{"id":6565,"date":"2019-09-09T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T04:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=6565"},"modified":"2019-10-15T19:41:43","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T23:41:43","slug":"tac-annual-04","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2019\/09\/09\/tac-annual-04\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC Annual 04"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As difficult as it\u2019s getting to keep the timeline straight, why not toss in another annual? Why not publish one more book to potentially contradict everything? Well, they did. Looks like a wild one, too. It\u2019s written by Bill Mantlo, with pencils by Kerry Gammill and Sal Buscema, inks by Carlos Garzon and colors by George Roussos. As we open, 3 goons are drilling up into the First National Bank vault from the sewer during a storm at night. They get in, load up some money bags and get out, but when they come up out of the sewer, guess who\u2019s up there?
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Yeah, Spidey is being driven around in his sleep by the costume. There\u2019s even a footnote saying Peter will find out about this in ASM 258, \u201con sale in just 7 days.\u201d When I was a kid, just reading the ASM issues in my trade, this twist was played as a huge shock. Now I know it was spoiled twice by other comics beforehand. So weird. The unconscious hero swings over the head of his Aunt May, as it turns out. I thought it was the middle of the night, why\u2019s Aunt May on the streets downtown? No one says! The purple prose that is Bill Mantlo\u2019s trademark is talking about how her life used to be in these streets when she was young. She sees an old rundown building that was a dancehall when she was a girl, and flashes back to going there with one Johnny Jerome, clearly a gangster. Much later, as dawn breaks, the costume takes Peter home and lets him hit the bed for a few minutes before\u2026
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I mostly included this page because I was shocked to see that Spider-Man. That particular drawing is going to be the corner box on Web of Spider-Man for a stretch one day. I had no idea it came from this. Anyway, he arrives at the house, and Nathan gives him some guff before carefully leading him to Aunt May\u2019s room. He says she came in only a few hours ago, rain soaked, and began \u201creading the letters again\u201d and fell asleep in a chair. Peter asks what letters he means.
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Well, that\u2019s weird. Pete & Nathan promptly fall asleep in the living room, but exhausted from being up all night, though only one of them knows he was. While they\u2019re out, Aunt May wakes up, checks the mail, gets another letter from Johnny, and wakes up Peter going out to get in a taxi. The cab takes her to Coney Island, never suspecting Spider-Man has stowed away on top. When she arrives, May is once again transported back in time, to a time when she ran into Ben Parker there looking for Johnny. In a trance like state, she starts riding the carousel, but it begins spinning way too fast as she remembers meeting Johnny on it.
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Spidey stops the carousel, but while people are thanking him for saving their kids, Aunt May disappears into the crowd and he loses her. She\u2019s gone up on the ferris wheel, where once upon a time, Johnny tried to give her a very expensive necklace surely gotten illegally. She refused it, though, and he said one day she\u2019d be ready. Later that night, Peter & Nathan are at the house, wondering where May could be, and Sal Buscema has taken over pencils, when May comes in without even noticing them and goes to bed. Both Nathan and Peter worry she\u2019s got dementia, but Peter isn\u2019t willing to believe it yet. He sees how the letters are somehow triggering this, and decides to find out why.
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Hey, what do you know, I thought Aunt May\u2019s maiden name was made up in the 90s, but here it is. I\u2019m learning all sorts of trivia tonight. The card is from Johnny, of course. Peter sees photos of him & May in an album, and it gives him Johnny\u2019s name, so he goes to The Daily Bugles morgue, where he learns Jerome is a career criminal who went away for murder, and just got parolled. Peter goes back to the house and finds that another letter arrived and sent May back out of the house, this time to meet Johnny in person. He rushes off to make sure she doesn\u2019t get hurt. He beats her to her old neighborhood, now a run down and dangerous place, as she pulls up in a cab and wanders toward her old building. 
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While Spidey deals with the local goons, May is finally reunited with her Johnny, and he\u2019s got a box with the necklace from her flashbacks in it. But as one of the goons gets off a shot in the present, both of the old folks are living in the past\u2026
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HUH? But\u2026 but the letters were putting her in a legit TRANCE. What? I don\u2019t\u2026 I don\u2019t know, man. As was often the case with Mantlo, nice sentiment, not the best execution. There\u2019s a 2nd feature by Bob Denatale, Ron Randall and George Roussos about Spidey trying to talk Black Cat into a quiet evening at her place for once. As part of his plan, he brings her the gift of a fancy new wine carafe. She sets it down in the kitchen and agrees to his plan, but then\u2026
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Felicia finds a matchbook with a mouse drawn on it, and heads to the restaurant it\u2019s from. There, she finds the carafe being used at a table by a couple. She introduces herself as a crimefighter, and makes up a story about the carafe having a secret microfilm on it, when a guy with a weird forked gray beard and a gun shows up demanding the microfilm. He takes the couple Felicia was talking to hostage, and when the very confused Cat gives chase, he abandons both hostages and carafe to run.
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On top of that, Cat sees Spidey on his way back to her place, and just cuts her losses and heads back before he does. She meets him in the living room and says she\u2019s having trouble making dinner, and then heads back into the kitchen and out the window. Pretty screwball stuff. She heads to police headquarters, where the carafe is now in the hands of Captain Jean DeWolff. She\u2019s not sure what to do about that.
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The old guy dives out the window with the carafe and Felicia follows. ON a nearby roof, the old guy accidentally drops the carafe over the edge, shattering it on the street below, before removing his disguise to reveal\u2026
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That makes two of us, Tammy! Pretty wacky story. Now that this silliness is out of the way, our next post will be a big one.
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As difficult as it\u2019s getting to keep the timeline straight, why not toss in another annual? Why not publish one more book to potentially contradict everything? Well, they did. Looks like a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[225,35,732,107,156,733,380,370,158,731,127,164,734,37,121,2],"class_list":["post-6565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","tag-annual","tag-aunt-may","tag-ben-parker","tag-bill-mantlo","tag-black-cat","tag-bob-denatale","tag-carlos-garzon","tag-george-roussos","tag-jean-dewolff","tag-johnny-jerome","tag-kerry-gammil","tag-nathan-lubensky","tag-ron-randall","tag-sal-buscema","tag-spectacular-spider-man","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565","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=6565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6580,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions\/6580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}