What Did You Love About JMS's Amazing Spidey Run?

[Seto Kaiba]

I have to agree Doom crying was ridiculous. That guy has been responsible for mass genocides without shedding a tear, but the deaths of the people at the WTC hit his soft spot? Come on!

Maybe it was the sheer senselessness of it all? There was no goal or gain, just indescriminate loss of life. One thing about Doom is that most of what he does has purpose.......

.....but yeah, I agree that it was corny as hell regardless.

[MrV]

Back on topic!

One of the villains I loved from JMS's run was Shathra, a.k.a. Spider-Wasp/Sharon Keller.

She really endangered Peter and MJ's marriage with her gossip as Sharon Keller. She was a swift, fluid, visually amazing and formidable predator too. Literally a feral mama of hundreds of baby wasps. Plus, her design was creepy and awesome at once!

R.I.P. Spider-Wasp.

[E. Wilson]

Shanthra should have been a lot more interesting than she was, but her personality was essentially Morlun without the charm, and both of them had incredibly lame motivations. "Eat him." Uhm, 'kay....

Granted, not like Quake/Shaker/whoever the hell he was, Shade, or Gabriel Stacy were any great shakes either. The only villain JMS created that I thought had potential was Digger.

[GreenComixEnvy]

there were a lot of things i liked about his run, the ones that i like the most was his villain Morlun, Ezekiel, giving peters powers a mystical side in way of the totem stuff, giving peter the other powers, and making peter a teacher cuz i liked his interaction with the students and how he was helping them with their problems.

[romanwarrior84]

Morlun, Shathra, Aunt May knowing, Digger, the Marriage, and the some of the Spider-Totem stuff.

[Minerboh]

JMS did some pretty daring things during his time and ASM surely needed some strong injections those days. I really liked the first time Spidey faced Morlun (and the method he used in order to defeat him), i also liked the Ezekiel- Peter interaction. One of the most notable and welcomed aspects of the first half of JMS's run is that Romita jr redesighed Spidey quite a bit, making him more skinny in contradiction to the more musclular version he was using earlier.
I absolutely loved his aunt May turning her from an old pest into a really dynamic woman and one of Peter's greatest supporters (heck she even went face-to-face with Logan in one of the most hilarious scenes ever).
I also liked the whole mystical approch to Spidey's powers and the future Spider-Man plot. To bad it remained in limbo though.
Lastly i need to say what i didn't liked during this run-the covers. I know it was a common thing at Marvel to depict the marvel characters in various poses during that time on the covers but i really detested them. They were completely unattractive.

[Chris S.]

Its funny how people enjoyed JMS's villains. As I said earlier, I loved JMS's run and think he is one of the best ASM writers. However, I've never cared for his villains. I never felt like they had any real character. They all were just boring to me. Most of them were also sort of one and done villains.

[MrV]

One of the BEST moments in Spider-Man's history, was the now non-canon () talk he had with Aunt May after she discovered his powers, courtesy of JMS.

That was perhaps the best dialogue exchange I have yet to read in a comic book.

[McFarlane's Green Hulk]

Almost everything. This run, Stern's, and Ultimate Spidey are a toss up for my favorite. Some great things:

MJ and Aunt May felt like real people, not caricatures like they so often are portrayed
The dialogue
The totem stuff wasn't a retcon, but a neat possibility that didn't take away anything from the origin
The humor
The teaching job
The idea that anything could happen, and that changes would stick (until he was off the title, anyhow)

But I mainly love it because the run had balls. Aunt May finding out the secret, Spidey's totem powers, etc. Even Sins Past. A lot of people hate it because Gwen seemed "out of character," but how many people do things out of character in real life?

It's too bad they played it safe with BND for that first year- going back to the old status quo, basically ignoring everything from JMS, etc. Sure, we got new characters, including a love interest that most fans didn't like, but the stories just felt old. Lucikly the book has been great again since #600.

Pretty much summed up my like for the run. Although I had to drop it for budgetary reasons after "Sins Past", I really enjoyed everything that was done.

[Chris S.]

One of the BEST moments in Spider-Man's history, was the now non-canon () talk he had with Aunt May after she discovered his powers, courtesy of JMS.

Technically, didn't that still happen? All that has changed is the marriage, right? It just happens that there is a magical spell that makes it so Aunt May doesn't remember the conversation.

[MrV]

Technically, didn't that still happen? All that has changed is the marriage, right? It just happens that there is a magical spell that makes it so Aunt May doesn't remember the conversation.

I hope she eventually finds out Peter's secret and remembers that one specific conversation. Although I doubt it since she moved away.

It feels wrong to have retconned away everything JMS did. Like all his hard work amounted to nothing new for the mythos and was nothing more than a dream.

If May's conversation still happened, then what happened to Peter's totem powers? How did he lose them?

I bet the only person who remembers the marriage even after Mephisto altered the timeline is MJ. Time travel at Earth-616 is so shitty, they seriously need to bring over the Argiopes from Earth-1610.

The Argiopes are arachnid entities that devour anyone who tries to alter the timeline. Like moderators in a sense.

[z1co80]

Just bought the five Ultimate Collection volumes and can't wait to get started.

Something tells me i'll be revisiting this thread with to talk about how awesome it was.

[Leocomix]

Back then I had stopped reading mainstream Marvel (only Marvel Knights deserved reading). JMS brought a quality of writing that I had only seen on Vertigo titles. It wasn't really Lee's character but it was a very good alternative. I also liked the acknowledgment that his philosophy was self-destructive and would lead him into a dead end.

[Chris S.]

I hope she eventually finds out Peter's secret and remembers that one specific conversation. Although I doubt it since she moved away.

It feels wrong to have retconned away everything JMS did. Like all his hard work amounted to nothing new for the mythos and was nothing more than a dream.

If May's conversation still happened, then what happened to Peter's totem powers? How did he lose them?

I bet the only person who remembers the marriage even after Mephisto altered the timeline is MJ. Time travel at Earth-616 is so shitty, they seriously need to bring over the Argiopes from Earth-1610.

The Argiopes are arachnid entities that devour anyone who tries to alter the timeline. Like moderators in a sense.

Not to get totally off track, but I think the totem powers have been alluded to. I believe I saw a post around here documenting it. Scarlet Spider currently has some of those powers. The whole retcon thing did make a mess of things.

JMS did some things with Aunt May that were incredible. She was a character I wish had never come back from the dead (especially after how good 400 was) but JMS changed all that.

He may not have had a huge supporting cast, something people call him on, but he used the two key characters in Peter's life better than anyone ever had or has thus far.

[MrV]

Not to get totally off track, but I think the totem powers have been alluded to. I believe I saw a post around here documenting it. Scarlet Spider currently has some of those powers. The whole retcon thing did make a mess of things.

That would be Spider-Island and Grim Hunt. In both stories you see Kaine using totem powers and Madame Web making allusions to the JMS era and the spider deity from The Other. It still doesn't explain how those powers went from Peter to Kaine though. Bloody mess.