{"id":4136,"date":"2020-04-07T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2020-04-07T04:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=4136"},"modified":"2019-06-03T00:31:27","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T04:31:27","slug":"asm-303","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/04\/07\/asm-303\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM 303"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You\u2019d never know it, but I haven\u2019t read an old Spider-Man comic in like 3 or 4 weeks as of this writing, which is the longest period in about 8 months. But I\u2019m back and refreshed and you didn\u2019t even know I was gone and by the time you see this, I wrote it almost a year ago, so who cares, here goes.
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I took that picture solely for the terrible Doc Savage pun. And here\u2019s another, because the Spidey in the 2nd panel has been swiped and remade for advertising a surprising number of times:
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As Spidey arrives home, MJ is asleep on the couch, and David Letterman is making a joke about something that happened to President Reagan in Captain America 344, which is pretty random. A footnote even leads you to Cap 344 so you can get the joke. MJ wakes up and they talk briefly about their future, each displaying some of Todd McFarlane\u2019s trademark hilariously tiny hands in close-up shots, before deciding to sleep on it. The next day, Sandman is breaking a bunch of robots to prove he\u2019s formidable to Silver Sable. She recaps that they\u2019re after that Franz Kraus guy, then mentions she\u2019s approached someone he knows to help with this job, leading to\u2026
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Mm hm. Do we know why Joe\u2019s in the hospital? I\u2019m not sure if we\u2019ve seen it yet. ASM & TAC don\u2019t seem to want to play nice with the rest of the line right now. Anyway, elsewhere, worrying over what to do about Peter\u2019s job offer is messing up MJ\u2019s gig for the day, while Spider-Man shows up at the Symkarian Embassy, and Todd McFarlane does his first of many gag newspapers:
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…this one riffing on how he quit The Hulk to do ASM. Silver brings Spidey to Sandman and is informed they\u2019ll be working together. Spidey\u2019s not so sure about that, but in the end, decides getting paid to beat up Nazis beats whatever misgivings he has, and signs on. Thus, later in the evening, the 3 converge on a warehouse by the docks, and Spider-Man heads in to get a look at the place, while McFarlane reproduces his cover corner box for some reason\u2026
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Real stealthy. Spidey takes out that guard and discovers all the crates are full of drugs, and soon finds Kraus, who\u2019s telling his goons they\u2019re about to make the biggest drug deal in history with The Kingpin, which will allow them to buy up some land in Central America and found a \u201cNazi state.\u201d They are aiming really high. Spidey slips back out to tell Silver what\u2019s going on. Back at the crib, MJ gets frustrated by not knowing what the future holds and makes a decision on her own since Peter\u2019s not home, but we\u2019ll have to wait to see what it is. At the warehouse, Spider-Man says they should call the cops because of the size of the army in there, but Silver just walks in. Sandman takes off after her, and Spidey takes off after them, so it\u2019s fightin\u2019 time. Everyone splits up, and Sandman is able to overpower a whole tank.
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(I put the 2nd page in there mostly \u2018cuz I like the quip) With his part done, Spidey finds Silver fighting her way into Kraus\u2019 office, needing no help. Silver waltzes in, bars his escape and jams a gun in his mouth to get him to surrender. It\u2019s an effective strategy. They finally call the cops. Pruett from 301 arrives on the scene to say how happy he is with her work, and she promises to pay Spidey in cash tomorrow morning, since he can\u2019t cash a check. That just leaves the question of whether to move to Kansas. But come on\u2026
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Well, that\u2019s sweet. But it\u2019s not all fun and games as we close the issue:
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Egads! Who could those fiends be? Could this be an elaborate misdirection for no obvious reason? Did Todd McFarlane really draw those classic-looking Spider-Mans up there? The answers to some of these questions await in our next issue of ASM.
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I have the weirdest relationship with Todd McFarlane\u2019s art. It is, objectively, kinda awful. Bizarre is a good word. Bizarre anatomy, bizarre character \u201cacting,\u201d bizarre page layouts. But when I was a child, it was so unique that I was enthralled by it, so in some ways, this is still \u201cmy\u201d Spider-Man. This is what it\u2019s supposed to look like. Sort of. Even though I frequently think it looks pretty bad, and have come to see The Romitas as the gold standard in my old age. Complicated.
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You\u2019d never know it, but I haven\u2019t read an old Spider-Man comic in like 3 or 4 weeks as of this writing, which is the longest period in about 8 months. But…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[9,259,275,21,101,276,2,274],"class_list":["post-4136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-david-michelinie","tag-gregory-wright","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-sandman","tag-silver-sable","tag-spider-man","tag-todd-mcfarlane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136","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=4136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4146,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136\/revisions\/4146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}