{"id":2461,"date":"2019-12-04T00:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T04:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deweybass.com\/spiderman\/?p=2461"},"modified":"2019-05-31T14:52:22","modified_gmt":"2019-05-31T18:52:22","slug":"web-117","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2019\/12\/04\/web-117\/","title":{"rendered":"WEB 117"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you weren\u2019t reading comics in the 90s, you just don\u2019t know. The hype around this thing was pretty crazy. The shock of the stunt. I feel like the truth was out before they revealed it. Hard to keep that secret. By the time we got to this, if you were a Spider-Man fan, you were buzzing with excitement. Not necessarily a good excitement. I mean, good for some, nervous for others. I was the 2nd camp. This smelled fishy to me. But I jumped on the hype train like everyone else and let it carry me to these 4 comics with their shiny \u201cchromium\u201d covers. This issue is the debut of new regular WEB penciler Steve Butler, whose style was not my favorite. I felt like he was mostly aping Bagley, and didn\u2019t respect that too much. Will I have a different take now? Let\u2019s find out. He joins continuing writer Terry Kavanaugh and colorsit Kevin Tinsley as we pick up right where TAC 216 ended.
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Spider-Man chases Peter across town, Peter just trying to escape, Spidey rather unhinged and out for blood. All that conciliatory talk from TAC 216 is out the window.
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Sigh. We thankfully cut away from this insane fracas to a whole bunch of new weirdos on the scene:
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Sure, this mismatched goth band shows up to the institute and no bats an eyelash. Why not? There couldn\u2019t be ANYTHING weird going on here, right? Back in the warehouse, Spider-Man is still wailing on Peter, until he finally thinks for a second about how he\u2019s not setting off his Spider Sense and seems to care about Aunt May. Peter pulls Spider-Man\u2019s mask off.
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…he\u2019ll be long gone, he says, as we hop back to Ravencroft. We haven\u2019t covered the 70s clone business yet, which is kind of a shame, but the thing about it is, there was a Spider-Man clone, and he existed for a single issue. He was part of a larger scheme by The Jackal, which did stretch out for quite some time, but the clone itself was a pretty silly blip on the radar 20 years prior to this issue. This is a really random, questionable pull. Anyway, back at the institute, Dr. Kafka is getting to know the Victorian Supervillain cosplayer who\u2019s turned up to help her do her job. Holding a book by him called \u201cThe Criminally Insane,\u201d she says his theories are the cornerstone of what they do here. Well, if you built your business model around this guy, no wonder the building is on fire more often than not. She leaves him to get settled in, and as soon as she\u2019s gone, he reveals he & the band have \u201cother plans.\u201d GASP! No! I can\u2019t believe it. He says Ravencroft is the perfect place for his \u201cultimate experiment,\u201d and begins touring the holding cells by walking into and out of shadows in different rooms. First he bothers The Chameleon, then terrifies the perpetually angry Shriek with a glance before getting to Carnage, whose symbiote slithers off of him rather than be touched by Traveller.
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Butler can\u2019t decide if Kafka is skinny or chubby from panel-to-panel, a situation I suspect simply stems from comic book artists only knowing how to draw one body type, especially in this era. Even that doesn\u2019t explain her constantly changing haircut, though. I guess that doesn\u2019t matter now that she\u2019s green smoke. Spider-Man finally wakes up in that warehouse, and barely has time to pout about how he doesn\u2019t want that guy to be who he said he was when Chakra\u2019s astral form appears.
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I assume Traveller is throwing open the front doors of the Institute there, but the staging makes it impossible to know what\u2019s happening and where.
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As he swings off to the trap, we see the clone hasn\u2019t even left, he was just hiding. He saw the whole thing, and decides Spider-Man is in no shape to deal with trouble alone. But he also thinks he\u2019s here to see Aunt May, not be a hero, while revealing he\u2019s got a Spidey mask & gloves in his bag. Speaking of May, Anna Watson has just shown up to be with her, and MJ is there. This flies in the face of earlier issues where MJ skipped town and MJ was still there and said Anna was there, respectively. Danny Fingroth is not a good editor. Then Spidey arrives at Ravencroft, which is surrounded by cops.
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Yeah, Traveller responded to his thoughts. That doesn\u2019t bode well. In the letter column, they print a long letter by Steve Wachnicki, explaining how he\u2019s figured out who the mystery man is, and also thoroughly detailing how his return doesn\u2019t make any sense. Editorial assures him his concerns will be addressed. They largely will not, and those that are will be wildly unsatisfying. But that\u2019s for later. Right now, Spider-Man\u2019s gotta do a low rent Arkham Asylum storyline, and his clone\u2019s gotta do\u2026 whatever he\u2019s gotta do.
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Each issue of this crossover is a \u201cflip book,\u201d with a backup story filling in the clone\u2019s deal that you had to flip the book upside down to read. No gimmick was too gimmicky in the 90s. Here\u2019s the back cover to this issue:
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Behind it, JM DeMatteis, Liam Sharp, Robin Riggs & John Kalisz begin a 4-part feature detailing the clone\u2019s origins. Like, all the way back.
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We see him grow into a full-sized 1974-era Peter Parker and then get released from his tube by his creator, who sucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What, you thought something by DeMatteis in this era wouldn\u2019t be grim and depressing? That\u2019s Professor Miles Warren, Peter Parker\u2019s college biology professor, who has made a clone of him. Yeah, I know. Back in \u201888, TAC Annual 8 retroactively tried to come up with an explanation for how this guy could\u2019ve had the knowledge and resources to actually do this (We\u2019ll see it eventually), but that only made things worse. Warren is also The Jackal, a minor supervillain, and also made a clone of Gwen Stacy, and is also dead. Gwen\u2019s clone\u2026 eesh, that\u2019s a whole thing, again made worse by that annual. Anyway, Warren zaps his Peter clone with a sonic device, tells him how much he hates Peter Parker while beating him, then puts him in a cell for an undisclosed period. He then comes at him with a syringe, saying he\u2019ll soon \u201cgo out into the world as Spider-Man\u201d with no memory of this, but the clone belts him in the face and escapes. That can\u2019t be how it went down, so we\u2019ll see more on this next issue, whether we like it or not.
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If you weren\u2019t reading comics in the 90s, you just don\u2019t know. The hype around this thing was pretty crazy. The shock of the stunt. I feel like the truth was out…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[427,36,35,455,458,177,125,27,442,457,418,459,21,83,460,433,2,456,423,165,265],"class_list":["post-2461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-ashley-kafka","tag-aunt-anna","tag-aunt-may","tag-ben-reilly","tag-carnage","tag-chameleon","tag-jm-dematteis","tag-john-jameson","tag-john-kalisz","tag-judas-traveller","tag-kevin-tinsley","tag-liam-sharp","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-miles-warren","tag-robin-riggs","tag-shriek","tag-spider-man","tag-steven-butler","tag-terry-kavanagh","tag-vermin","tag-web-of-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461","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=2461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4598,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461\/revisions\/4598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}