Hey brother, can you spare some dime books?

So one of those things happened to me the other day that makes the collector inside of me giddy.

Sometimes it's lucking into someone's old collection of 70's and 80's Marvel books that fills in a bunch of gaps in your collection! I've been fortunate enough to have that happen about four or five years ago.

Other times it's something less bountiful, but equally pleasing, like opening up a 70's back-issue of The Avengers that you haven't read yet and realizing that it has a George Perez signature on the first page!

This time around it was the former, as my brother gave me his box of old comics on Easter! It turns out that he's paring down things he's been saving for years, and since I'm the "comic book guy" in the family, he was awesome enough to give 'em to me.

I'm not bragging just for the sake of braggin however, as my gain is your gain. This gives us another 170 issues of random comic books to choose from for the blog!

So what was in the aforementioned box of comics?

If you had questions about when this collection was put together, the dot matrix sticker labels on the dividers should answer that question.

Lucky for me, mine and my brother's taste in comic books were somewhat different. Where I was an Avengers nut, he was a Daredevil fan. While I was following the X-Men, he was reading The New Mutants.

So sprinkled in to my collection goes 80 issues of Daredevil ranging from issue #2 all the way up to #229. We also get a solid collection of the first three years of The New Mutants. I also spied a nice copy of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #27 featuring Frank Miller's first stab at Daredevil.

The big surprise for me, was seeing about 25 old 70's and 80's issues of The Flash, as I had no idea my brother had these. I was just thinking about looking for some of the Trial of the Flash issues at my LCS, and wouldn't you know it...he has some here!

The strangest book, however, goes to the german language version of Texas Rangers #67?! Although I have a spanish language Green Lantern book in my collection, so who am I to judge.

In celebration of the new collection, I'm breaking format for the next random book to review. We're going to randomly pick the next book from the new box before I file them in with my stuff.

So thanks again to my brother, and now on with the show and the next random pick...

...and that book is Daredevil #193 from April 1983, published by Marvel Comics!

I guess we can officially call this Daredevil month here at The Random Longbox. After his guest-starring role in the previous pick, he move's up to the title role in this one. It shouldn't come as a big surprise however, as over half of the collection featured him in some way, shape, or form.

I was actually hoping for one of the early Stan Lee issues so we could add his name to the roster of creators on the right hand side of the blog, but it was not to be as this particular issue is written by Larra Hama and drawn by Klaus Janson.

I know that Frank Miller had just departed a few issues earlier, but above and that, this issue is a blank slate to me. I enjoyed the heck out of Larry Hama's Wolverine run in the 90's, so I'm optimistic that we'll find something to like here.

See you in a day or two for the review.

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #110

TITLE: Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #110

PUBLISHER: Marvel

COVER DATE: January 1986

COVER PRICE: $0.65

24 pages


WHAT I REMEMBER...

As I mentioned last time, I've never really been a huge Spider-Man collector. I enjoy the character well enough, but don't have the passion to follow his titles day in and day out. With that being said, it doesn't mean that I don't read 'em every now and again.

This issue holds a special place in my collection, as these four issues were the first Spider-Man books that I recall buying fresh off the racks. I remember enjoying his appearances in Secret Wars, and definitely thought his new costume introduced there was bad-ass, but for some reason it never spurred me to start picking up either of his two regular titles.

Eventually, however, I did buy a few issues and it was with this storyline that I started. I couldn't tell you what finally spurred me to buy a few, but I'm glad I did. This particular arc was pretty intense, compared to what else was out there at the time. It definitely struck a nerve, and when I think of good Spider-Man storylines, this one always jumps to the top.

It's actually been quite a while since I've reread it, so I'm curious to see how it holds up to today's standards. Peter David's one of the best writers out there, not super flashy by any means, but he's consistently good just about every time he puts pen to paper. I have faith that this issue won't disappoint, but still...this was Peter David's first comic book work, so the chance for some clunkiness is still out there.

Finally, with this issue Peter David takes the lead with the most issues reviewed by a writer here at the Random Longbox. The funny thing is, he did it with no help from his 10 year run on The Incredible Hulk, of which I have the whole shebang just waiting to be picked for a review sooner or later. He's got a ways to go before he catches up to Curt Swan, who currently holds the record for most books reviewed, but with the sheer number of Peter David books I have in my collection it's bound to happen sooner or later.

