Amazing Spider-Man in the 1990s

Feb 14

Feb 14 Amazing Spider-Man in the 1990s

And here we are in the 1990s, an era which countless blogs will tell you is the worst decade of Amazing Spider-Man ever put to paper. But is it really that bad? Not really. I wouldn’t say that it is any worse than any other decade that has come before or after. It has its highs and lows and some things about it are utter shit. At the start of the decade Todd McFarlane came off the book to go and write a brand new Spider-Man title, leaving David Michelinie to finish Spider-Man’s Acts of Vengeance arc with Erik Larsen and wrap up the whole “Cosmic Spider-Man” sub-plot. Apparently he was given the power of Captain Universe so he could destroy the Tri-Sentinel, three Sentinels that were magicked together by Loki and threaten life on the planet. It was such an underwhelming reveal and closed so quickly it doesn’t seem like it was worth the effort.

They also had the Black Cat return and find out that Peter Parker had married Mary Jane and is hurt by this to the point where she plans to get revenge? This revenge? Date Flash Thompson to get him to fall in love with her and break his heart. I’d say this is a lousy choice since Flash was Peter’s high school bully and while they made peace with each other over the years he wasn’t exactly that close to Parker, so it was kind of a weak premise. Naturally she eventually ends up actually developing feelings for him before getting scared and ending it in another Spider-Book. It was such a weak idea.

Another annoying trope during this run was that Mary Jane was regularly put in peril by stalkers, first by Jonathan Caeser, then by a “police officer” named Hal Goldman. In both cases Mary Jane would have to save herself while Peter was busy being Spider-Man. It created some tension in their marriage but also made it appear as though Mary Jane could look after herself, but the frequency these two plots happened made it a tired offering.

Then there was the frequent return of Venom, who would show up, poke his fingers in Peter’s personal life. This would lead to the two battling to the “death” where Venom is defeated, or tricked into thinking he killed Spider-Man only to come back again.

Michelinie and Larson’s first big arc together was the Return of the Sinister Six, a six part epic starting in Amazing Spider-Man #334. On the one hand you’re wondering why it took almost 30 years for someone to come up with the idea of bringing back the Sinister Six. On the other, this story came at a time where Marvel was cramming guest stars and cameo appearances in all of their stories that it was bloated over with pointless team-ups that don’t advance the story. This arc also saw the end point of the relationship between Aunt May and Nathan Lubensky. For the later half of the 80s they turned Nathan from a kindly old man to a miserly and unlikable character with a gambling addition. He was such a spiteful unlikable character you’d think they’d come up with some way to redeem himself but instead they gave him heart failure and has him die while weakly trying to stop the Vulture from harassing his family. Then, not even a few issues after they plant the poor bastard into the ground Aunt May starts dating the Fantastic Four’s old mailman Nathan Lubensky.

The next arc was a three parter titled “Power Less” which ran from issues #341 to 343. As the name implied it is the exact opposite of the idea of Acts of Vengeance, and Peter has to be Spider-Man without powers. Since it was mostly Spider-Man getting his ass kicked by a bunch of villains it is mercifully short, because writers hate having Spider-Man powerless for overly long. Props to Michelinie for stretching this concept out two issues longer than Stan Lee would have, I guess. Issues #344 introduces a new foe for Spider-Man, a cyborg (ick) named Cardiac who goes after corrupt corporations. It was an interesting idea, a socially conscious character, but nobody did the character much good until Dan Slott brought him back years later during his run on Superior Spider-Man.

Issue #351 saw Mark Bagley take on pencilling duties on the title, the Bags would become one of the most well regarded Spider-Man artists of the decade and beyond, particularly with his later work on Ultimate Spider-Man. In the 90s, Bagley’s run on the title was a nice change from Erik Larson’s blocky Jack Kirby-Meets-Image-Comics style.

