The Classy Comics Podcast

Travel back to the early 1980s as we look at what made Spider-man's third series a worthwhile read in Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3 collecting Issues 54-74 and Annual #3.
Affiliate link included.
Transcript:
Grab your web shooters and get ready for a trip back in time to the '80s as we take a look today at Essential Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man Volume Three.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast, and today we take our first look at the Essential line for Marvel with Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man Volume Three. And this book collects Twenty-One issues of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Issues Fifty-Four to Seventy-Four, and Annual Number Three which featured cover dates from May of 1981 to January of 1983. Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man was actually the third Spider-Man series. Of course, Amazing Spider Man was the flagship of the Spider-Man line and then Marvel Team Up came along in 1972. And that was so successful that we got a third Spider-Man book in 1976. Generally when you've had multiple Spider-Man or multiple Batman books, when you get beyond two you begin to have some dodgy quality, but I don't think that was the case on Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man. I got the trades because they were not particularly expensive and I didn't know quite what I was going to get. I would actually have been pleasantly surprised by the quality overall.
I should mention that this Marvel Essential book, like all of the Essential Marvel books are in black and white. This was one of the earliest wholesale reprinting of series via trade paperbacks. The Essential line launched in the 1990s and continued up till 2013. DC had a counterpart Showcase Presents that essentially did the same thing, and when you go on Amazon to look at a review you invariably find one or two people who will say these are all in black and white. But they were also relatively inexpensive. Throughout the run of the Essential books the price tag varied from $14.99 to $19.99, and you got sometimes five hundred pages upwards to perhaps even six hundred in a larger collection. You got all of the stories and the penciling and inking – just not the colouring, which is what made it affordable. Since then there have been other lines: Marvel's got its Epic Collection and DC is doing its omnibuses that are a bit more expensive but cheaper than some of the prior larger collections. But I still like the Essentials because they collect some series that are quite as popular and they are able to sell at the lower price point, and you still…they've started to do the Marvel Master Works with Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, but they have not gotten nearest far into the series as The Essentials did.
The book is written by two different writers: Roger Stern who would be promoted up to Amazing Spider-Man and write that series until Issue 250 and have a pretty celebrated run there, and also end up writing for Superman at DC Comics; and then there's Bill Mantlow who's a pretty underrated writer, particularly on Spider-Man. True, he didn't write too much on Amazing Spider-Man, but he wrote a lot of Marvel Team Up and he began his second long-term run on Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man. There are tons of artists who worked on this book and it varied from month to month who would be penciling it. John Byrne, the famous Superman writer-artist did do one issue of this and Jim Shooter did the art on a couple of issues. Beyond that, these are some of the lesser known names in comics that rotated on and off this project. Probably the most distinctive and interesting was Ed Hannigan who really did a very stylistic title page which is j...

Travel back to the early 1980s as we look at what made Spider-man’s third series a worthwhile read in Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3 collecting Issues 54-74 and Annual #3.

Affiliate link included.

