The Amazing Spider-Man #308: “Dread”

Mary Jane is missing, sending Spider-Man out on a mission to find her kidnaper. The trail leads Spider-Man to Taskmaster, who is now an entrepreneur teaching people to be “muscle for the super-villain trade.” There, of course, a fight.

Caesar Kidnaped the Credits

The Start of The McFarlane Style

We’re eleven issues into Todd McFarlane’s run on “The Amazing Spider-Man” at this point. (Where did the time go?!?) We’re still in the middle of the bi-weekly summer grind. But McFarlane’s ink work in this issue is where his Spider-Man style starts coming together for me.

Some of it is still a little stiff and overwrought, but this feels more like the McFarlane style that we’re building towards over the course of The McSpidey Chronicles.

Even the opening splash page of a sad Peter Parker on his own balcony looks perfect. It’s the fine line work on his Members Only-style jacket to trace all the right contours, as well as the line showing where the light ends on his face, to the messy wind-blown hair, speedlines on the ground, and high contrast New York City skyscrapers behind him.

It all fits. It’s all just perfectly McFarlane. Finally, the book looks and feels like how we imagine it when we think back to this run.

Add to that all the perfect little things David Michelinie’s script gave McFarlane to draw. There’s lots of Spider-Man swinging through the city and fighting. There’s even a montage of it with a fun graphic design style.

We should start tracking all the phone cords McFarlane drew to create panel borders during phone call scenes in this series.

There’s fire and explosions and lasers overlapping. There’s a graveyard scene. There’s gargoyles and full moons and private armies of gun-toting soldiers and fancy panel borders made of phone cords and webbing. (We haven’t seen a good uniformed private militia in a while. See issues #299, #301, and #303 for others.)

The Taskmaster has all you need in a character for Todd McFarlane to draw. He has a big billowing cape. He’s got pouches. He’s got a gun. He has a memorable face that’s half skeletal. He has the boots with a big fold-over flappy thing at the top. And, thanks to powers that allow him to remember moves from previous opponents, he even carries a shield and a billy club.

Just look at this half-page panel:

If you’re a McFarlane fan, this is the kind of image that sticks out in your mind. This is the glorious hero shot of his interpretation of a character you wanted to see in every issue. And this one has everything you want to see McFarlane draw, like the glorious cape and the skeletal face.

McFarlane drew superhero comics but you could tell he wanted to draw something closer to horror a lot of times. He excelled at the monsters and the darker characters. He turned Spider-Man into a a scarier creature, too, when you think about it: The bug eyes, the blacker costume, the creepy crouching….

Note the grave stones with previous Spider-Man artists’ names on them: Steve Ditko, John Romita, Ross Andru, Gil Kane, Ron Frenz, and John Romita Jr.

It all comes together in this issue. It’s like McFarlane has learned enough about drawing Spider-Man after the first ten issues that he’s just getting comfortable and producing work that looks like what you envision his stuff to look like.

The inking is a major factor in this. McFarlane is inking himself here, but it rarely seems like a rush job, even given the two week deadline on the issue. In the past, there’d be panels or pages that looked spot on, but whole pages that looked simplified and sometimes even half-finished would surround them. This issue feels like the first issue where McFarlane fired on all cylinders.

Jonathan Caesar

The whole point of the issue, though, is that Peter comes home to find Mary Jane missing. The police are on the case, but Spider-Man launches his own investigation. He’s desperate for answers and is willing to go to new extremes to find her, even when those leads are questionable at best.

In this issue, he is led to believe the Taskmaster has something to do with it based on very flimsy evidence. Since he has nothing else to do, he chases after that.

Meanwhile, Mary Jane is locked up, unbeknownst to Peter, in a soundproof apartment in the same building he already lives in.

But, yes, it’s a bit of a by-the-book style storyline. Mary Jane is kidnapped, her husband doesn’t believe the police will get to her before he could, so he launches his own investigation free of the shackles that things like the rule of law would put on him.

Also, he has the proportional strength of a spider. That helps. That’s not in the playbook, usually.