Bagley’s first big arc on Amazing was with Al Milgrom as writer for a six part story titled Round Robin: Sidekick’s Revenge. It’s not so much a Spider-Man story is it tying up a loose end from the Moon Knight comic with an obscene amount of guest stars. It was absurd. The story had Moon Knight, the Punisher, Nova, Night Thrasher, and Darkhawk going up against the Secret Empire and Moon Knight’s former sidekick Midnight, who was left for dead and was rightly pissed about it. At the time, Marvel was pushing Spider-Man out bi-monthly so long epics like this were becoming quite common.

Notably, or perhaps notoriously, the next big Spider-Man story on this run was the three part Carnage epic by Michelinie and Bagley. It introduced, you guessed it, Carnage. Carnage of course was a serial killer that was bonded to the offspring of Venom’s alien symbiote. This story saw Spider-Man and Venom putting aside their differences and working together to stop a greater evil, before this plot premise became a tired trope. That story arc also saw the return of Peter Parker’s parents (or is it?). For those with short memory, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5 told the story that Peter’s parents were CIA agents that were killed on a secret mission. This story reveals that they were alive and well and were actually prisoners of war for the decades they were thought dead and had just been released. This led to Peter initially becoming skeptical, then accepting, and then bonding with his long-lost parents. It actually was an interesting premise particularly in the now Post-Cold World world that this story was written in.

They also tried to do something, anything, interesting with Mary Jane. After being blacklisted from the modelimg industry, Mary Jane gets a job acting on a soap opera and takes up smoking to deal eith the stress of Peter beimg Spider-Man. This latter point is just to have characters rag on her for smelling like an ash tray until Peter forces her to visit Nick Katzenberg, the sleazy tabload photographer, who suddenly got a terminal case of lung cancer whem writers got bored with him. She’s scared straight and never touches a cigarette again. Quitting smoking can only ever be that easy in fiction, but I digress.

Issue #365 is the first of many, many, many special covers. See in the 90s, comic publishers started making special holofoil covers, or covers with holograms, or special die-cut covers, or whatever. It was usually reserved for milestone issues or stories with important plot developments. Issue #365 was special because it was published on the 30th anniversary of Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15. If only the stories inside were fitting for such a celebration, but they were just a bunch of filler or tying up loose ends to other plots. The main story, for example, was a rematch between Spider-Man and the Lizard after Todd MacFarlane’s epic premiere run on Spider-Man. Next came the next huge epic, the six part Invasion of the Spider-Slayers, which saw Alistair Smythe building a bunch of different Spider-Slayers and sending them after Spider-Man one at a time. This run had such little substance, they had to cram in back-up stories.

Issues #374 was actually one of the more interesting Venom stories. In it, Venom learns that Peter Parker’s parents are still alive and kidnaps them in order to protect them from their son, who Venom still sees as evil. Issue #375 was another “special” cover celebrating the 30th anniversary of Amazing Spider-Man #1. It promised to be the “final battle” between Spider-Man and Venom. It wasn’t to the death, but the pair end their animosity toward each other. It was also a blatant spring-board to get readers to follow Venom’s solo adventures in his own limited series, Venom: Lethal Protector.

Issues #378-380 were all parts of the most ambitious Spider-Man story arc ever, Maximum Carnage. The story had Carnage and a bunch of other maniacs breaking out of Ravencroft Institute and go on a murder spree across New York City. It was a FOURTEEN part story that crossed over every Spider-Man title including a NEW one (Spider-Man Unlimited) that was put out just to capitalize on the event. It’s not the worst Spider-Man epic but suffers from the same tropes of the era by having a shit ton of guest stars including Cloak and Dagger, the Black Cat, Moribus the Living Vampire, Firestar from the New Warriors, Deathlok the cyborg, Iron Fist, and Captain America among others. It was such a big deal that Marvel had a huge advertising campeign to promote the crossover which also included a video game (on nearly every home console of the time) and a them song by Green Jelly. If you don’t know Green Jelly, picture a cross between Gwar and Weird Al Yankovic and that’s Green Jelly. And why not? The band that brought you the classic song “The Misadventures of Shitman” were just the right fit for a song vaguely about a Spider-Man villain. It sounds all really stupid in retrospect, but this was the era of comics I grew up in and that was as big deal. So much so that I got a copy of Green Jelly’s album “333” (which included “Carnage Rules”) for Christmas that year, because nothing says “happy holidays” than a song promoting the virtues of carnage, that other song about bears that was in “Dumb and Dumber” and a song about having a sex slave done in the tune of a B-52’s song, but I digress.

