The Spot Kicks Spidey's Butt

[mrosa]

The Spot nowadays is considered a joke (and he was never meant to be a very serious villain anyway) but the first time he fought Spider-Man he actually defeated the web-crawler. This is how it happened:

After gaining powers from a polka-dotted dimension, the Spot, a scientist working for the Kingpin, decides to test his powers on Spider-Man:



Admittedly, at first he didn't impress Spider-Man:




But the Spot made him rue his arrogance!






And from that day forth no one ever laughed at The Spot again! (until next issue.)

(taken from Spectacular Spider-Man #99)

Comments

[silverhammerman]

Wow, seems like Black Cat's "luck" powers were a little overpowered.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about that. How do bullets have bad luck?

[silicondream]

"It was a day like any other day when I first left the chamber and tasted the freedom of open air. I dreamed of the millisecond when I would strike my target dead-on, tearing a perfect hole through the aorta, earning the admiration and envy of the other bullets. Who could have guessed that I would shortly deflect off several trillion freakishly-clustered air molecules and a pigeon returning from Afghanistan with a metal plate in its head, before decaying into a previously unknown form of hyper-stable matter and suffering a total existence failure? Bad day, .45, bad day."

[icon_uk]

The bullets don't, but the person shooting at her can, by choosing bullets which were faulty to fire at her.

Probability and luck powers can be a pain to quantify since they are, by their nature, an exception to the norm.

Byrne had Wanda's power influence objects retroactively through time. So when they tested her using her powers on a girder, it snapped in two because of fault lines and microfractures, and when they checked their records the fault lines and microfractures had suddenly always been there, even though they had documentary evidence that prior to the hex being cast the girder was fine.

[dewinged]

I always thought the Spot got a bad rep. Sure, he looks goofy, but those powers of his could be absolutely devestating when written right.

[mrosa]

He doesn't look goofy! The guy's a pure comic book design! No other medium could come up with something this marvellous and make it work.

[dewinged]

I was going by the usual opinion about his look. I kinda like it. :)

[sleepymax]

Totally agree. It's a shame we don't get simple designs like this anymore.

[fungo_squiggly]

Don't "harness" the Kingpin again?

Also, if the Spot had been armed with, say, a knife rather than wimpy scientist punches, Peter would pretty much be dead right now.

[icon_uk]

Don't "harness" the Kingpin again?

It is a rather odd mental image isn't it?

[crinos]

I just got a weird mental image of the Kingpin in that hanging leather harness set up the German Dominatrix form Phantasmagoria 2 set up for Curtis. Only with the Kingpin in it.

[angelophile]

Quick, call Chris Claremont!

[amaniwolf]

Maybe he meant harass?

[crinos]

That's just crazy talk.

[lucky_gamble]

Oh man that dialogue

[thanekos]

Oh sure, round one, but rounds two and on?

[akodo_rokku]

Succulent.

Little.

Bod.

[rainspirit]

I KNOW. I was like... "Really, Cat?"

[q99]

It strikes me as odd that someone with teleportation powers could be considered a 'joke' villain. Sure, not the most serious one, but the powers are so useful that he can still provide a regular quandary and get stuff done despite normal defenses- a teleporter is a foe that *needs* a super response.

[drmcninja]

It's one of the interesting things about Necrosha that I remember, usually hidden behind the vicious mauling of Blink's character. They had her killing people with teleportation, just teleporting the flesh off of people's bones and such. Its an interesting application of the power I'm surprised that we don't see more of it. There are more teleporters who are capable than there aren't, I think.

[q99]

Oh, Blink can do some *crazy* stuff with her powers. Spot shouldn't be able to do a lot of it (since he makes portals, rather than being able to grab bits), but the simple ability to go from one place to another is *very* helpful.

He was pretty effective in MODOK's 11 if I remember right.

[q99]

Even aside from that kind of stuff (and the various versions of Blink are *very* good at that kind of thing), simply being able to move stuff from one place to another is incredible useful. Keep a goon squad at a nearby location, deploy if needed. Get to then escape from a scene very quickly. And so on.

Even the least powerful teleporter is going to be really hard to catch.

[silicondream]

It's the same with phasers. They always lose by getting tagged when they solidify to throw a punch, but they shouldn't have to. Give Shadowcat or Phantom Girl a long pole and a firearm and they could take out 90% of superpeople without any risk to themselves; even the invulnerable guys usually take damage from having stuff phased into them.

[ensiform]

A sweet story, I thought. Fun. Very throw-back style art. Homage to Ditko, almost. Spidey's making some somewhat bizarre poses.. But I like it.

The writing itself, though. Ugh. Al Milgrom never met a speech bubble he couldn't fill to bursting. Was the guy being paid by the word? "Who would have thought that I, once a lowly etc etc blah blah exposition.... [time passes] ...yes, that was quite a tale. Too bad no one was around to hear it, so I must resort to speechifying to myself."

[mrosa]

With all the speech bubbles going on, the art still manages to flow clearer and to be more expressive than so many of our image-oriented modern comics. For me this is an excellent mix of pictures and words.

[wizardru]

As like as not, that was an editorial requirement. Shooter was pushing the 'every issue is someone's first' pretty heavily at this time. And while the dialogue is a bit much, you DO know everything you need to follow along, regardless of whether or not you had the previous issue or not.

That may seem unnecessary or redundant, but in the days when comic shops weren't located in a lot of places and newsstand sales were still a real thing, this was something of a godsend. The one page summaries that Marvel has done in recent years serve that function, nowadays.

[randyripoff]

It was the days before "decompressed storytelling" when a comic took longer than five minutes to read.

[ensiform]

Decompression has nothing whatsoever to do with poor dialogue and clunky exposition-rich dialogue. There are plenty of ways to catch a reader up without being so obvious and stilted about it.