All My Sins Remembered

• Writer: Peter David
• Layouts: Rich Buckler
• Finishers: M. Hands
• Colorist: Bob Sharen
• Letterer: Rick Parker
• Editor: Jim Owsley
• Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter

The conclusion to the Death of Jean DeWolff storyline begins as both Spider-Man and Daredevil are racing to the home of J. Jonah Jameson to avenge the death of Betty Brant at the hands of the Sin-Eater. Little does Spider-man know, however, that Betty is not quite dead yet as she managed to duck under JJJ's desk as the Sin-Eater fired his shotgun.

Just like he killed a priest who opposed capital punishment and a judge who coddled criminals, he has come to take down JJJ because he's against the idea of masked vigilantes. While not having any particular beef with Betty, he promises to kill her so that she can deliver a message to Jonah in the afterlife.

Betty shows she has a little life left in her as she grabs a letter opener and stabs him in the leg. That maneuver buys her a few moments, which is all she needed as Spider-Man comes crashing through the window and is surprised to see her alive.

The thought that Betty was dead, coupled with the other senseless deaths brought about by the Sin-Eater, have pushed Spider-Man to the edge. He arrived before Daredevil, and while he's fighting solo he shows a level of bloodlust that Peter rarely shows.

The Sin-Eater doesn't really stand a chance against an enraged Spider-Man, and now unmasked he's at his mercy. He apologizes to Spider-Man, but it's too late. Spider-Man tells him to save his apology for the one who deserves it, Jean DeWolff!

It's at this point that Daredevil catches up to him and sees Spider-Man on the verge of beating the Sin-Eater to death. He jumps in between the two, as Sin-Eater is obviously defeated, but Spider-Man will not be brought out of his bloodlust quite so easily. With Daredevil now between him and his prey, he becomes the new target of Spider-Man's rage.

Daredevil uses this to his advantage and taunts Spider-Man into following him as he leads him away from the Sin-Eater. Leading him away frm Jonah's house, Daredevil keeps him distracted enough that he is able to get a few lucky blows in and pummels him into subconsciousness.

Over the next couple of pages we get an awful lot of exposition that brings us up to speed with the chain of events that brought us here, so here's the super quick rundown.

The Sin-Eater was none other than Stan Carter, the actual police detective in charge of catching the Sin-Eater! With him in custody, the citizens of New York are not happy as they now have reason to fear both the criminals and the police. The rest of the force is put on alert as demonstrations start to crop up outside of police headquarters.

Jonah returns from his business trip to the news that Spider-Man has saved the life of his wife and secretary in his very own home. That's one more debt that JJJ owes Spider-Man that will more than likely go unpaid.

Back at police headquarters, we get more backstory about Stan Carter as they are visited by a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. He informs the police chief that Carter was a test subject in a drug enhancement program earlier in his career. It seems S.H.I.E.L.D. was experimenting with their own version of a super soldier serum. It worked, but also had unstable and unpredictable side-effects. The program was deemed too dangerous and was mothballed.

All of this new info means that it's possible that Stan Carter will be able to avoid responsibility on an insanity plea. That's the last thing this city needs to hear about.

The police decide to transfer the Sin-Eater to Riker's Island, and it's here that we catch back up with Spider-Man and Daredevil. Watching the transfer from a nearby rooftop, they debate the difference between justice and vengeance. Spider-Man still sees a big difference between what he does and what the Sin-Eater did. Daredevil is trying to show him that everyone deserves their day in court, even the Sin-Eater, whom Spider-Man was unwilling to give that option earlier in the story.

It's an argument left for another time, as the demonstrators on scene have succumb to mob rules and decide to take out the Sin Eater. Daredevil jumps down to protect him, but Spider-Man is still hesitant to expend any effort to protect the Sin-Eater.

The wild mob proves too much for Daredevil's heightened senses and hey are soon overpowered. He's at the mob's mercy as he calls out to Spider-Man for his help. What catches him by surprise, is that Daredevil called him by his first name!

With the death of his uncle and Gwen Stacy still hanging over him, Peter finally swings down to help out Daredevil as another innocent life lost on his watch would be too much to bear. Together they disperse the mob and get Carter secured at Riker's.