Maximum Carnage was followed by a two part Hulk crossover in issues #381-382. It’s distinct because Peter David (who wrote Hulk at the time) tried to write off the story as a dream in is own book because he thought the idea of the Hulk taking an airplane to be silly, and nothing in comics is ever silly. Don’t worry, the Continuity Gods who write the Marvel Handbooks confirm that this indeed was not a dream, no matter how silly Peter David thinks it is. Next up was a three parter called Trial by Jury, which reintroduced readers to the Jury, a group of high tech mercenaries that were specifically formed to bring Venom to justice. In this story, they decide trying to catch Venom is too hard and decide to execute Spider-Man since it was his fault for bringing the alien symbiote to Earth to begin with. I mean, they’re not wrong, but this story had to end with a deux es machina by way of one of the Jury developing a conscience and letting Spider-Man free.

The next three parter was kind of a downer. Lifetheft ran from Amazing Spider-Man #386-388, it featured the Vulture getting a device that allowed him to de-age himself by draining the life forces of others. However, in some incredibly stupid writing, the process was not permanent unless the Vulture steals the life force of an artificial life form and wouldn’t you know it, while working with the Chameleon to kidnap Peter Parker’s parents, the Vulture discovers that Richard and Mary Parker we’ve been seeing all these months were actually artificial simulacrums created for some nefarious reason and were programmed to attack Peter Parker the moment he reveals to them his double identity. Obviously, such a gut wrenching twist would ruin Spider-Man’s day leading him to go on an unending quest to bring the person responsible to justice. In this case, Spider-Man thought that the Chameleon was solely responsible and this was some twisted scheme to avenge the death of Kraven the Hunter. Ignoring the fact that Kraven committed suicide, but villains seeking revenge always miss the finer points.

The death of the “Parker Parents” saw David Michelini leave the title to be replaced by J.M. DeMatties, because if you want someone to write a fucking depressing Spider-Man story, you get J.M. DeMatties. This run started with a four part story title Pursuit which ran across all the core Spider-Man titles at the time. Get used to this because that starts becoming the trend. Instead of having arcs running the course of a single Spider-Man title, they were told in two or more of the Spider-Man on going titles in order to get you to buy more. In my mind, this is the biggest crock of bullshit of the later half of the 90s when it comes to Spider-Man (and the X-Men also, while we’re at it) It certainly makes indexing and summarizing all this stuff harder for me in the here and now. At least when Marvel did this practice in the late 2000s (during Brand New Day), they didn’t insult your intelligence by having five different Spider-Man titles, they just condensed to a single Spider-Man book (Amazing Spider-Man) and published it on a weekly basis.

Anyway, issues #390-393 was a four part arc called the Shrieking which featured the villain Shriek trying to force Malcolm McBride to become Carrion again and forsake his biological mother for her. It’s your typical J.M. DeMatties fair about characters having mommy and abandonment issues. I’m pretty sure that’s coming from a personal place but given the types of downright depressing dredging stories DeMatties wrote during this period I am not even going to attempt to try and unpack what’s going on here, I’ve got enough of my own depression to juggle and don’t need to up my dosage.

That’s when we get into….. THE CLONE SAGA!! DUN-DUN-FUCKING-DUNNNNNNNN!