Adam Graham talks about the benefits and drawbacks of comic book trade paperbacks
Transcript:
Trade Paperbacks, threat or menace? Find out on today's episode of the Classy Comics Podcast.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast from Boise, Idaho; this is your host Adam Graham. This is something I will try to do infrequently – mostly I want to be talking about comic books and trade paperbacks, but sometimes there can be a general comic topic that's worth a talk, particularly since part of my vision for the show is to talk to folks who are not necessarily been into collecting or reading for quite some time. When you say reading a comic book, people will often imagine you sitting there with their traditional comic book with its glossy cover held together by a staple or two, and generally with a few ads in there. I think of that specific experience I've only read one in all of 2017 and that was an issue of The Tick. For most of my comic reading I've either been reading from trade paperbacks or I've been reading from digital. And digital's another conversation; today we're going to focus on trade paperbacks which collect multiple issues. Generally a small trade might collect three or four issues of a comic while a larger one might collect twelve, and then there are some fairly large collections or omnibuses such as those that come from Marvel that can have twenty or thirty different issues in it.
Trade paperback collections have become a lot more ubiquitous in recent years. It used to be that only select comics were collected together and sold in trades; now pretty much any major ongoing series that either DC or Marvel does is turned into a trade paperback, and there's a lot of work being done on the back catalogue of both companies to bring even some titles that hadn't been collected in trade together so that collectors can have them easily in one place, and those who haven't read them can discover them for the first time. So, it's a great way to read on up on classic comics and older comics that you just could not buy on an individual basis without a lot of money. And in general the trade collections can save quite a bit. Remember pretty much every DC Comic is going to be $2.99 an Issue, except for those that are more, and every Marvel comic is going to be $3.99 an Issue. Most trades that I get I end up paying about two dollars per issue for the comics that are in the trade. You also can more easily avoid bad titles – if you see a comic series starting and from some of the descriptions it sounds interesting, a trade can be a better option just because you can get an overall impression of what people actually thought of the comics in the trade, and based on what you hear you can have a really good idea of whether this is going to be something that will work for you.
It's also important to remember that most ongoing comic book series today, particularly from the Big Two are written for the trade. That means that the comics are drawn with the idea that this is going to be in a four or seven-part book, and thus many issues are less standalone and more chapters in a book, and this can lead to some frustration for those who get individual issues one at a time. For example, an issue might really not progress the action much but might show some character moments which – if you've been waiting two weeks to a month for the story to move – is a little bit annoying; but if it's merely a section in a graphic novel you've gotten, well then it's not a big deal, it might actually contribute positively to the reading experience. Also with a trade paperback you can evaluate a series as a whole which can be crucial. You take, for example,

Adam Graham talks about the benefits and drawbacks of comic book trade paperbacks

Transcript:

Trade Paperbacks, threat or menace? Find out on today’s episode of the Classy Comics Podcast.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast from Boise, Idaho; this is your host Adam Graham. This is something I will try to do infrequently – mostly I want to be talking about comic books and trade paperbacks, but sometimes there can be a general comic topic that’s worth a talk, particularly since part of my vision for the show is to talk to folks who are not necessarily been into collecting or reading for quite some time. When you say reading a comic book, people will often imagine you sitting there with their traditional comic book with its glossy cover held together by a staple or two, and generally with a few ads in there. I think of that specific experience I’ve only read one in all of 2017 and that was an issue of The Tick. For most of my comic reading I’ve either been reading from trade paperbacks or I’ve been reading from digital. And digital’s another conversation; today we’re going to focus on trade paperbacks which collect multiple issues. Generally a small trade might collect three or four issues of a comic while a larger one might collect twelve, and then there are some fairly large collections or omnibuses such as those that come from Marvel that can have twenty or thirty different issues in it.

Trade paperback collections have become a lot more ubiquitous in recent years. It used to be that only select comics were collected together and sold in trades; now pretty much any major ongoing series that either DC or Marvel does is turned into a trade paperback, and there’s a lot of work being done on the back catalogue of both companies to bring even some titles that hadn’t been collected in trade together so that collectors can have them easily in one place, and those who haven’t read them can discover them for the first time. So, it’s a great way to read on up on classic comics and older comics that you just could not buy on an individual basis without a lot of money. And in general the trade collections can save quite a bit. Remember pretty much every DC Comic is going to be $2.99 an Issue, except for those that are more, and every Marvel comic is going to be $3.99 an Issue. Most trades that I get I end up paying about two dollars per issue for the comics that are in the trade. You also can more easily avoid bad titles – if you see a comic series starting and from some of the descriptions it sounds interesting, a trade can be a better option just because you can get an overall impression of what people actually thought of the comics in the trade, and based on what you hear you can have a really good idea of whether this is going to be something that will work for you.

