{"id":24548,"date":"2025-01-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=24548"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:40:24","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:40:24","slug":"jay-leno-spider-man-one-night-only","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2025\/01\/28\/jay-leno-spider-man-one-night-only\/","title":{"rendered":"Jay Leno & Spider-Man: One Night Only"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We wrap this block with the weirdest possible detour. Basically, as I\u2019ve mentioned, anything goes in this era of Marvel Comics. If someone had an idea Jemas and\/or Quesada thought was interesting, or one of them had an idea they liked, it would get printed. Enter: Ron Zimmerman. He came to Marvel via Hollywood. He wrote for various TV shows, worked on some Friday the 13ths, acted a little, did standup comedy. He may not have been a famous writer, but as we\u2019ve seen, even the slightest connection to Hollywood was enough to get Jemas excited, fitting the pattern. Zimmerman would be most known in comics for one of Jemas\/Quesada\u2019s bolder stunts, relaunching Golden Age Western hero the Rawhide Kid in a book where the whole conceit was he\u2019s gay. In the early 2000s, this was a firestorm, even though the material was extremely tame (And drawn by comics legend John Severin, even). But to me, he\u2019s the guy who made some dreadful Spider-Man comics, such as Get Kraven, a miniseries where our old pal Alexei Kravinoff, Kraven\u2019s 2nd random adult son, is a completely different character than he used to be trying to get into Hollywood. The title is an obvious reference to Get Shorty. \u201cDoes it make sense that Alexei Kravinoff is this guy or would do this? Who cares?\u201d It\u2019s dumb and bad. Prior to the release of Get Kraven, a prequel ran through various comics, serialized. ASM 41 contained part 2, but I didn\u2019t immediately know where to find a part 1. They weren\u2019t in every book, is the frustrating thing. But that\u2019s not the only weird serialized supplement leading into a larger project starring Spider-Man Ron Zimmerman did at this time. Really! There is also this, a 3-part series of shorts teaming Spider-Man with late night\u2019s worst and most popular host (Pre-James Corden, anyway), Jay Leno. And I just happened to come across part one in the back of Deadline #2 and part three in Daredevil #33, so I just had to figure out where a part 2 was, and found it in Black Panther #44. Thus, we shall suffer through this together. Zimmerman\u2019s art team here is Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and Dan Kemp. Capullo got his start at Marvel in the early 90s, doing an unusually-for-the-period nice looking run on X-Force before Todd McFarlane poached him to be the artist on Spawn for\u2026 a really long time. Close to 100 issues, I think. Capullo leaned heavily cartoony on Spawn, I guess trying to match the fluid look of McFarlane\u2019s art. He left Spawn in 2000, did a 3-issue creator owned Image series in 2001, and makes his brief return to Marvel\u2026 with this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, right off the bat, no idea when this takes place. Peter hasn\u2019t worked for the Bugle in a long while, by now. Does he live with Aunt May? Who knows?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Capullo is still fully immersed in the cartoony Spawn thing. There\u2019s basically nothing recognizable from his work on X-Force. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, yeah, this is top-to-bottom terrible. It\u2019s funny, in 1992, I would\u2019ve LOVED to see Capullo drawing Spider-Man, but in 2002\u2026 Not so much! We go to the set of the commercial, where Ron Zimmeman does a lot of fawning over Leno via dialogue and then Spider-Man shows up. Spider-Man and Leno are position on the hood of a car for the commercial, but as action is called, a light falls, crushing them to death. Or at least seeming to, that\u2019s the cliffhanger. Yes, they apparently expect you to entertain the idea that Marvel would kill Spider-Man and a visiting celebrity in a randomly running backup in certain issues. And that brings us to part 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Which is, again, in Black Panther 44. BP was always critically acclaimed and financially unstable, hovering near cancellation almost its entire 50+ issue run. People who loved it, REALLY loved it (Including me!), but too few people actually read it. Which explains why it\u2019s not on the fancy paper like Deadline 2. You can see the difference back-to-back like this. People calling cue cards \u201cdummy cards\u201d and Jay Leno getting annoyed by it is a \u201chilarious\u201d running gag in this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Was Zimmerman trying out for Leno here? He seems to be funny enough to join Leno\u2019s writer\u2019s room, but I do not say that as a compliment. As Spidey and Leno continue to trade terrible lines, they note the room has cleared out. And then Spidey\u2019s danger sense lets him grab Leno and leap away from a hail of gunfire. A whole army of faceless thugs with uzis is in the room shooting away, so Spidey carpets them in web and runs for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, now we\u2019re in DD 33 for the last part. I only caught this trying to get up to speed for the post with 34 & 35 in it. Lucky me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back on the good paper, too, of course. He\u2019s had his rough patches, but nothing but the best for Daredevil since Quesada came along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At least they didn\u2019t think anyone should pay for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One could point to how Spider-Man got his start in TV, or how he was on Johnny Carson back when the Tonight Show was good in ASM 99<\/a>, or whatever, but who cares, really? This all led into the Spider-Man one-shot Sweet Charity, also featuring Leno (and the Scorpion), which I was dreading having to cover, only to discover I got rid of it. I gave a big box of comics to a local comic shop before a move in 2014, and it would seem Sweet Charity was in it. Anyone who\u2019s seen this blog knows I\u2019ve kept a LOT of terrible comics over the years, so while I can\u2019t show you Sweet Charity, just think, it was THAT bad. Greg Capullo\u2019s career is surprisingly spotty for the rest of the 2000s, but in 2011, he moves in at DC comics to become that decade\u2019s definitive Batman artist, having refined and cleaned up his style to something much more appealing than this mess. Zimmerman\u2019s time at Marvel ends up being short, with the previously mentioned Rawhide Kid coming in 2003, the previously mentioned (In Vol. 2, block 6. I think) Ultimate Adventures around the same time, and that\u2019s it, really. Presumably, he went back to the far more lucrative world of Hollywood. Good for him\u2026 and good for Marvel\u2026 But we\u2019ve not yet seen the last of him around here. That will come in the next block, which is going to be a little different\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We wrap this block with the weirdest possible detour. Basically, as I\u2019ve mentioned, anything goes in this era of Marvel Comics. If someone had an idea Jemas and\/or Quesada thought was interesting,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[2026,2025,13,903,2024,2],"class_list":["post-24548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-danny-miki","tag-greg-capullo","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jay-leno","tag-ron-zimmerman","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24548","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=24548"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24550,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24548\/revisions\/24550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}