Wednesday, March 6, 2013

When Love Fails, Disembodied Floating Heads (tm!) will Follow....



Amazing Spider-Man #275 is something of a landmark because... well, 275 is kind of a round number, so there you go.

Here we see Flash's affair with Betty Brandt Leeds come to its inevitable conclusion.  Flash's relationship with Sha Shan really wasn't developed so much in Amazing Spider-Man (I think it played out more in the companion book Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man), so I was rather surprised to see it happen in these pages.  Thusly:



I've never understood the deal with autographed photographs.  I was around 18 when this was published, and I had never seen this in real life.  I mean, you'd sign the back of a school picture if you gave one to a friend, but you sure didn't act like you were Cary Effin' Grant and write your smooth dialogue on the front like that.  Maybe it was a New York thing.  You Yankees do all kinds of stuff I don't get.

Anyway, Pete is considering hanging up the webs.  Again.


NO, MARY JANE! DON'T ASK HIM TO TELL HIS ORIGIN!  HE DOES IT ALL THE...

And just as we had feared yesterday, we get the entire origin story from Amazing Fantasy #15 reprinted again.  This issue was touted as a "37 page story" and cost you an extra fifty cents, which was a pretty decent markup considering comics were only seventy-five cents back in the day, but eleven of those pages were the reprint.  So this was kind of a rip, considering how many times you've read Spidey's origin already.  I sure don't want to pay a 66% markup on a comic to read it again.  By today's standards, that would be at least a couple of bucks, and... 

Hold on.

Wheatcakes!


WHEATCAKES!

That still doesn't excuse the reprint, but you know how I feel about wheatcakes.

Anyway, Flash is a jerk and having an appropriately terrible time, complete with Disembodied Floating Heads! (tm!)


And the only way to deal with that is with a Random Sucker Punch (tm!) on an inexplicably blonde Ned Leeds:


Flash also punched his girlfriend earlier that issue.  I didn't reprint the panels because I didn't want anyone to think I found the domestic violence depicted therein funny.  Flash is a jerk.  But anybody who wants you to call him "Flash" is giving you fair warning of what you can expect.

Meanwhile, Sha Shan is having the worst day ever when she is kidnapped and insulted:



Well..... Touche! (tm!)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I LOVE the "Signed picture" thing. Lots of Superman comics had that in the 60s; you'd have Lois Lane's apartment, and there are SIGNED pictures of her CO-WORKERS because, you know, that's what NORMAL people do -- ha ha!!!!

Smurfswacker said...

"You'll eat my fist, jerk!" ?????

Thanos6 said...

The original Hobgoblin: one of my favorite villains, not least because of perfect lines like that.