It’s also important to remember that most ongoing comic book series today, particularly from the Big Two are written for the trade. That means that the comics are drawn with the idea that this is going to be in a four or seven-part book, and thus many issues are less standalone and more chapters in a book, and this can lead to some frustration for those who get individual issues one at a time. For example, an issue might really not progress the action much but might show some character moments which – if you’ve been waiting two weeks to a month for the story to move – is a little bit annoying; but if it’s merely a section in a graphic novel you’ve gotten, well then it’s not a big deal, it might actually contribute positively to the reading experience. Also with a trade paperback you can evaluate a series as a whole which can be crucial. You take, for example,

Tom King bids for an all-time great Batman story from Batman's second year as Batman fights the war of Jokes and Riddles.
Affiliate link included.
On today's podcast we're going to war. Join me as I take a look at The War of Jokes and Riddles by Tom King coming up next.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
There are many ways to tell a Batman story: there are the goofy stories of the Silver Age and the stories that are in the spirit of the 1966 TV show such as were published in the Batman Sixty-Six series by Jeff Parker, and then you have the darker crime stories which I think have dominated Batman for the better part of the past forty years. While we all love a light-hearted Batman tale I can also appreciate a good crime story featuring the world's greatest detective.
There are, of course, many ways to make a bad Batman story – it's far easier to do so. Some of it is caused by the almost worshipful reverence that a lot of comic writers have for Batman – him being this just absolutely amazing being who can do no wrong, or others who look at Batman and create a character who is utterly dark. To writers, what's cool is not really caring. Rotting Batman is Dirty Harry. Does The War of Jokes and Riddles fall into one of these traps or is it a classic story? I think from both the title as well as the way the story is written, this is the fourth big arc of Tom King's run and I think it's obvious that this is his attempt to add his own mark to the Batman mythology and to write a truly classic and memorable story. Does it succeed? Well, let's take a look.
The story is collected with Issues Twenty-Five to Thirty-Two of Batman. In Issue Twenty-Four of Batman Bruce proposed to Selina Kyle aka Cat Woman, but before she answers he wants to tell him a story, a dark story from early in his career in his second year as Batman. The Joker is on the loose but he's also lost the ability to laugh. It's like he's in a depressive state – he doesn't find anything funny anymore, and when he doesn't find anything funny he goes around killing people – which when you think about it is what he does when he goes around and finds everything funny.
The Joker has laid a trap for Batman but the Riddler escapes from Arkham to foil the plan and offer to join forces with the Joker. The Joker responds by shooting the Riddler and Batman goes after the Joker thinking with the range from which the Joker fired the Riddler surely must be dead but he's not. And the result is that the Riddler begins a war on the Joker, and the two bring every underworlds' figure in Gotham onto one side or another, except for Catwoman who is able to stay neutral in this. The war goes completely out of control; Batman is not able to stop it and efforts to contain it fail – even the efforts to call in the military leads to nothing more than more casualties from the noncombatants in this war. Finally, Batman decides he actually has to join with one side in the war in order to have a chance of ending it.
What works about this story? While King goes for a very Noirish feel to the story and he writes the dials perfectly, it never feels over the top but it's definitely very stylized and it helps to build the sense of the atmosphere. The same thing for the art: there are just some great shadows, some great movement that just makes this feel like a colorized film noir story, so I've really liked the feel of it. I also think, consistent with the atmosphere, it avoided overindulgence in gore. Yes, there's violence, there's even some death, but it doesn't go into extremely gory territory, which not only keeps it as a safe book for teens but it also allows it to focus more on the...

Tom King bids for an all-time great Batman story from Batman’s second year as Batman fights the war of Jokes and Riddles.

Affiliate link included.

On today’s podcast we’re going to war. Join me as I take a look at The War of Jokes and Riddles by Tom King coming up next.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.

There are many ways to tell a Batman story: there are the goofy stories of the Silver Age and the stories that are in the spirit of the 1966 TV show such as were published in the Batman Sixty-Six series by Jeff Parker, and then you have the darker crime stories which I think have dominated Batman for the better part of the past forty years. While we all love a light-hearted Batman tale I can also appreciate a good crime story featuring the world’s greatest detective.

There are, of course, many ways to make a bad Batman story – it’s far easier to do so. Some of it is caused by the almost worshipful reverence that a lot of comic writers have for Batman – him being this just absolutely amazing being who can do no wrong, or others who look at Batman and create a character who is utterly dark. To writers, what’s cool is not really caring. Rotting Batman is Dirty Harry. Does The War of Jokes and Riddles fall into one of these traps or is it a classic story? I think from both the title as well as the way the story is written, this is the fourth big arc of Tom King’s run and I think it’s obvious that this is his attempt to add his own mark to the Batman mythology and to write a truly classic and memorable story. Does it succeed? Well, let’s take a look.

