Released on March 25th, 2020
When I was in Florida last month I was checking out a website for a comic book store that does a weekly highlights list of things coming out that week. I'm not sure if this comic book store just hates modern comics or if it just tells you something about the quality of modern comics...but their weekly list seems to mostly be reprints or new editions of old material. Well that week they recommended a new Spider-Man trade paperback that was reprinting some of the old, classic Stan Lee era Spider-Man books and it featured a story line about an ancient tablet. I was on vacation in Florida so I figured it'd be something to read at night so I downloaded it, read it, and loved it. For some reason I'd always remembered the old Stan Lee Spider-Man books as being pretty boring. One particular example is the fact that the infamous death of Gwen Stacey and Norman Osbourne story line didn't even happen until Stan Lee left the book (and apparently he was in France and so couldn't prevent it from happening). Meaning he was pretty much just doing safe, fun, superhero stuff. Boring, right! Well the ancient tablet story line, while pedestrian, is actually a very entertaining read. It went from The Amazing Spider-Man #68 to #75. Parker was still working at The Bugle and dating Gwen Stacey. The Lizard and The Kingpin made appearances. It was truly peak Spider-Man. The actual plot of the tablet was that it was an ancient artifact that can give people powers. Everyone wants it, and eventually a mob boss gets Curt Conners, aka The Lizard, to crack the code of it. The mob boss drinks a potion from a recipe deciphered off of the tablet and it gives him youth...he turns young and strong but the catch is it makes him younger and younger until he turns into a baby and then disappears into nothing. I think the tablet came back again somewhere because in this current run of The Amazing Spider-Man they mention Doctor Strange breaking up the tablet and banishing it to another dimension. Well it's back for whatever reason...maybe writer Nick Spencer is simply out of ideas? Spider-Man and his roommate/sidekick, Boomerang, are attempting to get the tablet back together for some reason and in this issue, #42, they have to fight the monster Grog, who is the protector of a piece of the tablet. Whew. This issue is mostly the backstory of Grog, though, which, while somewhat touching, sad, and interesting, is completely out of place in a Spider-Man book (just have Parker fight with J. Jonah Jameson, make jokes, and fight villains like The Vulture...it's not hard to plot this book). I often said that it was time for writer Dan Slott to get off this book (he wrote it for ten years), but I guess I should have been careful what I wished for. It's coming up on two years with Nick Spencer writing Amazing and so far it's been a total disappointment. He's had one new, big bad lurking in the shadows for awhile (Kindred) but that plot so far hasn't gone anywhere. The rest of the book has been all over the map and not in a good way. It's just not interesting or exciting at all. The one shining light in this mess has been artist Ryan Ottley, who used to draw Invincible. This book is bi-monthly, though, which means Ottley seems to rarely be around, although he knocked it out of the park yet again on this issue. I'm not entirely sure who's left to take over this book and make it great again. I don't think it's that hard...is it? But when we're only being entertained by Spider-Man books written by Stan Lee fifty plus years ago these days...that's a problem. *1/2
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