{"id":33,"date":"2021-12-21T00:00:26","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T04:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deweybass.com\/spiderman\/?p=33"},"modified":"2020-10-26T00:31:18","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T04:31:18","slug":"gssm-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/12\/21\/gssm-5\/","title":{"rendered":"GSSM 5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s another Conway\/Andru\/Esposito production. Spider-Man is swinging around, thinking he wants to get out of New York…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gerry Conway\u2019s Spider-Man is a just a jerk, man, sheesh. The TV show Spider-Man is out here pushing people around for is a special on The Man-Thing, the swamp creature that\u2019s been sighted dozens of times in Florida. He thinks that if he can talk JJJ into sending him down there to cover it, he’ll get a free vacation. That is a very strange thing to think about confronting a muck monster, but this is a very strange Spider-Man. Also, more or less the plot of the first Lizard story. At The Daily Bugle, JJJ buys into the idea, and Betty Brant wants Peter to, you know, talk to Gwen, the terrified and confused person who loves him and recently returned from the grave. He\u2019s still not interested, though, and instead makes some phone calls. First, too Dr. Curt Connors, aka The Lizard, a Florida resident that he wants to catch up with while he\u2019s down there (Like Florida is so tiny). Then, I am impressed to see, he calls Mary Jane Watson. She\u2019s excited to get his call, but then crestfallen when he says he\u2019s going out of town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Boy, that Peter Parker is all class. Goodness. That mess on Peter’s face appears to be a blob of ink, the printer must’ve gotten crazy for this copy. And I think that’s the first example of MJ’s facade breaking for a moment. Meanwhile, Curt Connors is a complete idiot. What a professional. Now a rampaging monster, he knocks out his concerned wife and runs off into the swamp. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back in New York, Peter has suddenly decided to stop being a jerk and go talk to Gwen. He notes that, for some reason, JJJ “always pays his office people better.” I guess you have to explain randomly giving Betty a swanky address. When he arrives, Gwen says she doesn\u2019t want to talk from behind a closed door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That beat would be harder to sell if you were trying to keep the audience from ever thinking about the flow time like they have to now. The next day in Florida, some dude named Edmond Arnstead has come to the swamp to kill himself, and Man-Thing is being drawn to his raw emotion. Man-Thing is\u2026 one of the weirdest characters in the Marvel canon. His tagline is \u201cWhoever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing.\u201d So if you see the scary monster and don\u2019t keep your nerve, things will only get worse. A whole page is devoted to this Arnstead guy\u2019s backstory, how he started a company and it went bankrupt and now he\u2019s lost everything and decided to end it all, and then Man-Thing makes it to him. But he\u2019s not there to hurt Edmond, he\u2019s there to fight an alligator that was about to hurt Edmond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Right about then, Spider-Man has arrives in the swamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An unusually graceful Spidey for this art team up there, and a totally hilarious Lizard at the bottom. Spidey and The Lizard go a few rounds, with The Lizard getting the upper hand and spouting his usual about wiping out humanity so reptiles can rule the Earth, when suddenly it\u2019s revealed we\u2019re not far from the Connors home. Martha runs out and sees what her husband is doing to Spidey…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I live for moisture, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unbelievable. Unbelievable! He just… bit his tail. This issue is wild. Elsewhere, Edmond is tailing Man-Thing, trying to figure out how he can get him back to civilization and monetize him, when all the reptiles in the area and Man-Thing himself take off in the same direction. Back at the Connors\u2019 house, we learn The Lizard has sent out a mental command to local reptiles to come free him. It\u2019s surprising that this worked on Man-Thing, some part of which is still human in there. But it did work, and so Man-Thing is sicced on Spidey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While they\u2019re scrappin\u2019, the reptiles are chewing through the webs holding The Lizard, and then Edmond shows up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Man-Thing turns on The Lizard, reacting to his rage, as Eddie and Martha start mixing up Curt Connors\u2019 tried & true Lizard antidote. As Man-Thing fights The Lizard, the other reptiles begin attacking Spider-Man. Then Ed runs out with the antidote, but he trips over a snake and drops it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And that\u2019s that. In a mere 3 panels, the whole thing wraps up. Everyone goes home happy. The rest of the issue reprints ASM 21, and I\u2019ll handle that some other time. There were 6 issues of Giant-Size Spider-Man, but the 6th one just reprints ASM Annual 4 (Wish I\u2019d known that before I bought it\u2026 already having that annual), so this is the last appearance of this title. It provided some pretty unusual team-ups, but didn\u2019t seem to do anything you couldn\u2019t do in Marvel Team-Up other than the reprints. Not too surprising that this experiment didn\u2019t last long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s another Conway\/Andru\/Esposito production. Spider-Man is swinging around, thinking he wants to get out of New York… Gerry Conway\u2019s Spider-Man is a just a jerk, man, sheesh. The TV show Spider-Man is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[36,11,73,750,13,126,68,21,52,74,43],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1970s","tag-aunt-anna","tag-betty-brant","tag-gerry-conway","tag-giant-size-spider-man","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-man-thing","tag-martha-connors","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-mike-esposito","tag-ross-andru","tag-the-lizard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","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=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11570,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/11570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}