The rest of this retrospective will be all about Spider-Man, just like last year.
This issue was originally published immediately afterwards the ones included in the reprint that made me a regular reader, but I read it several months earlier than the reprint.
Uomo Ragno #27 (1989)
Published by: Star Comics
The issue title is “The cruel shadow of the past”, weirdly different from the original “In the shadow of evils past”.
Amazing Spider-Man #238 (1983)
by Roger Stern & John Romita Jr
Hobgoblin won’t ever get a cooler cover than this.
This is an extremely Romita issue: John Junior at pencils, his father at inks, and his mother as “traffic manager”.
We begin with Peter reminiscing about his origin story.
At this point my only frame of reference was a very watered down version that didn’t even include Uncle Ben getting shot, but I don’t remember picking up on the discrepancy.
A runaway car almost kills Aunt May and her then-boyfriend Nathan.
Why even try to come up with an excuse? Aunt May knows Peter takes pictures for the Daily Bugle, he could’ve just said he’s following a story. This feels like Nathan is covering for him because he knows he’s Spider-Man, but he most definitely didn’t.
We get a cool car chase out of this. Notice Spidey mentioning he has to pull his punches to avoid things from getting “a little messy”: the formal acknowledgement that Spider-Man can’t punch a regular human with all his strength to avoid literally blowing their heads off is a recent development, but it’s always been there in the background.
One of the accomplices runs away into a sewer. I get the feeling that the sewers are FAR easier to access in fiction than in reality, but I’m in no rush to check for myself.
Spider-Man decides that looking for this guy is not worth the effort… quite uncharacteristically, as he’s FAMOUSLY motivated by not letting small time criminals get away.
Luckily for the guy, you can’t go anywhere in Marvel New York City without stumbling into a supervillain lair.
There’s a panel that has been speculated as Aunt May referring to a miscarriage we’ve never heard about. Possibly a dropped subplot?
Her phone call to her friend Anna is an excuse for a cameo by Mary Jane, who had been missing from the book for quite a bit.
Obviously I knew her from the Corno books I had, but the Italian notes anticipated that she’d soon return to play a major role.
Peter hears that the warehouse where he lost the criminal belonged to Osborn, and this is where I learned that Green Goblin discovered his secret identity before he died.
We get a good character moment with Robbie Robertson, who will return being an important part of the cast soon.
Following the lead, he discovers that the criminal uncovered one of Green Goblin’s hideouts… and it’s gone up in flames.
Great job, Peter.
The guy who discovered the hideout won’t get to use it: after selling the weapons he took to a man we can’t yet identify, he gets blown up.
This mysterious figure tries out what he bought.
And after manufacturing a new mask…
…a new supervillain is born.
Amazing Spider-Man #239 (1983)
by Roger Stern & John Romita Jr
Because of this issue I’ll always have a sweet spot for Hobgoblin.
While the color coordination of the Green Goblin is unmatched, I vastly prefer Hobby’s use of a hood instead of that weird purple cap.
The first order of business is stealing MORE equipment from the original Green Goblin.
Not that hard, since at this time Harry Osborn is oblivious to his father’s legacy.
Spider-Man pays visit to Black Cat in the hospital, following the events of the other series we’ve seen last year.
He takes the opportunity to also visit Madame Web, who tells him to put on Plot Convenience Radio.
We have a subplot about Lance Bannon, a Daily Bugle photographer rival to Peter, and his love interest Amy. We’ll see her again in another comic part of the retrospective.
Some Peter fanservice for the ladies.
After he takes a nap, Amy tries to get him into a date… and wakes him up after 10 hours.
This makes him rush off to his first confrontation with Hobgoblin.
Hobgoblin was NOT prepared for this.
He manages to escape only by pulling the old “endanger civilians to distract the hero” trick, but he’s completely exhausted. Because unlike Green Goblin, at this point Hobgoblin doesn’t have any superpowers… he will eventually get around to getting the Goblin Serum for himself.
And that’s how the story ends. As far as Spider-Man finales go, this is a happy ending!
Historical significance: 8/10
Hobgoblin is incredibly important to 1980s Spider-Man; unfortunately the storyline about his identity will become a convoluted mess, due to miscommunications between writers and editors and a lot of office politics. We wouldn’t get the true full story until 1997.
Every following iteration of Hobgoblin has been a downgrade, and once Norman Osborn returned as Green Goblin he’s faded into the background. Too bad, because he was prime to become the new Spider-Man nemesis.
Personal significance: 8/10
This story, the fact that Norman wouldn’t come back for years and that I hadn’t read his classic stories first, is a big reason why I’m still not quite as fixated on Green Goblin as most Spider-Man fans.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Does it stand the test of time? 10/10
I try not to get nostalgia to make me give a full score to ALL of these, but holy crap is this still a masterpiece of a run.
