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[Tails82]

Aunt May vs web dummy, web dummy wins

[Tails82]

Spider-Man vs The Schemer! His villain power is...uh...he schemes.

Way to leave a catatonic Kingpin behind, by the way. Didn't even call the cops. We shall meet again, adversary, because I just swung out and decided to leave you!

This is one of the drawbacks to wrapping things up within a single issue. People complained that they were getting too long with their multi-part stories, which they were, but then they kinda need to force a conclusion and get into spots like this.

[Tails82]

Spider-Man fights terrorists in London. He can't go see Gwen because she'd suspect it's his secret identity. But he also is fine with 1) being Spider-Man and 2) asking the Bugle to go over there and take pictures. So Gwen could hear about his photos in the paper and wonder why he was over there but didn't meet with her. Everyone else with a brain will wonder and they can at least narrow down Spidey's identity off of who was on that plane.

[Tails82]

#99 is a good single-issue story...of a happy Peter Parker too!

Then there's the intro to the last few issues in this volume, by Roy Thomas. He filled in writing for Stan while he was out scripting a planned movie elsewhere. This included Marvel's first vampire, Morbius (the comics code had once banned werewolves and vampires from childrens comics). At the same time Marvel decided to up its page count, so a reluctant Thomas (who would rather have gone with Fantastic Four, but Stan insisted he do Spider-Man) went all-in and started to enjoy having more room to work with...only to be told later that he had to cut back again. Marvel decided to cut back on page count again, but it was a good business move. DC had upped its pages too, and stuck with it, so Marvel had the sales advantage for an entire year with its cheaper mags. Marvel passed DC as the largest comics company in 1972. As for Stan, the film he contributed to was never completed.

[Tails82]

Issue 100 is weird because Peter decides to stop being Spider-Man and takes a mystery potion he's secretly been working on the entire time, in case his radioactive blood became dangerous to him. There's not really much motivation to this and it wasn't paced well. No. 50 had reasons why he wanted to give it up, but in this one he wants to give up AND take his powers away.

[Tails82]

101 became surprisingly eloquent, and poor Spidey can't catch a break. I think another side effect of the potion (actually the new writer) is that Pete's now plugging pop culture references into everything. He namedrops Batman, Spiro Agnew, Kafka, Boris Karloff, Tony Perkins, and those are just the ones I remember. Both he and Morbius are talking to themselves but wouldn't you know, they meet up in the random abandoned house. The writing on this issue definitely took a step to the dramatic.

[Tails82]

More classic Goosebumps

The Werewolf of Fever Swamp
Welcome to HorrorLand
You Can't Scare Me!
Ghost Beach
Attack of the Mutant
The Beast from the East

But now my perfectly-sized bookshelf for what I had won't fit them all. Woe is me!

[little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔]

After the incoherent mess that was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I've decided to hit up some non-fiction with the autobiography A Streetcat Named Bob.

[little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔]

So I just noticed one of the first few pages of this book.

Also by James Bowen

The World According to Bob
Bob: No Ordinary Cat
For the Love of Bob
Where in the World is Bob?
My name is Bob
A Gift from Bob

I get the sense this dude really likes his cat.

[Tails82]

Well...I went over to the dark side and I'm taking a look at DC comics, the earliest Supermans. Liberry was discarding so it was use it or lose it.

Such a great guy! Issues 1-2 involve chucking a dozen people out the window, presumably to their deaths, in order to prevent going to war with Hitler. He kidnaps a congressman so that his proposals wouldn't pass (secretly designed to get us into an entanglement with Europe). Next involves tracking down his munitions lobbyist contact and threatening to rip his heart out unless he goes down to a war-torn nation somewhere in South America into exile. Superman then gets him to hate war, and then ends the war in one page by carrying both the fighting leaders off and telling them to fight each other directly, to the death. We quickly learn that neither one hates the other and they have no idea why they went to war in the first place, and this is where Superman steps in to tell them that they were obviously tricked into war by the munitions lobby. All done!

#3 involves Superman triggering a mine collapse to get the owner to increase safety measures. JJJ is lucky he doesn't live in this extended universe, or Superman would slap him around until he stopped making the Bugle.

[Tails82]

Superman (Action Comics) #4, in which Superman overhears people want to fix a football game. So his solution is to stick a hypodermic needle into one of the football players who looks like him, leaving him bedridden but conscious for days. I'm starting to see why no one recognizes Superman with glasses vs. without glasses - generic characters all look the same. Even though they messed up the other guy's hair color! You have them side by side as identical people...and the other guy's hair is yellow.

Superman keeps a low profile by almost instantly getting into a fight with another player, smacking him across the room, and getting kicked off the team. He starts playing anyway, as people see how he can just steamroll everyone. Meanwhile the bedridden real player gets kidnapped by the fixers, after they heard how great he was playing. The only time Superman dresses up in costume this issue is during the stealth sequence, when you think you wouldn't want to do that. Iunno lol. Superman's response to the kidnapping is "Fine! They've taken him off my hands!" and leaves the kidnapped guy to his fate. He has to escape on his own.

Superman starts winning the football game and tells the crooked coach to knock it off or he'll report them. So they try to stab him during the game. Superman beats them up and sends them to the hospital, never reports them after all, and then switches out with the escaped real player no questions asked - leaving him to get beat up on the field now that it's just a normal dude getting attacked by the entire other team. Yay Superman!

This is my favorite one so far. What a dick.

[Tails82]

Superman saves the circus. Okay. But did you have to prove your strength to the cash-strapped manager by busting his trailer and kicking it into the sky?

Superman decides he's going to help some juvenile delinquent kids. So he kidnaps them - even to the point of breaking into a police vehicle after one of them is caught - and then after taking out their crooked boss he finds the perfect solution to set the kids straight. He reads about terrible storm devastation and rebuilding efforts in a far-off location in the paper, which inspires him. He'll just smash every slum building in the neighborhood so the city will have to rebuild better houses! Of course! Great idea! It gets the army called on him but f*** you I'm Superman.

Clark Kent gets a tip of warden brutality from an escapee, then almost immediately rats out his source to the warden, in front of the paper's editor, so that the warden will become confident and beat him harder (but what a story it'll be for Clark Kent, to get the pictures of that!) Superman also kills a dog and then kidnaps the governor to show him the place, because I guess the photos of the lashings and prison torture sweatbox weren't incriminating enough.

[little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔]

Oh goodness it even has a sound playback thingy!

[Tails82]

Superman decides he's going to fight traffic. Do you sell used cars? Those are dangerous! Smash! The cars made by your company, statistically, get involved in more crashes. Smash!

Superman hears about an oil well that spent more time selling stock than drilling, so the stock is pretty much inflated and useless. Clark Kent buys the stock up and then drills for oil as Superman, so he becomes a millionaire. When the company decides to buy it all back for a million (after failing to kill him), Kent gets a million but learns they're fine with it because the oil is worth way more than that. So Superman just busts up the whole place, Kent walks off with a million (think he gave it back to the people who got ripped off? Nope!) and I guess all those dudes working the well are out of a job now.

I was talking this over with my bro and I'm starting to wonder - because Superman is fighting traffic - have supervillains even been invented yet?

[little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔]

The Incredible Journey

Chapter 1

So the whole book is pretty much the cat's fault. Got it. Stupid cat.