{"id":4863,"date":"2020-05-19T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=4863"},"modified":"2019-06-16T23:10:41","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T03:10:41","slug":"tac-148","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/05\/19\/tac-148\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC 148"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The last of the Inferno tie-ins, and the only issue of TAC in my magical comic box as a kid. Weird place to start! As  has been mentioned elsewhere, Ned Leeds is dead. I am avoiding the circumstances of his death if I can, but given the out of order nature of the blog, who knows. All I know for sure is Gerry Conway is clearly extremely excited about this \u201cNight of the Living Ned\u201d pun, as it has been printed 3 times in 2 issues, appearing again on the opening splash, which features Ned clawing out of the grave. A grave with actual dates on it, 1955-1986. So he was 31? This sort of thing is usually avoided anyway possible due to the sliding time scale, but they just put a flag in the sand. Ned was older than Peter, but Betty wasn\u2019t, and this makes their romance rather awkward. Anyway, zombies and whatnot.
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Betty had some kind of waking nightmare. Flash runs in to try to calm her, fresh from nailing boards over the windows. Flash, er, flashes back to all the troubles in Betty\u2019s life recently, up to her cult experience, and thinks she\u2019s been working hard to get her life together since. She\u2019s turned on a camping heater because it\u2019s so cold now, but Flash points out that a gas heater indoors is dangerous. She says she\u2019s so mixed up she\u2019s not thinking clearly anymore. He continues trying to comfort her.
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Right about now, I assume The X-Men are fighting the big battle on top of the Empire State Building. It\u2019s nice to put that in here for Betty & Flash to see. The demons declare that they want to play with their food before they eat and vanish. Flash continues boarding up the windows, thinking about how crazy things are, and about his regrets about the past. Wishing he\u2019d finished college, feeling like he\u2019s not much use to anyone anymore as he heads up to the roof. Then his brooding is interrupted.
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Pure chaos! Sal Buscema\u2019s angular, gritty style is well-suited to zombies. He should have done more horror stuff. Betty runs into the basement, cowering, losing it. Up on the rood, Flash has been webbed to a TV antenna and is being beaten up by his hero. \u201cSpider-Man\u201d says he\u2019s done it to see Flash get electrocuted, having removed the building\u2019s lightning rod. Flash asks why, and \u201cSpidey\u201d says because Flash annoys him.
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That\u2019s rough. Back inside\u2026
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Hey, good for you, Betty! Up on the roof, Flash manages to free himself from the web. No way he coulda gotten out of Spider-Man\u2019s web with a screwdriver, but of course, this isn\u2019t Spider-Man\u2019s web, and Flash is such a superfan he realizes that immediately, tackling his tormentor and demanding to know who he really is. He gives him a good ol\u2019 fashioned Sal Buscema beat down and then rips his mask off, declaring he\u2019s not a loser.
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Some pretty serious psychological exploration going on in this one. Betty, meanwhile, is slowly creeping through the apartment, intent on facing the Ned zombie. The apartment is now full of candles, and she eventually finds the thing saying he did it. How sweet. But she declares that she knows it\u2019s not really Ned, and it says the game is up.
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Checkov\u2019s gas heater! Flash and the Spider-Demon\u2019s fight above spills over the edge of the roof, and they come smashing through the window into the same room Betty\u2019s facing her demon in, how convenient.
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Weird way to express that Flash, but yeah. I quite enjoyed this one. A good look at a couple of characters who don\u2019t get much attention, and the ground level view of this sort of crossover event is rare and welcome. And now they\u2019ve emerged stronger people. Betty especially. And that\u2019s it for Inferno. Don\u2019t worry, The X-Men saved the day. All the demons were driven out, Cyclops\u2019 wife who was actually a clone of Jean Grey and also The Goblin Queen got killed, N\u2019Astrih got the axetrih, and all was well. Ish. X-Men is way more confusing than Spider-Man.
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The last of the Inferno tie-ins, and the only issue of TAC in my magical comic box as a kid. Weird place to start! As  has been mentioned elsewhere, Ned Leeds is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[11,253,12,73,579,55,37,121,2],"class_list":["post-4863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-betty-brant","tag-bob-sharen","tag-flash-thompson","tag-gerry-conway","tag-inferno","tag-ned-leeds","tag-sal-buscema","tag-spectacular-spider-man","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863","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=4863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4877,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863\/revisions\/4877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}