{"id":27262,"date":"2025-06-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=27262"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:38:44","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:38:44","slug":"tac-v2-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2025\/06\/22\/tac-v2-21\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC V2 21"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well\u2026 back to this. Spider-Man\u2019s just died and been reborn, I\u2019m sure he\u2019s gonna need some time to get his head wrapped around that. Just kidding, he\u2019s playing poker with a bunch of superheroes. Every choice Paul Jenkins has made since this book became Spectacular Spider-Man is baffling. In through the revolving door marked \u201cpenciler\u201d for 2 months is Talent Caldwell. If my parents gave me the name \u201cTalent\u201d and I chose a career as an artist, I would feel like I had a target on my back. I hope he didn\u2019t feel similarly. He was discovered by Michael Turner. Michael Turner got huge drawing Witchblade at Marc Silvestri\u2019s Image imprint, Top Cow, before creating his own company to produce comics about an underwater heroine named Fathom. Caldwell drew Fathom-related things, and at this moment, has only recently left Turner\u2019s company to do work at the Big Two. All of which is to say, his style has something of Turner in it, and Turner\u2019s style evoked the post-Image Marc Silvestri, so there\u2019s an unusually complex pedigree to this. Robert Campanella and Studio F hang in there. Anyway: Poker. We join X-Men\u2019s Angel as he wings his way to a building with a big login on top that just says \u201cESTABLISHMENT.\u201d Weird name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Caldwell really draws women like Turner, who got famous for drawing women. So many people who nerds flock to for drawing \u201csexy women\u201d do not, in fact, draw sexy women, in my humble opinion. Turner, like J. Scott Campbell, specialized in anorexic creatures with nowhere to store their internal organs, but his unique contribution was the glassy eyes of a sex doll. Well, unique until he established a studio and hired a bunch of people to draw like him. Well, Spider-Man continues assessing the players\u2019 skills, leaving out Sue, when there\u2019s a knock at the door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Comics about your various heroes playing cards aren\u2019t all that uncommon. Despite Jenkins\u2019 Spidey\u2019s dismissive appraisal of Thing\u2019s poker skills, he hosts a famous poker night in other comics. But one where Kingpin shows up is different, at least. Hey, remember how Spider-Man turned into a spider, died, was reborn and got new powers? Wouldn\u2019t you expect the next issue to explore the fallout of all that? I sure would. Instead\u2026 this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, a poker night story would be fine with me, a nice change of pace, but Spider-Man DIED LAST ISSUE. We\u2019re just moving on to the next thing like he didn\u2019t DIE LAST ISSUE. I don\u2019t get it, man! Where are your storytelling instincts? Well, anyway, the heroes confer and decide to let Fisk into the game on his terms. Has no one considered this is blood money? Peter \u201cI can\u2019t sell this gold notebook because I didn\u2019t obtain it legally\u201d Parker is gonna donate this mob money to charity? Whatever, I guess. The first incident of the night is Fisk trying to light a cigar, and Dr. Strange magically making it fail to work after warning him he can\u2019t smoke and being ignored. Then Strange loses all his money on a single terrible hand before buying back in with his own money. This is a weird running gag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The best part of this story is Reed Richards just being one of the guys. Almost anyone else would\u2019ve made him the one who has no idea how to play. I think a lot of writers don\u2019t get Reed. They want to make him too stuffy and boring just because he\u2019s really smart. Also: It only really just occurred to me that this \u201cheroes play poker gang\u201d is the FF, Spider-Man, and Angel. Spider-Man said Black Cat isn\u2019t a regular and Dr. Strange is new. Why just Angel out of all the X-Men? It\u2019s all people who\u2019re friends with Spider-Man\u2026 and Angel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Caldwell\u2019s art is generally just sort of \u201cMichael Turner Lite,\u201d but his Spider-Man is \u201cHumberto Ramos Lite.\u201d Kind of jarring, really. You might think, pretty reasonably, that Spider-Man is referring to, you know, The Marauders, the X-Men villains who are all cyborgs, one of whom has a whole tank under his stomach instead of legs. But, no, he tells a story about running into a group of weirdos called \u201cThe Masochist Marauders\u201d who enjoy tricking superheroes into beating them up. Great story. This story about a poker game hasn\u2019t had a lot of poker in it, but we\u2019re running out of pages, so we jump ahead to just Spidey, Thing and Fisk left in the game just in time to see Thing get cleaned out. Naturally, it\u2019s down to Spidey and Fisk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spider-Man is next seen swinging through the city with flowers for MJ, laughing increasingly hard. The End. \u201cPoker Night\u201d is a sort of can\u2019t-miss setup for me, and yet, this wasn\u2019t too good. But, really, I just can\u2019t shake the fact that we\u2019re just ignoring the previous storyline. It feels like everyone realized that story was incredibly stupid too late to stop it and we\u2019re all just moving on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well\u2026 back to this. Spider-Man\u2019s just died and been reborn, I\u2019m sure he\u2019s gonna need some time to get his head wrapped around that. Just kidding, he\u2019s playing poker with a bunch…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27237,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[79,156,49,72,100,1911,247,1914,2088,2,2027,1710,2143,663,187],"class_list":["post-27262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-angel","tag-black-cat","tag-doctor-strange","tag-human-torch","tag-kingpin","tag-paul-jenkins","tag-reed-richards","tag-robert-campanella","tag-spectacular-spider-man-vol-2","tag-spider-man","tag-studio-f","tag-sue-storm","tag-talent-caldwell","tag-the-thing","tag-wong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27262","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=27262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27272,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27262\/revisions\/27272"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}