zachbeacon: (Default)

[personal profile] zachbeacon 2022-12-31 11:21 pm (UTC)(link)
Sure the Byrne/Mackie reboot of three years before was bad (but is it any worse than what we have now?) but Jenkins had already been doing Spider-Man for a year so the narrative that JMS came along and "saved" Spider-Man falls apart even if you don't account for the second half of the JMS run being a trash fire.

Though, yeah, Peter's behavior at the end of the Stalker arc nearly made the list. I'm reasonably sure being a horny creep to his traumatized wife and driving her away is also worse than the big secret.
zachbeacon: (Default)

[personal profile] zachbeacon 2023-01-01 01:02 am (UTC)(link)
Mostly I just reject the idea that the focus should be on Amazing. The last time Amazing was consistently good (post Clone Saga, pre-reboot DeFalco) it was still arguably the weakest of the Spider-Man books.

Plus, you miss out on most of the work by writers like Chip Zdarsky, PAD, Busiek, Dezago, DeMatteis, ect and experiments like Tangled Web (which admittedly also dropped off a lot in the second half)

(Not to mention all the great Slott stories we got when he was auditioning for the job … as opposed to the mixed bag we got from BND onward)

Yeah, both JMS and Jenkins had to endure a lot of editorial meddling in the second half of their runs but Jenkins still managed to tell some solid stories despite being forced to write for the trade and JMS just seems to have stopped trying after Ezekiel. I think Joe Q has done a LOT of damage to Spider-Man but the whole “this isn’t what JMS planned” narrative ignores that a lot of the original JMS plans for stuff like Sins Past and OMD sound even worse than what we got.

Not sure who to blame for The Other but I am fond of pointing out that Jenkins had already told a story where Peter turns into a monster and then dies giving birth to a version of himself with slightly different powers in a Disassembled tie-in a year before.