With everything wrapped up, Peter and Matt have a little unfinished business. Matt explains that he was able to use his enhanced hearing to figure out that Peter Parker and Spider-Man shared the same heartbeat and were the same man. He lets Peter know his secret identity as Matt Murdock, and the debate about justice and the law is back on...albeit on more friendly terms now.

Luckily for them, I guess, one of Aunt May's elderly friends has done something rather rash. It seems that in all of the recent simmering civil unrest, one of her friends took his old service pistol on the subway and shot three young punks who were hassling him.

Why is that lucky? For now Matt Murdock will demonstrate how the court system uses law to administer justice fairly by arranging representation for Aunt May's friend.

SO, WHAT DID WE LEARN...

...not even Peter David was able to escape the first time writer's curse of too many words. Granted, this was a different time and stories were told in a different fashion, but the story really hit a brick wall about half-way through as it shifts gear from slug-fest to morality tale of civil unrest.

The moral turmoil that Peter goes through seems a little heavy-handed, but not having re-read the previous three parts, I'm willing to give Peter David the benefit of the doubt that it got set up more thoroughly along the way.

Still, wordy as it was in parts, I like what he was trying to do with comparing and contrasting the extremes of masked vigilantes. Bringing in Daredevil to play, pardon the pun, devil's advocate for the justice system was a nice touch.

The art by Buckler and Hands was good, but also seemed to miss a step once the story switched gears. The fight against Sin-Eater and the showdown between Spidey and DD was very well rendered, but as soon as the exposition starts the artwork got a lot rougher and less defined. It was a vast difference from the first half, and definitely took me out of the story for a moment or two.

I'd forgotten that this was the issue where they learned each other's secret identity, so that was a pleasant surprise. Even more so, as it's a stark contrast to the state of the Marvel Universe over the last 5 years or so where everyone distrusts everyone and deals with the devil have rendered all of this moot anyway.

That's the great thing about longboxes, as we'll always have the good old days right at our fingertips.

All characters and artwork reproduced are (c) Marvel Comics

Related links for your surfing pleasure...

• Rich Buckler's official websites here and here
• Peter David's official website
• The Hipster Dad takes a spoiler-free look at an old copy of the trade collection
• Tom at the Fortress of Soliloquy once posted about this storyline too

Saturday Synchronicity #3

If you had a week like me, you left the comic book store with change leftover from a twenty. All that means, is that we have more than the usual excuses to go raiding the longboxes for reading material.

As a public service, here's some books tangentially related to some of the ones that did come out this week.

• It was one of those rare weeks with two (count 'em, two) books on the shelf with word balloons on the cover. Power Girl #10 and Green Lantern #52 were the two that went retro, so let's reminisce with some other dialogue heavy covers that we've seen here before. I really thought that there would've been more than this spattering of titles, but I suppose I could count this one also if I'm feeling generous.
  
  And hats off to Geoff Johns, for landing two issues on that list.



• So Kitty Pryde is back in Uncanny X-Men #522, but we miss out having the interior drawn this time around by Terry Dodson. Have no fear, Random Longbox readers, for we know what that would look like...don't we?

Thanks for checking in again this week. See you around the internets!

Confusion through the ages

It's the week of getting back on track, and since this is Wednesday we better strap in for another time-traveling blog post known as Comic Book Days of Wednesdays Past!

First up is a trip back to the tail end of the Golden Age of comics in 1954! So what were the kids reading, unaware of what great comic book characters were waiting to be re-imagined in two short years?

Hmmm...now I'm confused. It's an appearance of the 50's Cap, hero of the teabaggers! This is actually the third appearance of his return, so why didn't his return herald the birth of the Silver Age?

To be fair it wasn't a true reimagining. Actually, I don't think this Captain America got re-imagined until some two decades later when they tried to reconcile his non-continuity appearances here with the modern stories. At the time, this was a commercial failure that didn't catch on. I guess the kids just weren't ready for the Silver Age yet, and this title went down as a failed relaunch.

So that's not confusing at all. Let's try again and hope for something a little more straightforward. And forward in time it is, to the hurly-burly days of 1983!

