{"id":9885,"date":"2021-07-27T00:00:32","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T04:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=9885"},"modified":"2020-07-02T23:40:49","modified_gmt":"2020-07-03T03:40:49","slug":"asm-annual-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/07\/27\/asm-annual-96\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM Annual ’96"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The appearance of this comic at this time is SO jarring. Extremely un-90s Ron Frenz art, a cover full of dead people, 2 versions of the real Spider-Man. Very left field. Also left field is the naming structure. Marvel drops the numbers for the year with annuals starting in ’96. After a few years of this, they just start calling every annual #1, because that makes plenty of sense. Numbering goes totally insane at Marvel in the 2000s. Anyway, this one reteams Tom DeFalco & Ron Frenz on Spider-Man, and Ron has the great honor of being inked by John Romita, Sr., so it\u2019s the best looking work of his career. Good ol\u2019 Bob Sharen rounds out the team. Despite everything on the cover, we open on the Ben Reilly Spider-Man smashing into a subway car. He\u2019d been riding said car in regular clothes when some goons began robbing the passengers, so he slipped away to get to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frenz loves a Buscema punch. No mistaking Romita\u2019s hand on those Spider-Man drawings. They even refused to do modern webbing. Ben swings home expositing his complicated eal and thinking about how he envies Peter & MJ\u2019s happiness. In spite of all we just saw, he thinks about how none of the relationships he\u2019s had since he left New York \u201cmanaged to last or grow into anything significant.\u201d Ouch, Janine! To be fair, these guys probably had no idea about Redemption when making this, and also it wasn\u2019t over yet when this was published. He thinks things used to be different\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And suddenly it\u2019s the 60s again. Romita\u2019s presence grows much larger when we go back in time. Pete asks Gwen if she\u2019s ready to tell her Dad about their relationship, and they find Captain Stacy talking to Joe Robertson, so we can probably place this one between issues somewhere in the 70s of ASM. For more period flavor, we watch Harry Osborn get verbally abused by Norman for just hoping to get some fatherly advice, and then go back to see what Joe & George were talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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These might as well just be Romita pages. I am not complaining, but I wonder what it\u2019s like for artists who have him burying their style. Frenz is still making his presence felt, tho, such as on this next page, which also adds a curious relationship to 2 character who never met\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hm! Good job on the Stan Lee voice in that bottom caption, too. Soon, an underworld snitch hears some dudes talking about getting paid to go scare a college kid named Osborn, and he knows just who\u2019d be interested in that: Kraven the Hunter. Still smarting from the events of ASM 47<\/a>, Kraven\u2019s got it in for the Osborns, and thinks this is a chance for some revenge. We see Peter sell some photos to JJJ and get a look at Ned & Betty just \u2018cuz before Robbie tells Peter that Captain Stacy has a theory about Spider-Man he wants to share. Peter spends the rest of his day nervous that those 2 will expose his identity, and then heads to The Coffee Bean to see the gang.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Peter runs outside and gets into his work clothes, knowing full well his disappearance right before Spider-Man arrives is not going to help him. But then he sees Kraven bounding toward The Coffee Bean and goes to investigate. Inside, the goons declare their intention to rob everyone, and then one of them recognizes Captain Stacy as the man who put him him in jail, so things are pretty tense. But outside\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s always a pleasure to see Romita, Sr.\u2019s Spider-Man, even if he\u2019s not technically drawing it. Kraven\u2019s still got his weird nipple lasers and everything. Back inside, the goon is about to kill Stacy when Spidey & Kraven come smashing through the window. Spidey uses Kraven to cushion their fall and take his foe out of commission for a second, and Captain Stacy whacks one of the goons with his cane, but not the one who wanted to kill him, so\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When Stacy dropped some papers earlier, Peter & he exchanged the same dialogue. Seems a bit of an odd way for him to figure this out, but there it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A vast worldwide empire, huh? Seems a bit grand for the Osborn we knew back then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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..until the day he dies, he thinks. The book helpfully reminds us that soon George would be dead and Gwen would follow before returning to the present for Ben to