Mary Jane doesn’t just melt and pine for her savior to come get her, though. She listens to Caesar to find out what’s going on and, even though she’s naturally scared, she does make a first effort at resistance. She gets far enough to slap Caesar, though (trigger warning) his slap back looks a lot harder.

While her scene in this issue does end with her hoping for Peter to save her, let’s face it — she’s married to a superhero. Of course she’s holding out hope for that ending. She’ll do what she can, but give the poor woman some time to think first.

Thankfully, the story concludes next issue and doesn’t drag out. There are ramifications, but not the kind you’d expect. We’ll get to those in a few issues.

As usual, Mary Jane goes through a traumatic event and it’s instantly forgotten until the next traumatic event to trigger her husband into action.

Jonathan Caesar delivers his “Villain explains its all” speech in this issue. His own origin story includes how he murdered his brother as a kid because he wouldn’t give him his train set. Delightful. As he got older, he turned into a deranged Mary Jane fan with some convenient connections and a cool wad of dough.

He’s been creepy all along, but this monologue makes him downright freakishly villainous.

He’s also a patient man who plays the long game. He became an obsessed fan of Mary Jane. He built a soundproof room in the Bedford Towers so he could have her as his wife and not have anyone realize what was going on under their nose.

I’m guessing the room is far enough way to prevent tripping Spider-Man’s spidey sense from tingling. Since Caesar’s danger towards Mary Jane was never immediate before the event at the end of “The Amazing Spider-Man” #307, those senses also failed to tingle during Peter’s other meetings with Caesar.

Michelinie is also a patient man who had this storyline all planned out. Here’s a panel from “The Amazing Spider-Man” #300:

Peter is right, but Mary Jane unwittingly has some inside help on that.

Caesar must have also done some great targeted advertising to lure Mary Jane to the Bedford Towers. Of all the apartment buildings in the city, he’s lucky she wanted to sign up for the one he built the soundproof room in for her.

After Venom’s appearance in Peter’s apartment, Mary Jane wanted out. She couldn’t live in an apartment where “every little creak or rattle” would make her scream.

How long will they last at the Bedford Towers after this event?!? Until issue #314, as it turns out. Keep reading!

The Doppelgänger

It’s driving me crazy, but Caesar reminds me of an actor from the time, and I can’t make out who it is. He looks like the kind of guy who would have starred in one of those television mini-series events of the 1980s.

Wait, am I thinking of Hans Gruber, himself, Mr. Alan Rickman?

“Die Hard” was released on July 22, 1998. This issue came out ten days earlier. Unless McFarlane was a huge fan of the trailer to the movie, I would guess both McFarlane and the producers of that Christmas movie were both keying off the general image of a villain from that time period.

Or coincidence. Those kinds of things do happen, you know.

The “Webs” Book Tour

Peter cancels his latest book tour appearance in Queens, given the circumstances.

Except, Aunt May is very excited to see her nephew signing his book and will bring all her tentants to the event. Suddenly, Peter is back in the game!

We don’t get a bad signing story here, though I suppose Nathan Lubinsky’s outburst at him might count. We’ll see more from that particular tenant in later issues.

What I haven’t been able to figure out just yet, though, is which convention in New York City was this appearance tied into? There was no big New York Comic-Con yet. You had smaller affairs like The Big Apple Con, but that one didn’t start until the 1990s. I can’t find anything online in that city in that time frame.

This is the end of the tour in this title. Peter doesn’t suddenly fly to San Diego in the next issue, though San Diego Comic-Con was held in the first week in August that year. The timing would have been perfect. (Here’s a clip from San Diego Comic-Con in 1989.)

Hidden Cover Spider Count: 1

Check out the grass on the right edge of the cover climbing up in front of the gravestone with a cross.

Felix the Cat Watch

Oh, McFarlane played a good game of hide-and-seek in this one. I suspected we’d see Felix hiding in the gravestones somehow when I read this issue, but I didn’t find him the first time.