Yes, the much maligned Clone Saga which would fester in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man from issue #394 to 418. It ran for TWO GOD DAMN YEARS. This is when shit in Spider-Man went overboard with every story arc taking place across different Spider-Man titles. If you were collecting comics as a kid and didn’t have easy access to a comic book shop good fucking luck trying to follow this shitshow when it was first published. Not only the huge hit on the pocket book since you had to read every Spider-Man book every month just to know what’s going on, these books weren’t coming cheap. Marvel started printing on better paper, some titles were only available in direct editions, and special edition covers were pepper in just to gouge you even deeper.

Let me try and capsulize this in a nutshell: the clone of Peter Parker everyone thought was dead turns up alive and comes back because Aunt May is sick. This comes at a time when Spider-Man’s life is on the rails, his marriage is in the dumps, and being manipulated by villains everywere. The Jackal comes back and reveals, hey, the Peter Parker we’ve been following all these years? He was actually the clone and the guy we think was the clone — now called Ben Reilly and masquerading as the Scarlet Spider — was the real guy. Peter Parker discovers Mary Jane is pregnant, his powers start to fade, so he retires and gets a job someplace else, leaving New York and super-heroing to Ben Reilly and the Scarlet Spider. Oh also in the thick of it, in issue #400 to be exact, Aunt May seemingly dies. Her dying words to Peter was that she knew he was secretly Spider-Man this whole time and was proud of him. It was a heartbreaking moment.

The whole point of this exercise… If I’m not mistaken.. is that the Marvel editors didn’t like how Peter Parker was married and all grown up, wanting him to go “back to basics” and be that awkward teenager. Which is always the huge fucking problem when it comes to writing Spider-Man. Eventually the character has to grow-up or change. Editors want the character to appeal to younger readers and they’ll pull a 360 to kick Peter Parker back down a few pegs to be closer to his teenaged self, but without ignoring years of continuity. Every time they’ve tried to do this with Spider-Man it as always been received poorly. The Clone Saga is the biggest example of that. Fans lost their shit and the backlash was huge and Marvel’s creative teams had to scramble and back pedal some of what they did.

The big problem? Sending Peter Parker off into the sunset after people had invested so much time and tossing in a different character that we had no investment in. Yes, at the time, Ben Reilly was the “real” Peter Parker, but he was as on dimensional as any other character with a “dark and gritty mystery past”. So Marvel did a 360, revealed that the whole reveal that Ben Reilly was the clone was a huge deception, but not by the Jackal, but none other than Norman Osborn the original Green Goblin who — SURPRISE — wasn’t dead all these years. This led to Peter Parker’s powers miraculariously coming back, returning to New York, and taking up the mantle of Spider-Man again after Ben Reilly heroically sacrifices his life.Even then, this flip flop did not ingratiate writers to fans who still, apparently, wanted a married Peter Parker as Spider-Man. Still, they used the final story arc, Revelations, to set up the next mystery. In that story arc, Mary Jane gives birth to a child and is told that it was stillborn, but they were also building up a plot to suggest that maybe the baby was still alive and was being held somewhere by Norman Osborn.

Adding to the misery was the fact that the Clone Saga also took place during the Onslaught event and the subsequent Heroes Reborn reboot that saw the Fantastic Four and the Avengers plucked out of the Marvel Universe proper and put into a pocket universe were they lived Image Comics-esque versions of their lives, leaving Spider-Man one of the few non-mutant superheroes still left.