The Romitas speak for themselves, and Roger Stern is one of my all-time favorites on several series. This is peak Spider-Man: not only we get a cool new villain, we get to explore Spidey’s past without dwelling too much over it AND we get several subplots about the supporting characters AND even the events of other Spider-Man series have their role!
Uncanny X-Men #143 (1981)
by Chris Claremont & John Byrne
Only the second half of this other masterpiece was published here, but I already reviewed the whole story. I actually read the second half FIRST.
Uncanny X-Men #144 (1981)
by Chris Claremont & Brent Eric Anderson
But we also had the first half of THIS story.
We begin with Man-Thing meeting a man diagnosed with cancer.
The guy shoots himself under the influence of the D’Spayre, a demon responsible for despair and on-the-nose character naming.
He then proceeds to quickly defeat Man-Thing and to take the form of the dead man.
The reason because this is on X-Men (in addition to the fact that D’Spayre was created by Claremont on 1978 on Marvel Team-Up) is that the guy who just killed himself is the father of Lee Forrester, the current love interest of Cyclops.
Poor woman… her father just killed himself after learning he had inoperable cancer AND she’s with Cyclops, truly the most unfortunate Marvel character of all time.
I find it funny that Cyclops has been doing this trick for so long that the Marvel Handbooks seriously consider this a secondary superpower.
Meanwhile the rest of the X-Men are doing some cleaning.
They’re doing some playful teasing with Kitty Pryde…
…which on one hand she’s taking WAY too seriously, but on the other hand she’s 14.
Aww, and that was the happiest I’ve seen Wolverine in ages!
Lee brings Cyclops home, where they meet D’Spayre.
He brings them back to his domain… wherever THAT is…
…and into a flashback of Cyclops’s origins.
He then moves into a vision of fighting side by side his brother Havok.
This is when the story ended for me: this book only included half the story, and I didn’t have the following one.
What follows is a dream sequence… or rather a nightmare one.
This is a problem with all D’Spayre stories: the second he shows up you KNOW that everything is just an illusion. He shares this with Nightmare, who at least has enough stage presence to occasionally be interesting.
Thanks to Man-Thing’s intervention, D’Spayre is successfully defeated at the cost of burning down Lee Forrester’s house.
And so we close with a somber reminder of the tragic life of Man-Thing.
His is a bleak existence, no doubt about it, but…
Lee Forrester lost his father to suicide and demon possession, her home was burned down the same day AND her boyfriend is still Cyclops… so who is the most tragic figure, really?
Historical significance: 0/10
I’m not knowledgeable enough with the X-Men to say if this is the first time we see Cyclops survive the explosion of the plane. If this WAS the first time, it would warrant a higher score; without it, this amounts to nothing.
Personal significance: 3/10
Considering I read half the story, I barely remembered it.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
With a suicide on page two? No chance.
Does it stand the test of time? 6/10
Interchangeable with virtually any other D’Spayre story (he really doesn’t have a ton of range).
It’s perfectly fine, and Claremont’s tendency to over-narrate fits the nightmare scenes, but you figure out everything that’s going on the second D’Spayre shows up.
Anderson’s art is good, but he suffers from being between Byrne and Cockrum stories so we’re used to see better on this title.
Star Comics wasn’t publishing many books at the time, so they used a “Superhero referendum” to get a better feeling for what they should concentrate on.
This issue published the results of 2369 answers from readers.
- 60% of readers who responded were male
- 40% were between 20 and 26 years old, indicating that a considerable chunk of readers (or at least the ones who responded) were long-time fans. Readers under 14 years old were only 7.6% of the responses.
- 30% of responders read every single book Star Comics was publishing. These would have included only Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Punisher.
- All the technical categories got either “good” or “excellent” scores: graphics, covers, distribution, notes, letters page, chronology, translation and lettering!
- Out of all the serials published, X-Men was overwhelmingly the best rated with 75.4% voting “excellent”. Following that were Daredevil with 57.9% “excellent”, Spider-Man with 47.9% “good” and 31.8% “excellent”, Fantastic Four with 45% “good” and 32.8% “excellent”, and last place the Hulk with just 38.2 % “good”.
- 90% wanted the book to keep its publishing schedule of twice a month. It will keep it for its entire Star Comics run.
- Responders were split on what they wanted on the book: 46.7% wanted to see both Spider-Man and X-Men on the same book, and 52.5% wanted to add a THIRD series with a different character! What will actually happen is that X-Men will migrate to their own book and we would get only Spider-Man stories rather soon.