say he\u2019s never been able to commit to anyone or anything since Gwen died. Seems a bit much! But he thinks maybe it\u2019s time he changed. As we\u2019re done. That was a pleasant little return to the old days. DeFalco\u2019s writing may be woefully out of touch in 1996, but when he\u2019s trying to ape 1966, he\u2019s right at home. Next up, Fabian Nicieza, Steve Lightle, Al Williamson & Nel Yomtov on deck for another flashback tale, this time returning to right after Peter & MJ got married. A time when, as we\u2019ve seen, Nicieza got to write a few Spidey comics. Our man is having trouble coming to grips with having gotten married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spidey swings home, wondering if it\u2019s fair to MJ to be married to a guy who risks his life all the time, and wondering if that would be fair to future kids. Inside, MJ is failing to make some dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The pot lid on his head is funny. Cut to a mysterious figure smashing Uncle Ben\u2019s tombstone! And then\u2026 a continuity issue\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But\u2026 Ken Ellis has only been on the scene for a couple years now in 1996. He can\u2019t be hired back in 1987! Peter & the anachronism go to investigate\u00a0 the homicide. While Ellis fails to get by the police tape, Peter slips off and gets some shots of the crime scene. Meanwhile, some SHIELD agents bust some Russian gun runners looking for info on a Russian super assassin called\u2026 well, called Deadmaker. That\u2019s so silly. One agent intimates that he\u2019s after May & Peter, and then we see a weird hand print on a tree in Aunt May\u2019s yard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gasp and such! Peter & MJ are having a quiet night in when his Spider Sense goes nuts. With no time to get into Spider-Clothes, he just grabs a webshooter and goes up on the roof in time to see a missile flying toward their place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Peter stops the 2nd missile, but by the time he gets home, MJ is gone. Soon cops are swarming his place, and soon after that, the SHIELD agent from earlier and Ken Ellis show up. The SHIELD agent, Cru, says this is about Peter\u2019s parents, and makes Ellis give them some privacy. Peter\u2019s folks died in their duty as SHIELD agents, you see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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May realizes they\u2019re in Richard & Mary Parker\u2019s old apartment as the son of \u201cDeadmaker\u201d wearing his father\u2019s gear announces he wants to kill Peter in revenge. Meanwhile, Peter & Agent Cru have discovered May was taken and Ben\u2019s grave was desecrated, so he runs off to the old apartment. He says he found out about it after he learned the truth about his parents (We\u2019ll see that classic tale one day), so he\u2019s on the right track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m continually surprised by how much I like Nicieza\u2019s Spider-Man voice, because cards on the table, I didn’t care for much of anything he did in the X-Office. It\u2019s a shame he didn\u2019t get to do more with the character. Because we\u2019re running out of pages, Lightle handles Spidey\u2019s showdown with \u201cDeadmaker\u201d in a crazy 15-panel page of them smashing each other around until Spidey gets blown off a roof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The fight somehow takes them onto the bridge Gwen died on. The geography of this doesn\u2019t make any sense to me, but here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, there you go. A weird little story, but Peter reckoning with his new responsibilities and his parents\u2019 past coming back to haunt him were both good angles. Not bad at all. This annual was a little oasis in the very bizarre and mostly terrible desert that is Spider-Man in \u201896.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The appearance of this comic at this time is SO jarring. Extremely un-90s Ron Frenz art, a cover full of dead people, 2 versions of the real Spider-Man. Very left field. Also…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[481,9,225,35,455,11,253,267,20,16,22,13,26,17,491,45,21,55,872,39,321,2,939,124],"class_list":["post-9885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-al-williamson","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-annual","tag-aunt-may","tag-ben-reilly","tag-betty-brant","tag-bob-sharen","tag-fabian-nicieza","tag-george-stacy","tag-gwen-stacy","tag-harry-osborn","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-joe-robertson","tag-john-romita","tag-ken-ellis","tag-kraven-the-hunter","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-ned-leeds","tag-nel-yomtov","tag-norman-osborn","tag-ron-frenz","tag-spider-man","tag-steve-lightle","tag-tom-defalco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9885","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=9885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9913,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9885\/revisions\/9913"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}