During the Clone Saga, Tom DeFalco became writer of Amazing Spider-Man and tried to right a ship that was way, way, way out of control. DeFalco wrote ASM until issue #439 where he had Peter and Mary Jane try to rebuild their lives after losing their baby and Norman Osborn being back from the dead and finger-fucking Peter’s life both in and out of costume. One of DeFalco’s running arcs was one of his biggest tropes: setting up a massive gang war. This time it was between the new Rose (this time it’s Daily Bugle reporter Jacob Conover) going to war against the Black Tarantula, a seemingly immortal international criminal looking to set up shop in New York City. In the middle of all this, DeFalco tried to develop a friendship between Spider-Man and the X-Man, an Age of Apocalypse hold-over from the X-Men books who was basically a young-and-hip version of Cable. DeFalco took some risks as well, like seemingly killing off Electro and resurrecting Doctor Octopus (who was murdered during the Clone Saga). However, the Spider-Books still suffered from stories being told over multiple books to tell expansive stories. The two biggest of these was the Spiderhunt and Identity Crisis storylines which saw Spider-Man being framed for a murder by Norman Osborn. Unable to effectively fight crime and clear his name as Spider-Man, Peter Parker convinces Mary Jane (who has been reduced to the role of complaining about Peter risking his life between taking psychology classes) to design new costume identites for him. Naturally, with these new identites, Spider-Man catches the real murderer, the Trapster, and clears his name.

Seeing things spiral out of control once again, the Marvel editors tried to meddle in things again and had John Byrne take over as writer to steer the Spider-Man books in a new direction. He started with the Gathering of the Five, which saw Norman Osborn seek ultimate power so he can complete his mad scheme that has been floundering in “mildly inconvenience Spider-Man” territory. It also tied up that final loose end, was the Parker baby still alive? Well that’s was resolved in the so-called Final Chapter. That story saw Norman Osborn go insane and become the Green Goblin once again. It turns out the “May” that Norman Osborn had prisoner was Peter’s Aunt May, who was SURPRISE! still alive.

In one of the most bloated diologue based exposition the Goblin explains that he replaced with a terminally ill actress who was enginreered to look like May down to a genetic level and take her place as a “final performance”. In the end, Norman Osborn was defeated (again), and another status quo of Spider-Man was returned, doting old Aunt May. Thankfully, not as in frail health as previous eras.

This also saw a reboot of the entire Spider-Man franchise, with titles being cancelled and others being rebooted. Amazing Spider-Man being one of them. The second volume of Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Byrne and… Well it suffered from the same sort of bullshit nonsense that dogged the title through the Clone Saga: It still tried to tell stories that crossed over multiple Spider-Books, and tried to change things.

One thing Byrne tried to do was retcon Spider-Mam’s origins with a spin-off book “Spider-Man: Chapter One” which saw Spider-Man’s origins retold from a more modern perspective but also include Doctor Octopus. Some of these plot elements were visited during Byrne’s run of Amazing Spider-Man. However, Marvel would later double back on this, retconning shit the way Byrne did was way too DC Comics and Spider-Man: Chapter One has since been delegated to happening in am alternate reality. The Byrne stories in Amazing Spider-Man that directly reference Chapter One? Well those are conveniently ignored for the most part so fuck you, I guess?

Also, Byrne set things up by having Peter retire from beong Spider-Man until someone else begins going out dressed as the titluar character. That was a lead in to introduce a new Spider-Woman, a teenaged girl named Mattie Franklin, because they couldn’t possibly had done something with the other two they had kicking around already.

This was another opportunity for the creative team try and do away with Peter’s marriage to Mary Jane. With Peter being Spider-Man again it allowed the writer to ratchet up the marital problems to a nearly insufferable level. Most the the time it ends with Peter and Mary Jane getting into the same circular arguments about Peter risking his life as Spider-Man only with the added bonus of the two of them both complaining they were too young to be married. Which, to be fair, the pair are roughly 25 in Marvel years and by today’s standards that is pretty young.

They also had Mary Jane quickly drop her interest in studying to be a psychologist in order to dive back into modelling. In case you thought she had short term memory over the last time what with a stalker trying to kidnap her then blacklisting her from the industrt, don’t eorry they bring back that old chestnut in spades. In this instance they decided she not only needed another stalker, but an utter lunatic that could reacher her anywhere and was getting violent and planting bombs and shit. This all culminates in…. Well you’ll have to go and see my retrospactive on Spider-Man in the 2000s if you want to get the skinny on that, but it’s annoying as fuck, that’s all I can tell you about it here.