Read Captain America #12 (really love the big gatefold covers on the books that they were doing around this time)

So Doom has been going backwards in time on numerous occasions to try and stop Galactus from devouring Earth. This eventually leads to the Avengers and the FF cooperating with Surfer by giving him all of their weapons and the Ultimate Nullifier to beat the crap out of the "Shark of the Spaceways" and it works. Thought it was a decent issue

You MONSTER!

So, carrying on with my re-read of J. Michael Straczynski's run on Amazing Spider-Man, I recently read issues #43–56 (or #484–497 in the old legacy numbering)…




ASM #43 kicks off a three-part tale in which Peter Parker decides to sort out his relationship with his estranged wife Mary Jane. He travels to Hollywood (with Aunt May), where MJ is shooting a corny superhero movie, in an attempt to rescue their marriage. Concurrently, Doctor Octopus has his robot arm technology stolen by a corrupt L.A. businessman named Mr. Carlyle. This young pretender embarks on an L.A. crime spree with the stolen tech, with Doc Ock in hot pursuit, setting the scene for a battle royale between the pair that spills over into – you guessed it – the movie studio where MJ and May are.

Actually, there is a really neat moment in issue #45 where Aunt May and Otto Octavius come face-to-face for the first time in years…




As a big fan of the utterly ridiculous – but oh-so-enjoyable storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #130 and #131, in which May and Doc Ock almost marry – this brief and unexpected reunion was a joy to see.

Overall, this story arc was fun, with plenty of bone-crunching action, but I couldn't help feeling that it was a bit of a "by the numbers" Doc Ock/Spider-Man story.

Straczynski follows this with a continuation of the on-going "Spider Totem" sub-plot in which a predatory Spider-Wasp deity named Shathra comes to New York to kill our hero, having become aware of him during his recent Dr. Strange-assisted trip to the astral plane. Shathra relentlessly pursues Spidey across town, before Ezekiel – who Peter believed to be dead – reappears to rescues him by whisking him away to Africa. When Shathra inevitably turns up in Africa, Peter and Ezekiel lure her into a trap in an ancient temple dedicated to the worship of the spider god and she is defeated.

Afterwards, Ezekiel explains that although Peter's powers are likely science based, the radioactive spider that gave him his powers was being guided by mystical totemic forces, which Peter doesn't really believe. Ezekiel also warns Spidey that another, worse mystical bad guy will be coming after him soon because these things come in threes (apparently!).

This continuation of the Spider Totem plot was enjoyable enough, but it did feel a little bit like a retread of Spidey's earlier encounter with Morlun some issues back. Still, Shathra is a fairly scary foe and we learned more about the whole Spider Totem concept, including a foreboding hint that something big and supernatural has been set in motion, causing all these other-dimensional baddies to suddenly start hunting Peter.

This arc is followed by a brief storyline where Peter meets up with MJ at Denver airport, just as Doctor Doom arrives to board a diplomatic flight and is attacked by Latverian freedom fighters. As it happens, Steve Rogers/Captain America is at the airport too and he and Spidey find themselves in the bizarre position of having to protect Doom from his would-be assassins. This was a fun, if slightly lightweight, little story, but it gave Peter and MJ a chance to straighten out their marriage and get back together again. It's a sweet little diversion to the larger on-going Straczynski plot…a narrative palette cleanser, if you will.

Next up is one of my favourite story arcs from the Straczynski run, in which a government gamma bomb test in the Nevada desert reanimates the corpses of a long-dead gang of 1950s Maggia dons into a single Hulk-like entity named Digger. It's preposterous, science-based comic book nonsense, of course, but I really like the concept. There's plenty of action in this arc, but it's the more reflective moments that really provides the meat, as the aged Maggia boss Morris Forelli (who Digger is out to kill) reflects on his past misdeeds. Likewise, as Peter and MJ continue to work out their relationship, Straczynski does an excellent job of not rushing this and portraying the pair in a very moving and realistic way; Peter and MJ have to thoroughly discuss their romantic problems in a very adult fashion, which is something of a rarity in superhero comics.

