Cap to Spidey: "We don't want you in the Avengers!"

[mrosa]

Hate to post again so soon, but Stern's Avengers run is such a treasure-trove of great moments!

Here's Spider-Man trying to get into the Avengers. First some leisure time at the mansion:






And in another thread I was saying Spider-Man would never join the Avengers for the money, but:



And then he sees the Quinjet leave, shoots a web and has an adventure with the Avengers, because things happened in comics back then!

Comments

[insolent_one]

Jarvis, you lucky SOB...

[arilou_skiff]

Ah, Stern's run. When i was a kid these were the comics I was reading, yeah, sure, Lee & Ditko was seminal, but these were the comics I read first. (admittedly with a few years lag for translation into swedish)

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

And in another thread I was saying Spider-Man would never join the Avengers for the money

I don't know why that would surprise anyone, since one of the first things he did as Spider-Man was try to join the Fantastic Four for the money. He did get better at evading security in the interim, though.

That was around the first time that he was asked to join The Avengers. It didn't work out then, either.

[starwolf_oakley]

Spider-Man is... weird about money. He first wanted to use his powers to make money to pay back May and Ben for taking care of him. This indirectly leads to Ben getting killed so Spider-Man decided to become a crime fighter and make some money taking pictures of himself fighting crime. And selling those pictures to Jonah Jameson, a jackass who hates Spider-Man since he really hates himself for only wanting to make money.

Told you it was weird.

[mommy]

I'm distracted by the idea that the Avengers Mansion has metal tentacles. Not that any other kind of tentacle would be any better, but still. Metal tentacles!

[icon_uk]

They crop up rather a lot, including the time Marvel Boy (The Vance Astro one) tried to join up, just before he joined the New Warriors IIRC.

[mastermahan]

Metal tentacles *and* a naked She-Hulk! So much potential for shenanigans!

[bruinsfan]

That Jen, always such a shy, demure wallflower...

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I thought maybe Doc Ock had busted in.

[silverhammerman]

I like this, I like it a lot. I always like when they show just how uncannily competent Spidey really is, and I like that he points out that even though he's younger than the Avengers he's still been fighting crime for longer than most of them, and gotten quite good at it.
I enjoy seeing Spidey strapped for cash too, admittedly it can lead to a lot of cheesy moments where Peter has to pawn his microscope to pay for Aunt May's medicine and insipid stuff like that, but it also highlighted how selfless he had to be to do what he was doing. Yeah, he'd love to be on the Avengers and get paid to be Spider-Man, but he'd do it even without the money, even at the expense of his personal life, because he's good guy.
Other things I like about these pages:
Heroes meet and team up without fighting pointlessly.
Jeez, look at how much dialogue they get into these pages. It might be a bit clunky, but it really moves the story along instead of wasting half the issue on clipped dialogue and beat panels as padding, with them only actually going off to do hero stuff at the end of the issue.
I love Jarvis' face their. Dude just looks so uncomfortable serving this ridiculously hot, naked, green woman.
That six member limit is hella arbitrary, and pretty laughable in retrospect.
And finally, in what may sound petty and odd, I really like the way Spider-Man eyes are drawn here. A lot of artists these days drawn them as really huge and expressive (for example, Bagley's Ultimate Spider-Man) but I much prefer them like this. The smaller eyes help to make Spidey look a lot more mature and I like that them being non-expressive makes it hard to see what he's thinking, which is just a little bit creepy to other people. It provides at least a bit of explanation for which people found Spidey so unnerving and untrustworthy back in the day.

Agree 100%

[steverodgers5]

Loved these issues. And yeah, I prefer the eyes that way too. To the extent that I'm not enthused by the news that they're enlarging the eyes on the suit for the Amazing Spiderman sequel. Dammit, that wasn't the type of costume redesign I was looking for! I really don't want to be seeing the 90es look for Spidey onscreen.

[mrosa]

Jeez, look at how much dialogue they get into these pages. It might be a bit clunky, but it really moves the story along instead of wasting half the issue on clipped dialogue and beat panels as padding, with them only actually going off to do hero stuff at the end of the issue.

I don't find it clunky at all. The art is clear and the speech balloons are ordered in a way that tells the eyes where to look next.

The main difference I see between this art and today's is the type of shot. To borrow from cinema, old comics were drawn with medium and long shots; nowadays artists use close-up shots a lot. Watchmen was mainly drawn in long shots, which is why each panel contained so much. No one needs to see a head shot of Cap all the time, occupying one fifth of the page, it's just ridiculous.

Another difference is the backgrounds. Comics then only painted backgrounds when it was needed; the ones in these pages aren't very detailed because, well, who cares what the Avengers Mansion's living room looks like? But every comic book nowadays is obsessed with a wide, heavily-detailed, painstakingly-rendered shot of backgrounds, and that of course takes space. It doesn't add shit to the story, of course, but try and tell these prima-donnas they're here to draw comics and not posters.

[silverhammerman]

I don't mean to call thesepages bad or anything, it's just that it's way more words per page than we're really used to seeing nowadays. It's not bad by any means, and I actually like it this way, but it's kind of jarring to see just how different it is from the way dialogue is done now.
I never noticed about the backgrounds though, I have seen that older comics use far less closeups and generally drew things in a different way, but somehow the lack of backgrounds never really jumped out at me. I guess that just goes to show how little I actually care about the painstakingly levels of detail we see today.

[bardbrain]

It's less that today's artists are prima donnas.

It's more that a single issue will net them less than $5k from a publisher... and more like around $3k for a lot of people. After putting in maybe 400 hours of skilled work. That's roughly speaking, minimum wage.

And then art collectors will frequently pay $10k-$100k for the 22 pages of original art from a name artist. But only if the backgrounds are detailed.

The main reason many artists work for publishers at all is to give their work more resale value. The wages are not high enough to make storytelling the big priority for people who are an established name. So they cut corners, focus on storytelling for the love (in spite of it cutting into their income), or wind up tailoring their work for the resale market, since that's what pays for Little Suzie's college education.

[crinos]

To be fair, it looks like Spidey didn't really make the best first impression.

I mean he breaks in, makes himself a hammock, and generally acts like a smug jackass.

Was there something up with Spidey in this story? Cause he seems to be acting a little out character here.

[silverhammerman]

Well storming their base is relatively standard for superheroic introductions, and I think it's a little more understandable here since to my knowledge there wasn't quite as much of a well developed superhero "community".
And yeah, he's in full cocksure Spider-Mockery mode, which might be great for infuriating the Rhino when you're trying to stop a bank robbery, but it's definitely terrible for introducing yourself to someone. I'd chalk his acting that way up to him being nervous about approaching the Avengers for membership, since his jokes have been acknowledged as a defense mechanism.

[sir_razorback]

I hate it when they make money look less like a payroll and more like.. well.. something just handed out? Just rubs me the wrong way I guess, but hey, chalk it up to the writing of the times. It felt weird more often than not. A thousand a week for risking your life to help make the world safer vs threats like alien invasions and killer robots*? Shouldn't be anything skeevy about that at all.





*Pym-bots not included, that's quality control.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Funny... when he finally did become an Avenger, I thought he was reluctant and all "I don't do well with others"?

[korvar]

That comes up in the issue, actually.

[servant_iskandar]

That kind of slow burn was a good move. Stern got the ball rolling, but they kept the pace purposefully slow: it was a nice way to keep people guessing, enough that when Peter finally attained reserve (!) status it actually felt like a big deal.

Also, Al Milgrom! One of the Marvel workhorses back in the day,