The story is collected with Issues Twenty-Five to Thirty-Two of Batman. In Issue Twenty-Four of Batman Bruce proposed to Selina Kyle aka Cat Woman, but before she answers he wants to tell him a story, a dark story from early in his career in his second year as Batman. The Joker is on the loose but he’s also lost the ability to laugh. It’s like he’s in a depressive state – he doesn’t find anything funny anymore, and when he doesn’t find anything funny he goes around killing people – which when you think about it is what he does when he goes around and finds everything funny.

The Joker has laid a trap for Batman but the Riddler escapes from Arkham to foil the plan and offer to join forces with the Joker. The Joker responds by shooting the Riddler and Batman goes after the Joker thinking with the range from which the Joker fired the Riddler surely must be dead but he’s not. And the result is that the Riddler begins a war on the Joker, and the two bring every underworlds’ figure in Gotham onto one side or another, except for Catwoman who is able to stay neutral in this. The war goes completely out of control; Batman is not able to stop it and efforts to contain it fail – even the efforts to call in the military leads to nothing more than more casualties from the noncombatants in this war. Finally, Batman decides he actually has to join with one side in the war in order to have a chance of ending it.

What works about this story? While King goes for a very Noirish feel to the story and he writes the dials perfectly, it never feels over the top but it’s definitely very stylized and it helps to build the sense of the atmosphere. The same thing for the art: there are just some great shadows, some great movement that just makes this feel like a colorized film noir story, so I’ve really liked the feel of it. I also think, consistent with the atmosphere, it avoided overindulgence in gore. Yes, there’s violence, there’s even some death, but it doesn’t go into extremely gory territory, which not only keeps it as a safe book for teens but it also allows it to focus more ...

We conclude our look at the second volume of Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows. Can you really tell a good Venom story in two issues. Find out as Ryan Stegman clears the deck for a new creative team with issues 8-12 of Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows.
Affiliate link included.

We conclude our look at the second volume of Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows. Can you really tell a good Venom story in two issues. Find out as Ryan Stegman clears the deck for a new creative team with issues 8-12 of Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows.

Affiliate link included.

Adam Graham takes a look at Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows, Volume 2: The Venom Experiment with a look at the alternate universe Spider-Family and the reason they exist. He discusses Issues 6 and 7 as the Spider Family meets the X-men.
Affiliate link included in this post.
Transcript Below:
Spiderman and family meet the X-Men, fight the Lizard and face a giant Green Goblin robot. Find out more about it on today's episode of the Classy Comics Podcast.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host Adam Graham.
Welcome to today's episode of the Classy Comics Podcast. If you have a comment email it to me [email protected]. Today we're going to be talking about the trade Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows Volume Two: The Venom Experiment, collecting issues Six through Twelve of the ongoing Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows series. So, what's this series about? To explain that you have to begin in the 1980s with the marriage. In both the comics and comic strip Spiderman, AKA Peter Parker, had been a bachelor from the 1960s on. He had a series of women in his life: Betty Brant, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson, Deborah Whitman and the list goes on and on. However, invariably, tragedy would strike or Spiderman would come in between Peter Parker and happiness in one way or another.
However, the decision was made for Peter Parker to marry Mary Jane Watson and it was a big to-do. It was done in both the comic strip and the comic books, as well as a live action ceremony performed by Stan Lee himself at Shay Stadium. However, many comic book writers chafed against the marriage, and really struggled with how to write it well. The best writers managed to come up with interesting angles on the marriage, while others could only portray Mary Jane as someone who was constantly worried about Peter, and serving no constructive purpose in his life. And increasingly Marvel looked at ways to get rid of the marriage in order to avoid having Peter seem too old, and they tried several things. There was a period where Peter and Mary Jane were separated and there was a period where they actually killed Mary Jane off. Neither of these were accepted by fans and Mary Jane returned alive, so this led to One More Day.
In One More Day Peter's Aunt May is critically wounded by a gunshot wound. Peter turns to help from anyone in the Marvel Universe he can find it from including Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom and Doctor Octopus and Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four but all are powerless against a bullet wound. They might be able to bend reality, summon dark forces from other dimensions, bend time itself and threaten creation with utter destruction, but a bullet wound – that's just a little bit too hard for them. So, Peter ends up trading his marriage to Mary Jane to Mephisto, the Devil character of the Marvel Universe in exchange for Aunt May surviving and his secret identity being restored which was revealed after civil war.
For many fans, One More Day led to a parting of the ways with Spiderman and disillusionment with Marvel Comics because it represented a betrayal of the character of Peter Parker and Spiderman. Not only had the comics portrayed Peter as someone who cared about morals and responsibility, doing the right thing and that was all betrayed here because ultimately, according to One More Day, the big reason he couldn't let Aunt May die is his inability to take responsibility for his own sense of guilt about the person who shot her having done so because of his activities. And it…also Spiderman has always been a character that rue, changed and advanced in life. When Peter Parker became Spiderman he was sixteen years old, and Stan Lee made the really monumental decision in Amazing Spiderman Number Twenty-Eight to have him graduate from High Sc...

