Anonymous asked:
brevoortformspring answered:
Well, you could have been reading Untold Tales of Spider-Man, like all of the finer comic book readers were.
First of all….I actually will agree with Brevoort here cos Untold Tales kicked ass.
Second of all…no. Spider-Man from 1994-1997 was not terrible. Rarely has there been an era of Spider-Man spanning that long where everything sucked. In 1994-1996 you had stories like Amazing Spider-Man #400, Spider-Man: the Lost Years, Spider-Man: Redemption, Revelations, Web of Carnage, the Final Adventure, and several other decent stories. In fact 1996 Spider-Man with Ben Reilly, when viewed in the hindsight of knowing he wasn’t the real Peter Parker and also was temporary (basically what Doc Ock was as Superior Spider-Man) is quite enjoyable for seeing something different yet familiar.
Third of all 1997 Spider-Man was awesome. J.M. DeMatteis was writing Spectacular Spider-Man and delivering terrific stories that were both psychologically deeper than you’d expect and at the same time really funny. Howard Mackie and Romita Junior were also doing great crime noir stories and Norman Osborn was being successfully built up as the Spider-Man Big Bad that no one else had ever been.
Yes, the parents arc and Gathering of Five sucked, but Gathering of Five was there for TWO months and was a crossover. The parents stuff unto itself was mostly inoffensive until they actually resolved it. When it showed up they just joined the supporting cast and that was it. The reveal that they were robots sucked but that didn’t happen immediately and wasn’t going on for months.
Similarly the Clone Saga was mostly bad from 1994-1995 with the odd decent story thrown in. But for Heaven’s sake the behind the scenes chaos of the time was ridiculous and the poor quality owed much, much more to the marketing department’s meddling as opposed to the personal failings of overstressed creators trying to make something work amidst the chaos that wasn’t of their doing. Sure, the actual decision to make Peter a clone sucked but again that wasn’t happening from the start of 1994-the end of 1996. The Clone Saga is more an era than a story unto itself with lots of issues and arcs devoted to stuff outside the primary story thread of who is the clone and the fallout from that. One of the best issues from that era is a fun old school superhero story with Swarm and it has literally nothing to do with the clones, the Jackal or anything like that.
‘All terrible’ and ‘four years of garbage’ is a hasty and ill advised generalization.
