{"id":7461,"date":"2020-12-08T00:00:30","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T04:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=7461"},"modified":"2020-07-31T16:37:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T20:37:00","slug":"tac-035","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/12\/08\/tac-035\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC 035"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This cover sure doesn\u2019t evoke a labyrinth. Probably wasn\u2019t made with this issue in mind. But what if it was? This cover is looking pretty wonky. Inconsistent perspective and proportion. Spidey is huge and not at all sticking to that building. Anyway. Inside, we have a guest writer & penciler in the form of Tony Isabella and Lee Elias, a totally unfamiliar name to me. Mike Esposito inks. I believe this is Isabella\u2019s 2nd appearance on the blog, but his first chronologically. As we get going, Spider-Man is engaging in one of his most frequent pass times: falling to his death. Some malignant force is influencing his brain and making it impossible to think. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Is this gonna be The Mindworm?? Someone actually brought back The Mindworm!? I guess we\u2019ll see, I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. Spidey is pretty banged up, but his head is clearing as 2 cops come for him for breaking & entering. Then the voice says he won\u2019t be robbed of his plans and orders Spider-Man to kill the cops. He knocks them both out with a single punch, and then the voice tells Spider-Man he can\u2019t resist it, and makes him smash his own head into the wall just for fun. Then it forces him to\u2026 ugh, to swing out to Flash Thompson\u2019s old neighborhood, this is really The Mindworm! Whyyyyyyyyy Spidey thinks to himself that they were supposed to knock down the old houses there to put up high rises, and \u201chas a bad feeling\u201d as he\u2019s made to enter a house and, well, you know\u2026
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It\u2019s him. Perhaps the dopiest villain in the history of Spider-Man. Also: Chapter 2? What a dated move for 1979. Mindworm recaps his sole previous appearance since it\u2019s been over 5 years and the readership probably didn\u2019t see it, then goes on to explain where he\u2019s been. I love that he\u2019s still wearing the shirt & shorts he was wearing all those years ago. 
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If there\u2019s one thing I love, it\u2019s stories that turn on the debunked notion that people don\u2019t use their whole brains. Just kidding, I don\u2019t like them at all. Exposition out of the way, Mindworm starts zapping Spidey with his ill-defined mental attack to punish him for\u2026 doing this to him? I guess? Then tosses him through I guess a window, it\u2019s not terribly clear, but it also seems to drop our hero into a basement or dungeon or something. It\u2019s a very muddy page as a woman in business wear runs up and says thank Heaven Spider-Man is here. She turns out to be a Dr. Joyce Phillips, who says Mindworm was her patient \u2018til he escaped. Spider-Man confirms we\u2019re in \u201cthis poor man\u2019s labyrinth,\u201d and then, before Dr. Phillips can offer her thoughts on why they\u2019re here, they\u2026 they\u2019re attacked by giant rats? What?
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What?? It is very unlike Spider-Man to just execute something, even a giant rat! The doc says she was Mindworm (\u201cMr. Turner\u201d)\u2019s psychologist, and says they were attacked by giant rats because Mindworm was bitten by one as a child. When Spidey suggests they\u2019re \u201ctrapped inside his neuroses,\u201d she agrees. What in the world is this? So are they hallucinating all this? Then they get picked up inside a hurricane all of a sudden. Maybe Mindworm was also bitten by a hurricane as a child. It picks them up and carries them to Chapter 3.
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Folks, I am really not on board for this issue. Mindworm blasts Spidey again and produces some tentacles, so now he looks even more like Krang from Ninja Turtles. Dr. Phillips yells to Spider-Man that he can only defeat Mindworm by reminding him that he\u2019s human, and so Spider-Man tells him he can\u2019t quit the human race, and asks if his parents ever told him that (I\u2019m guessing they did not).
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Aaaalright. It was all a dream. I will not do the Biggie quote a 2nd time on this blog, but I did think it. Possibly the least essential Spider-Man comic of 1979, this. I mean, also probably a fill-in, so you can\u2019t give the creative team much trouble for it. Probably done quickly to beat a deadline, and also unable to tie into any ongoing subplots or anything. A random return of an obscure villain will at least get you another issue on the stands. But\u2026 woof.
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This cover sure doesn\u2019t evoke a labyrinth. Probably wasn\u2019t made with this issue in mind. But what if it was? This cover is looking pretty wonky. Inconsistent perspective and proportion. Spidey is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[987,52,758,121,2,355],"class_list":["post-7461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1970s","tag-lee-elias","tag-mike-esposito","tag-mindworm","tag-spectacular-spider-man","tag-spider-man","tag-tony-isabella"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461","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=7461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7505,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461\/revisions\/7505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}