Adam Graham takes a look at Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows, Volume 2: The Venom Experiment with a look at the alternate universe Spider-Family and the reason they exist. He discusses Issues 6 and 7 as the Spider Family meets the X-men.

Affiliate link included in this post.

Transcript Below:

Spiderman and family meet the X-Men, fight the Lizard and face a giant Green Goblin robot. Find out more about it on today’s episode of the Classy Comics Podcast.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host Adam Graham.

Welcome to today’s episode of the Classy Comics Podcast. If you have a comment email it to me [email protected]. Today we’re going to be talking about the trade Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows Volume Two: The Venom Experiment, collecting issues Six through Twelve of the ongoing Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows series. So, what’s this series about? To explain that you have to begin in the 1980s with the marriage. In both the comics and comic strip Spiderman, AKA Peter Parker, had been a bachelor from the 1960s on. He had a series of women in his life: Betty Brant, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson, Deborah Whitman and the list goes on and on. However, invariably, tragedy would strike or Spiderman would come in between Peter Parker and happiness in one way or another.

However, the decision was made for Peter Parker to marry Mary Jane Watson and it was a big to-do. It was done in both the comic strip and the comic books, as well as a live action ceremony performed by Stan Lee himself at Shay Stadium. However, many comic book writers chafed against the marriage, and really struggled with how to write it well. The best writers managed to come up with interesting angles on the marriage, while others could only portray Mary Jane as someone who was constantly worried about Peter, and serving no constructive purpose in his life. And increasingly Marvel looked at ways to get rid of the marriage in order to avoid having Peter seem too old, and they tried several things. There was a period where Peter and Mary Jane were separated and there was a period where they actually killed Mary Jane off. Neither of these were accepted by fans and Mary Jane returned alive, so this led to One More Day.

In One More Day Peter’s Aunt May is critically wounded by a gunshot wound. Peter turns to help from anyone in the Marvel Universe he can find it from including Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom and Doctor Octopus and Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four but all are powerless against a bullet wound. They might be able to bend reality, summon dark forces from other dimensions, bend time itself and threaten creation with utter destruction, but a bullet wound – that’s just a little bit too hard for them. So, Peter ends up trading his marriage to Mary Jane to Mephisto, the Devil character of the Marvel Universe in exchange for Aunt May surviving and his secret identity being restored which was revealed after civil war.

For many fans, One More Day led to a parting of the ways with Spiderman and disillusionment with Marvel Comics because it represented a betrayal of the character of Peter Parker and Spiderman. Not only had the comics portrayed Peter as someone who cared about morals and responsibility, doing the right thing and that was all betrayed here because ultimately, according to One More Day, the big reason he couldn’t let Aunt May die is his inability to take responsibility for his own sense of guilt about the person who shot her having done so because of his activities. And it…also Spiderman has always been a character that rue, changed and advanced in life. When Peter Parker became Spiderman he was sixteen years old, and Stan Lee made the really monumental decision in Amazing Spiderman Number Twenty-Eight to have him graduate from High Sc...