an editorial mandate. Larsen is inked by John Beatty, famously a collaborator of Mike Zech, among others, and Gregory Wright is back to color, reuniting with Larsen from the SM run. As we get going, Peter Parker is having a nightmare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I had stopped following Savage Dragon years before this. Larsen, to his credit, kept trying radical new things with that book to keep it fresh, but when Dragon became a government agent (or something like that, hard to recall), completely upending the book, it seemed like a good place to stop. All of which is to say, I think his art got looser and a little cartoonier over the years, but I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the whole story on this issue. I suspect he was doing something more like breakdowns, and Beatty is finishing in a crisp, open style. After Spider-Man appears in Peter\u2019s dream to say the villains are right and pull his mask of to reveal no one underneath, Peter wakes up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s unmistakably Larsen, but it\u2019s very different from 1990. Peter goes in the bathroom to splash water on his face and recap everything that\u2019s been going on, and then we check in on Eddie Brock, paralleling Peter\u2019s desire to get MJ back by telling his suit he wants his own wife back. Anne Weying, last seen around here in ASM 375<\/a>. Somewhere between then and now, she\u2019s even been Venom briefly in one of the endless Venom miniseries, so they have a lot more history than I\u2019m privy to.\u00a0 Speaking of Anne, we go see her next, to see she\u2019s got some kind of agoraphobia, too scared to even leave her home. Ok. Then\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ugh. Jill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why is he making webshooter hand gestures?? Also, yes, somehow he\u2019s down to the black suit. He used to have spares of all of them, you know. Well, whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s not like we\u2019re in out THIRTIES!\u201d What\u2019s going on with Jill? Don\u2019t recall, don\u2019t much care. Her days are numbered. We\u2019re 11 issues away from a regime change around here, and the Stacys will stop being a going concern, and I am just barreling toward that with all I have. Later, Eddie Brock shows up at Anne\u2019s place in a suit with flowers, but she\u2019s already freaking out, the last thing she needs is Venom coming around, and she\u2019s not too receptive. They talk past each other until Ann reveals she\u2019s been unable to leave her place ever since she briefly was Venom, as mentioned before. Hey, relevance! Meanwhile, Spider-Man\u2019s swinging around, recapping how he can\u2019t trust Arthur, but sure could use his help finding his suit and MJ, and that just happens to bring him by Anne\u2019s window as Eddie opens the curtains. Anne is horrified to see what she thinks is the symbiote outside. What luck!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s kind of crazy how Spider-Man posing was kind of stock for decades, everyone more or less doing Romita, Sr. (Or a Ditko homage) (with the ironic exception of John Romita, Jr.) and then McFarlane came along and drew some Spideys that could only have been him, and then Larsen did the same. That\u2019s such an unmistakable Larsen Spider-Man down there. Partly, it must be said, because almost anyone else would be trying to respect basic anatomy. But it\u2019s dynamic, you gotta give him that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even Larsen\u2019s own Venom is creepier this way than his old way. Sometimes less is more. Well, they get to fightin\u2019, Eddie mentioning during the chaos that he wants to get back to his wife, which is a rather sore subject for our hero at present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Is that Willie Lumpkin? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, you certainly can\u2019t say you\u2019ve seen that resolution before. Pretty weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And that, though it\u2019s kind of hard to track, is Anne\u2019s death. What a random and pretty terrible end to her character (Or any character). This series feels so disjointed now. Things just happen, weightless, and then we roll on to other things, and then sometimes some of the things come back, seemingly at random. Sheesh. Every issue feels like a string of half-considered incidents instead of a story. It\u2019s such a stunning departure from the material Mackie did before the relaunch. A real shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, well, look who it is. Since he\u2019s been doing work around Marvel in this period, it was probably only a matter of time. And still writing, drawing & inking Savage Dragon…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[1863,1581,35,880,275,415,976,252,24,2,409],"class_list":["post-22491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-amazing-spider-man-vol-2","tag-anne-weying","tag-aunt-may","tag-erik-larsen","tag-gregory-wright","tag-howard-mackie","tag-jill-stacy","tag-john-beatty","tag-randy-robertson","tag-spider-man","tag-venom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22491","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=22491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22492,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22491\/revisions\/22492"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}