{"id":4386,"date":"2020-04-26T15:37:38","date_gmt":"2020-04-26T19:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=4386"},"modified":"2019-09-02T01:00:17","modified_gmt":"2019-09-02T05:00:17","slug":"asm-309","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/04\/26\/asm-309\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM 309"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

$10! Ballin outta control! Did I buy this? Is this another one my uncle got me that one time, as mentioned elsewhere? Honestly don\u2019t recall. Styx & Stone! This issue is the thrilling(?) debut of this extremely long walk to a pun name. Yer gonna love \u2018em. Or not, I dunno. This one gets rolling with the Least-Demanded Character Return of 1988: Manslaughter Marsdale is BACK!
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Who? A random weird bad guy from near the end of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz\u2019 run a few years prior. Not a great creation. This guy\u2019s a jobber, and Michelinie and McFarlane treat him like one, as Spidey has him webbed up by the end of page 2. Spidey demands to know where Mary Jane is, but after announcing he \u201chad a little operation so he can\u2019t feel pain anymore,\u201d Marsdale says he doesn\u2019t know, Spidey instantly believes him, and he departs. Marsdale is the main fighter and muscle for a shady boxing gym run by a bad person, it\u2019s not worth getting into. Sitting among some gargoyles shortly after, Spidey recaps his situation, and then says he\u2019s run out of places to look for MJ and is grasping at straws. That much is obvious, sir. He heads home defeated once more, still unknowing his beloved is trapped just a few floors beneath him, where Jonathon Caesar is annoyed that she hasn\u2019t fallen in love with him yet.
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MJ\u2019s always been a fighter, but she runs into Caesar\u2019s big dopey muscle, and her escape attempt is foiled. Casear threatens her with a knife and tells her to accept her new life, while the goons tell him they\u2019ve learned Spider-Man is looking for her. Caesar says he\u2019ll have to bring in some specialized bodyguards. Hey, you think it\u2019ll be Styx & Stone?? We\u2019ll have to wait & see. The next day, Peter drops by The Bugle\u2026
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Same ol\u2019 JJJ. Peter decides if the word is getting out about MJ, he better go out to Queens and tell Aunt May before she hears it from somewhere else. First, though, he checks in on Robbie, whose situation has not yet been shown in this particular Spidey title. He\u2019s still trying to keep his spirits up, but being bedridden is really getting to him. Back at The Bedford Towers, let\u2019s meet Styx & Stone\u2026
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\u201cI just go around killing everybody\u2019s houseplants. All part of the service.\u201d Boy, some bad printing on this page. And a few others so far. We skip ahead to the night, as Spider-Man swings home sadder than ever, still no closer to a lead, when he accidentally solves everything. He swings by the shatterproof window in MJ\u2019s prison as Caesar is looking out it, and having heard Spider-Man is looking for Mary Jane, he assumes he\u2019s been found out and mobilizes the goon squad.
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Todd McFarlane said his goal with Spider-Man was to contort him into impossible positions and really make him seem creepier and \u201cmore spider-like.\u201d Which is all well and good, but as time wears on, most of those positions are only possible if Spidey\u2019s abdomen were missing. Like this one. Spidey has no idea why these dudes are suddenly after him, but decides to lead them to nearby Central Park and hopefully away from innocent people. The big contraption on Stone\u2019s shoulders allow him to do all kinds of things, as we saw briefly in The Arachnis Project (I think?). He shoots gas, sonic attacks, and a powerful strobe light, and that combo does a pretty good job on our here. Gas is, of course, his archenemy. As he\u2019s being blinded and S&S move in for the kill, MJ is taking her chance\u2026
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There\u2019s our MJ. She\u2019s no damsel in distress. As she makes a break for it, her still blinded husband is relying on his Spider Sense to dodge the many attacks of Stone, while Styx continues to just stand around posing menacingly. I mean, the one guy is all about ranged combat, and the other can only do anything by touching people, and they ride together. Not the best combo. Or maybe it is, as Stone hits Spidey with a heat ray and then coats the ground below him in some kind of adhesive, trapping Spider-Man in the kind of trap he usually gets other people with.
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How bout that? They really turned the whole \u201chero\u2019s love gets kidnapped\u201d trope on its ear, and I have to commend them for it. MJ wasn\u2019t kidnapped because of Spider-Man, didn\u2019t really need him to escape, and even managed to save his life instead of the other way around. If yer gonna do a kidnapping plot, you could do so much worse.
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$10! Ballin outta control! Did I buy this? Is this another one my uncle got me that one time, as mentioned elsewhere? Honestly don\u2019t recall. Styx & Stone! This issue is the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[9,253,259,308,13,26,279,345,21,2,344,274],"class_list":["post-4386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-bob-sharen","tag-david-michelinie","tag-glory-grant","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-joe-robertson","tag-jonathan-caesar","tag-manslaughter-marsdale","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-spider-man","tag-styx-stone","tag-todd-mcfarlane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4386","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=4386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4399,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4386\/revisions\/4399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}