Product Description: Spider-Man is as amazing as ever against adversarial alumni like the Lizard and the Kingpin, as well as up-and-coming enemies such as Stegron and Jigsaw - with the lesser-known larcenies of the Big Wheel and the Spider-Squad to fill his spare time! Featuring the first appearances of Rocket Racer and Will O'the Wisp! Forgotten chapters from the Green Goblin legacy and the Clone Saga! Spider-Man's origin and Peter Parker's college graduation! And J. Jonah Jameson at his best and worst! Guest-starring the Punisher, Nova the Human Rocket, the Human Torch and the X-Men! Collects Amazing Spider-Man #161-185 & Annual #11, Giant-Size Spider-Man #6 and Nova #12.
Poor Story-Telling ^ I finished volume 8 last night. I think this is the beginning of the poor story-telling.
Outside of one saga involving the Green Goblin, the other stories were a far cry from the writing of Stan Lee.
The comics included in Essential Spider-Man vol. 8 are:
...And The Nightcrawler Came Prowling, Prowling Let The Punisher Fit The Crime! All The Kingpin's Men! (part 1) Deadline! (part 2) Stegron Stalks the City! (part 1) War of the Reptile-Men! (part 2) ...Stalked By The Spider-Slayer! Murder On The Wind! Confrontation Madness is All in the Mind! Photon Is Another Name For...? The Fiend From The Fire! If You Can't Stand The Heat...! The Hitman's Back in Town! (part 1) Big Apple Battleground! (part 2) He Who Laughs Last..! (part 1) Goblin In The Middle (part 2) Green Grows The Goblin! (part 3) The Goblin's Always Greener...! (part 4) Who Was That Goblin I Saw You With? (part 5) Flashback! The Rocket Racer's Back in Town! (part 1) ...And Where the Big Wheel Stops, Nobody Knows! (part 2) White Dragon! Red Death! Spider, Spider, Burning Bright!
B/W reprints of late 1970s ASM #161-185 and Annual #11 ^ This eighth "Essential" volume collects black-and-white reprints of "Amazing Spider-Man" issues #161-185 that Marvel Comics originally published between October 1976 and October 1978. It also includes Annual #11 and an issue of Nova. Len Wein wrote issues #161-180, and fellow ex-Marvel editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman started his ASM writing run in #182. Ross Andru provided the penciling for 34 of the 35 regular issues, with the only exception being #181, a "clip show" fill-in from the Spectacular Spider-Man team of Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema. Mantlo and Don Perlin are the respective writer and penciler for the 1977 Annual. The first half of this book consists of two-part stories including Nightcrawler, The Punisher, Kingpin, Stegron and The Lizard. This run also includes another iteration of the Spider Slayer and the origin of the Will O' Wisp. #171 is a crossover with Wolfman's Nova series, which itself was considered a clone of ASM. After some mediocre issues with forgettable characters like The Rocket Racer and The Hitman, #176-180 is a five-part Green Goblin story, the highlight of Wein's run. Wolfman's run begins with more weak villains like The Rocket Racer (again!) and a man named Jackson Weele who becomes "The Big Wheel", but these issues show more of Peter Parker's interesting personal life, including a Mary Jane marriage proposal and the return of an old girlfriend. A few of these stories appeared in late 1980s Marvel Tales issues, but most are reprinted here for the first time. The stories in this book run parallel with the other Marvel Essential Spider-Man titles Essential Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider-Man Volume 1 and Essential Marvel Team-Up Volume 3. I prefer the Amazing Spider-Man DVD-ROM for its complete collection of the entire ASM run in full color PDFs. However, the Marvel Essentials series offers convenient, inexpensive access to these 30-year old Spider-Man comics without needing a computer.
Good average volume in the Essentials series ^ This was a fairly average entry in the Marvel Essentials series - the return of the Kingpin, Stegron the Dinosaur Man and the Lizard, along with guest appearances by the Punisher, Nightcrawler and Nova. It is a good read for a Marvel fan ... most others probably won't have all that much use for it.