Then something caught my eye in this panel:

Check out the silhouetted gravestone between the two trees on the right half of the panel.

It’s like he’s waving at you from behind the smoke. “Catch me if you can!”

Good job, Toddy Mac.

You can see the original art for this page on ComicArtFans.com. It looks like McFarlane was using blue lines to lay out his pages and indicate where characters would go and what they were doing. Maybe McFarlane was looking for approval before finishing the page? You can see notes in this panel like “dust in the wind” and “goon tries to leave.”

Was this book done Marvel style, so McFarlane wanted an early sanity check?

There’s a big blue pencil circle where Spider-Man is, but here’s the catch: Spider-Man was drawn later and pasted in. It looks like he’s also leaning in the opposite direction from that original layout, which has been whited out. It would make more sense to have Spider-Man looking in the goon’s direction since he confronts him in the next panel. That’s a smart change.

Also, what word do you think they changed to “bull” in that first balloon? Something was there of a similar length first before being changed to “bull.” It couldn’t have been “B.S.”, right?

We also have another hidden Popeye. In the bookstore where Peter makes an appearance in this issue, there’s a sign for one set of bookshelves: “Gumby to Popeye.” Look on top of the shelves in the back left corner. The “Gumby” is barely legible at print size.

Terry Austin — an inker McFarlane wanted to work with — used to hide Popeyes in the backgrounds of pages he was drawing. Art Adams once included Popeye in the background of a page he knew Austin would be inking. And Adams did draw a Gumby comic or two in the early part of his career.

So is this an Adams reference or an Austin reference?

Spawn Watch

Three things caught my eye:

David Michelinie uses the word “spawn” in a caption box. It’s in context. It makes sense. It’s legitimate, but a fun coincidence.

Doubly so, since it’s a reference to spawning revenge, which is what McFarlane’s Spawn series started as.

Second:

Taskmaster’s cape is ginormous. How he carries that huge blanket around with him, I don’t know. I also don’t care. It looks cool. That’s all that matters. Let McFarlane draw the biggest, most ridiculous capes that he wants to. Give the people want they want. It’s awesome.

Taskmaster’s face is also, uhm, textured in a way that’s not too dissimilar from Spawn’s.

Third:

Here’s another thing I only noticed the second time through: There’s a gravestone with “Fitz” on it, which is again likely a reference back to Terry Fitzgerald, whose career as a grape grower must now be over.

BD Recommendation

If you liked this issue, I have a recommendation for you from the world of les bandes dessinées, or Franco-Belgian comics.

Speaking of kidnapping, “Blacksad” v2 is the story of a child gone missing and Blacksad’s attempt to find her and get her back to her mother. Titled “Arctic Nation,” it’s the book many consider to be the best in the six book series. It is, indeed, a beautifully drawn and painted book from Juanjo Guarnido, with a solid crime-ridden script from Juan Díaz Canales that manages to mix issues of race — black-furred versus white-furred animals — and into a comic in a smart and chilling way.

But, mostly, you’ll want to read it for Guarnido’s art. It’s OK to admit it. It’s beautiful stuff.

Read my review of “Blacksad: Arctic Nation” now!

Honorable mention with this issue goes to “Harmony” v1, which is one of my favorite first volumes of a multi-book storyline from the world of Franco-Belgian comics. Harmony wakes up in a dark room and has to figure out how she got there and how to get out.

I recommended the series in general with “The Amazing Spider-Man” #301, but the first half of this particular volume is very cinematic in the way it tells the story of Harmony’s awakening and all the things going on around here, such as the voices she hears in her head. It’s great stuff, and I don’t mind recommending it again.

In the Next Issue

Spider-Man versus Styx and Stone, and then Mary Jane takes things into her own hands. The Woman fights her way out of the Refrigerator!

Read my review now –>

Bonus Historical Reading

I had to throw this in: I once wrote about the time when pre-emperor Julius Caesar was kidnapped — and how he brilliantly weathered the storm and conquered them all. Because that’s what Caesar does. It’s one of my favorite stories of the Roman empire.