Saturday, November 5, 2022

READING THE CLASSICS: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #245



 Published on October 1st, 1983

    All of these issues of 1983's The Amazing Spider-Man have been published on the 1st of the month. Was there not a new comic book day in 1983? That's kind of weird that books would just randomly be published on different days of the week, right? I do remember new comic book day used to be on Friday back in the early 90's when I started buying comics. I'm not sure when they changed it to Wednesdays. Now DC books come out on Tuesday. Anyway, the cover to the issue has Spider-Man unmasking The Hobgoblin. He does...but it's kind of a trick. Lefty Donovan, a local criminal working for The Hobgoblin, is hypnotized by The Hobgoblin and dresses up as him and goes to Times Square to cause havoc. Spider-Man saves the day and unmasks The Hobgoblin but realizes that Lefty isn't the real one. Then The Hobgoblin, working from a remote lab, drives The Hobgoblin's glider into a building, killing Lefty Donovan. This was a great issue. I wonder if Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie took their Green Goblin Times Square battle from this issue. Although I'm sure there's been plenty of Times Square battles in this book before and after this. Before the big battle, Peter gets set up at a dinner with Mary Jane. Peter, in a thought balloon, mentions Mary Jane had previously turned his marriage proposal down. Really? When did that happen? Sadly, the saga of will Peter and Mary Jane get together is still up in the air these days. They've been together and been apart countless times, so much that's it gotten extremely ridiculous. If Marvel had any balls, they would've been married with kids by now. That would have given the book a ton of potential storylines...but Marvel just wants to keep Peter in the ageless, gray zone of life. One reason this book used to be stellar was that it seemed to actually be a real life, real time soap opera chronicle but now it just seems frozen in time. But alas, we can always go back and revel in the glory days by reading issues like this. ***1/2

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