As many others have said, this volume DOES NOT contain Giant-Size Spider-Man #6. That issue, like most of the final issues of the Giant-Size books, was all reprinted material (which you can get in Volume 3 or 4, depending on which printing you get). All you get here is the cover, which is nothing out of the ordinary. I would've rather they have spent that money they used to print that page (and the Green Goblin entry from the Marvel Universe Handbook) to have acquired the rights so they could reprint Giant-Size Spider-Man #3 (not to mention Marvel Two-in-One #21) with Doc Savage, so they could've made the series truly complete.
The Punisher is now more important than the Green Goblin to Spider-Man ^ I already knew that I graduate high school the same year as Homer (and Marge) Simpson as well as Kevin and the gang on "The Wonder Years," but while reading "Essential Spider-Man, Volume 8" I discovered that I would have graduated from college the same year as Peter Parker. The only problem was that I graduated a year early while it took Peter "twelve" years to get his degree (he graduated back in 1965, but of course comic book years have their own weird math that you never really bother to figure out). Then again, despite what you see on the cover Peter Parker does not really get handed his diploma in this volume (what you see above is not the cover of the actual book, so just go along with me here for now), and you get one guess as to what alter-ego messes up Peter's graduation plans. However, do not start panicking that you do not see Aunt May at Peter's "graduation," because there is a reasonable explanation for her absence (although Joe Robertson should not be on the cover given that explanation).
That last observation is not really a digression, but speaks to why I was becoming less and less interested in reading Spider-Man comics back in the mid-1970s when these particular stories were first published (1976-78), which is that too many of the stories struck me as second-rate versions of ones I had enjoyed the first time I read them, when they were written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko and Johnny Romita (Sr.). For example, once again Aunt May is at death's door and once again being Spider-Man is causing problems in saving her life, because once again Harry Osborn is running around as the Green Goblin (okay, it is more complicated than that but once again amnesia seems to be hereditary). Once again Spider-Man thinks he is going mad, once again J. Jonah Jameson trots out another version of the Spider-Slayer, and once again Peter stands at Uncle Ben's grave and rededicates his life to the proposition that "with great power comes great responsibility."
My biggest disappointment is that there is this subplot running through the early issues where we know that JJJ has photos of Spider-Man dumping the corpse of Peter Parker into a smokestack. We know that this was the clone of Peter, but JJJ does not know that. This could turn into something interesting but when we finally get to the payoff, it lasts exactly four pages and that is it, which only underscores that you will only find one really memorable moment in these stories, and it has to do with Peter rather than Spider-Man (and it is not his graduation from college. I also discovered that because the Frank Miller version of the Kingpin from his run on "Daredevil" comics turned the character into a major super villain, right up there with Doctor Doom and Magneto, seeing Wilson Fisk as a more pedestrian villain in these old issues is rather disappointing. Peter's relationship with Mary Jane seems like it is just as much on and is it off at this point, at least when Lee Wein is scripting the stories, and then Marv Wolfman shows up and immediately ups the ante. In the blast from the past department I liked the reappearance of Betty Brant (notice she is seen on the aforementioned cover), who provides a nice perspective on Peter's life.
The best stories here are those involving the Punisher, who first shows up when Spider-Man is tangling with Nightcrawler, and then again when the Hitman is the bad guy. At this point the Punisher provides a strong contrast for our hero, embodying the good vigilante versus the bad vigilante, which also provides a critique a comic book world where you wonder how many times a supervillain can get out of jail.. But then we have Stego the Dinosaur Man, who ends up being a tag-team with the Lizard, and one of the other new villains--Will-O'-the-Wisp, Photon, Rocket-Racer, and Big Wheel--are that impressive either. The net affect is that the character is treading water, and if it were not Spider-Man I probably would not have been reading these comics then or now. "Essential Spider-Man, Volume 8" brings together issues #161-86 of "Amazing Spider-Man," Annual #11, the cover of "Giant-Size Spider-Man" #6 (go back to Volume for Annual #4 for what was actually in that one), and, for purposes of continuity, "Nova" #12. Len Wein is the writer for most of these issues, with a few exceptions, until Marv Wolfman took over as scripter on #182. Ross Andru is the penciler on almost every issue here, with Sal Buscema doing #181 and the "Nova" issue. The title might be in descent, but at this point it is only suffering from a slow leak.
GREAT COMIC ^ IF you like Spider-Man you'll love this one and don't forget to get the ones before this Volume because then you'll be clueless on whats happenen so great buy now...
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