- On Fantastic Four, a surprising 65% of readers wanted to keep on each issue a full Daredevil stories and half a Hulk story, instead of the other way around and instead of alternating them. Star Comics will eventually increase the number of pages to have only full stories.
- Readers were asked to rate their favorite series that was not yet being translated, with multiple choices possible. 73.4% included the Avengers, followed by Thor at 48.4%, Captain America at 45.4%, Alpha Flight at 35.7% and Silver Surfer at 31.5%. Star Comics will launch a Captain America title that will include the Avengers and Alpha Flight as backups, but the rights to Thor and Silver Surfer were instead taken by Play Press.
- The final notes acknowledge that the Hulk was the least rated serial but reassured readers that better stories would soon come up. Which is true, but they still had to rush by cutting most of the second half of the Mantlo run.
Claremont’s take on Cyclops is indeed a sorry character. The sole exception is also the best Wolverine story ever, by far: “X-Men #127”, published in 1979. But for some reason Claremont immediately backed down from what to me is still the best dynamic between the two characters.
Without Claremont, though, Cyclops is all over the place (so are most X-Men, as a matter of fact). Sometimes he is just great.
Amazing #239 was the first issue of that book that I read directly without any translation – bought from the store as soon as I found it in a Brazilian bookstore. It actually played a significant part in my never ending quest of becoming a better English reader. Also my first contact with Amy Powell, Madame Web and Black Cat. Spidey had a great female supporting characters cast at the time.
The confrontation with Hobgoblin was also great. Dynamic storytelling that showed quite clearly that while Spider-Man is a powerful character, he still has to work at it and he is not at all invincible. It is a asymmetrical fight which puts both participants somewhat off-balance from start to finish.
On the one hand, Spider-Man is insecure because he knows barely anything about his opponent, who has already shown access to the arsenal of one of his most difficult opponents, willingness and ability to build on it, and may easily also have happened upon secrets that could greatly harm both his own life as well as Harry Osborn’s. At the same time, Hobgoblin is dangerous yet clearly out of his current league – and his prompt admission of that mismatch, combined with the clear determination to look for ways around it without any hint of giving up, sends a clear message that this is not a foe to be neglected regardless of any considerations about current power level.
A marvelously subtle aspect of the best Spider-Man stories is that he has little to no privileged awareness of the scope and dangers of the situations he gets involved in, and even less control. A mastermind, a mover and shaker he is not. Going back to Amazing Fantasy #15 this is a character that, far from being helped by the police and given the best available information, support and back-up, has pretty much accepted that he is almost destined to make do with less-than-ideal circunstances at every turn. His emotional resilience raises to the level of a main virtue of character; Peter is everyone’s dream favorite brother – the person who is hardly invincible, privileged nor omnipotent, but somehow has the knack of always, always coming back and making things right somehow due to his strength of character alone.
Oh, we have seen Scott jump from the plane with Alex before. In Claremont’s run that happened not terribly long before, in 1978’s #114. The scene received continuity implants along the years that added many information and detail (X-Men #155, X-Factor #39), but the brothers jumping with a single parachute goes back to that issue; it apparently is not a part of the 1960s stories, Claremont’s own #108, or anything else before Claremont.
I also don’t know if this is the first time we see Cyclops and Havok pushed out of the plane, but there’s probably added significance here because less than a year later it’s revealed that their father is Starjammer leader Corsair and the plane was crashing because it was attacked by the Shi’ar. So the flashback is probably intended as foreshadowing that soon-to-come revelation.
That is not entirely correct. We learn that Corsair is Scott’s father in #107-108 – even though Scott himself only does in #154-155, when Corsair admits to it and explains the connection to his mother’s death. How much of that could be deduced from previous hints is probably an arbitrary call.
At first it is just Jean who learns that Corsair is Scott’s father, but she told Ororo at some point before #137, apparently off-panel.
No clue on why Jean and Ororo kept Scott in the dark for so long.
I stand corrected.
As it turns out, Ororo learns of Corsair being Scott’s father in #109, right after Corsair insists that Jean should not tell Scott.
There is never a very clear reason why he makes that demand, though.
That does seem out of character Wolverine writing, almost as if *he’s* a fourteen year old girl….
I’m not sure when it was first mentioned in the comics, but I think it’s canon that May and Ben tried for a child before they took in Peter and sadly May miscarried. It’s her Freudian excuse for constantly worrying about Peter (and other people she cares about) getting harmed.
Well Storm was within earshot when Phoenix revealed to Corsair his parentage (the two of them were linking with Phoenix to help her restore the Crystal). Next issue, Corsair tells Jean & Ororo to keep it secret. Scott was not happy when he finds out.
During the Savage Land visit in the World Tour Arc, Cyclops has vague memories of the plane incident. 144 is the first in depth.