Amazing Spider-Man #16

[cyberghostface]

 

Comments

[zachbeacon]

It can't be worse than the (many) times he's worked alongside murders.

Or that time he turned into a monster and ate a guy.

Or siding with the bad guys (at first) in Civil War.

Or a literal deal with the devil.

(I swear, the only reason people hold JMS in such high regard is he wrote some memorable gag scenes and the stuff that came after makes it look better)

Or siding with the bad guys in Civil War 2.

Or working for Norman.


I miss classic Spider-Man...though even then you had some rage issues, accidental manslaughter, and implied adultery.

(Marvel would never allow it but it would be VERY funny to me if Ned's kid were actually Peter's kid.)

[cyberghostface]

“ (I swear, the only reason people hold JMS in such high regard is he wrote some memorable gag scenes and the stuff that came after makes it look better”

I mean most of those examples weren’t his fault, they were either mandated by Joey Q or part of a crossover event.

[numeronone]

I mean...when JMS took over the bar was so low that Leech and Artie were using it as a baseball bat in the Morlocks' summer picnic.

Sure, the Morlun arc wasn't perfect. But it was...miles and miles better than "Oh no! MJ has a stalker! Oh no! The stalker killed her in a plane crash! OH NO! HE KIDNAPPED HER BEFORE THE CRASH THE STALKER IS JUST A WEIRD PSYCHIC MUTANT WHO THINKS HE'S PETER, HE KILLED A PLANE FULL OF PEOPLE FOR NO REASON, AND THE READERS HAVE NO INVESTMENT IN HIM AT ALL, MAKING THE WHOLE THING POINTLESS"

[zachbeacon]

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.

[cyberghostface]

I prefer Jenkins to JMS but JMS was the one who gave the flagship title and status quo an overhaul. Jenkins had some stinkers at the end of his run as well, too.

And again most of the crap at the end of JMS’s run were out of his control. That was Quesada’s midlife crisis coming home to roost. JMS didn’t even want his name on the final arc.

[zachbeacon]

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.