The next story centres around Peter taking an interest in the homelife of one of his students. The student in question is a teenage girl named Melissa who runs into gang-related trouble after her brother Josh is apprehended by Spider-Man and turned in to the cops. Spidey attempts to make things right by locating Josh, who has recently been discharged from prison, but Ezekiel pops up again, having taken the boy under his wing in an effort to reform him. Problem is, the whole scenario – and especially Ezekiel's role in trying to rehabilitate recently released young criminals – just didn't really ring true or seem very logical.

All in all, this was another enjoyable chunk of Straczynski's run on Spidey, but it was probably a slight come down from the awesomeness of his first 10 or so issues. The art team of John Romita Jr. on pencils and Scott Hannah on inks continues to produce some really nice work. Romita Jr's "blocky" art style has a slightly Kirby-esque quality to it, I think, but Hannah's inks give his work a nicely fluid and lithe finish. Romita also really excels here at cleverly expressing the emotions of various characters with some deft and understated facial expressions.

Agreed. Amazing Spider-Man #66 is a fantastic issue. I love the Silver Age ridiculousness of ol' Fishbowl Head's talking to himself for the first three pages or so, while he stands over his minature tabletop model of an amusement park where he will soon transport Peter via a psychedelic electric gun! Peter's "miniture adventures" dodging death in the fun park -- which is basically just an LSD hallucination -- is great fun and John Romita's art is fantastic in these sequences. The transition scenes where Spidey finally realises it's all an illusion and breaks through the trick to face off against Mysterio at proper size are really cleverly rendered too.

There are some nice romantic moments in this issue between Peter and Gwen too, if memory serves. Isn't it here that they both kinda admit that they really love each other?

And I believe this is the last appearance of Quentin Beck as Mysterio until the late '70s too.

I finished reading Epic Collection: Amazing Spider-Man Vol 4 which collects Amazing Spider-Man #53-67, the two issues of the Spectacular Spider-Man 1968 magazine, and a couple of short stories from Not Brand Echh. Plenty of goofiness and Peter acting kinda stupid and I got pretty sick of Aunt May. I liked the stories with Kingpin, Mysterio, and the Green Goblin, and the Not Brand Echh stories are fun. The best things are the art and Stan Lee's humor. Not just Spidey's dialogue, but the captions and even the credits on the splash page. Sometimes captions are almost unnecessary, but Stan Lee's captions are always worth reading. Obviously, the John Romita art is great and I liked the banter between Peter, Gwen, and Mary Jane. Having finally read some Gwen Stacy issues makes me feel the impact of her eventual death a lot more, since I'd read virtually nothing with her in it before this. Also, it's cool to see where the scene in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie with Norman Osborne inviting Peter and friends to dinner while he knows Peter's secret identity came from.

Hard Boiled Angel 1: Blue Angel
Hyun Se Lee, 2004 (Eng. translation by Keo Melvin Lee)

Lee Hyun-se is apparently considered one of Korea’s top comics (or manhwa) artists and creators. This volume collects four stories that originally appeared in 1994, and feature a recurring character named Jiran Ha, a tough-as-nails female homicide detective who lives and works in a large, unnamed Korean city. As per the title, these are hard-boiled detective stories, albeit with a healthy dose of noir. The first story, “Autumn of a Man” sees Detective Ha dealing with a creepy, middle-aged stalker who ends up being politically well-connected; in the second story, “Target,” Ha agrees to tail a middle-aged businessman as a favor to his much younger wife –an old high-school acquaintance of Ha's. This is the odd one of the lot, in that there’s no violence and it even has a sort of innocuous, almost happy end; the third story, “Ah Voh Puc, the Lord of Hell,” revolves around some kind of conspiracy or cult of killers who commit murders that they try to stage as accidental deaths, and Ha’s ex-flame, a former cop who just returned to Korea after spending a few years in the US, is possibly involved; the fourth story, “Les Enfants Terribles,” involves juvenile delinquency among other things, as Ha has to deal with violent gangs of teenagers while also trying to convince the runaway son of her former high school teacher to go back home.

(Detective Ha taking a sexist older colleague down a peg)
I quite like the art; it alternates from looking like dynamic versions of Patrick Nagel posters to an almost humor comic style, sometimes from one panel to the next. Overall, though, I found the stories solid but not spectacular – there’s nothing here that would make me actively seek out the follow-up volumes (of which I think two or three more were published in English translation).