So much for not being confused.

Here's a title that I have never heard of before, even though it went for twenty-seven issues during the time when I first started collecting comics.

Two things strike me as curious about this book.

First, this book is written and drawn by William Messner-Loebs. I had no idea that WM-L had any pencilling talents. I've enjoyed his stories over the years, so that caught me completely by surprise.

Second, I can't imagine Marvel legal allowing a comic book character being called Wolverine these days.

And while we're talking about odd things, who knew that anybody other than Dave Sim ever published a book through Aardvark-Vanaheim?

All right, it's time to use the Randomizer for the power of good, as we pick the next completely random book to review. Take it away Randomizer...

...and that book is Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #110 from January 1986, published by Marvel Comics!

It's good to see the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man again, as the last time we reviewed one of his books was way back in July!

While that's reason enough to be optimistic, this issue actually delivers in a couple of other areas as well.

First, it'll be the debut appearance of Daredevil at the Random Longbox. I dont' have a ton of book with Daredevil and Spider-Man, as both titles are ones that I collect more for the creators who are working on them, than a slavish devotion to the character. I'm a fan, just not enough of one to wade through the average stuff.

Which brings me to the second item of interest. The four-part Sin-Eater storyline that comes to a close in this issue just happens to be the debut work of Peter David.

It's been a while since I reread this story, and Peter David has obviously gone on to make quite a name for himself, so it should be interesting to see a hungry young creator looking to make his mark. See you in a day or two for the review.

H-2-Oh no...

So it turns out that Augie De Blieck Jr. wasn't just slacking with the Pipeline Podcast after all.

I feel your pain.

It makes me wonder if there isn't some nefarious plot to get all of us comic book blogger/podcasters out of the way. For what, I haven't quite figured out yet.

Although Aquaman is coming back next month...coincidence? I think not.

More fun with Dredd

Seeing as how we had so much fun recently with Judge Dredd, let's get back into the action and look at the second story from Judge Dredd #16 that we talked about yesterday.

Night of the Bloodbeast

• Writer: John Wagner
• Artist: Garry Leach
• Letterer: Tony Jacob
• Colorist: John Burns

The post-nuclear future may be a rough and scary place, but some things never change. Case in point...the husband dragging his feet on the way to visit his mother-in-law.

Lucky for this particular son-in-law, he gets eaten by a vicious monster who steps out of the elevator, so he doesn't have to visit the old battle-axe after all!

By the time that Judge Dredd is on the scene, things have gotten even more grisly as the monster has moved beyond his initial two victims and is working his way through the apartment building looking for more meat.

In a throwback to another previous Judge Dredd story, we find out that the monster is actually a member of the Klegg race of aliens. A mutated Klegg, but a Klegg nonetheless.

For those unfamiliar with Judge Dredd continuity, the Kleggs are an alien mercenary race that the tyrant Chief Judge Cal used to quell disorder in Mega-City One. Needless to say, things didn't pan out quite right and the aliens were banished from earth.

Not all of the Kleggs made it off planet however, as this particular one was kept hostage by a couple who thought they could make a buck or two off him after the rest of the Kleggs were destroyed. They kept him caged and fed him scraps until he was strong enough to escape and eat his captors. Oops.

Now loose in the building, it is welcomed into a costume party where compliments on his "costume" don't dissuade him from eating the other partygoers. That's where Judge Dredd catches up him and tries to take him down.

With regular bullets not even slowing him down, Dredd switches to Dum-Dum rounds but the beast keeps coming. Not even a couple of shots directly to the brain are enough to stop the creature before it has Dredd in it's grasp.

But Dredd's aim was true, it just took the creature a little bit longer to realize that he was dead.

Taking his final utterance as a post-mortem nom-de-guerre, Dredd eulegizes Urk as just as much a victim as everyone else. After all, he was just a beast, innocent in his desire to quench his hunger.

A good judge, however, knows that sometimes you have to protect the city against the innocent as well as the guilty.

SO, WHAT DID WE LEARN...

So far we're batting a thousand at the Random Longbox, as far as Judge Dredd stories go. While not as meaty (pardon the pun) as the previous tale, this one is just as entertaining with a little of the old ultra-violence.

This issue gives us a glimpse into the softer side of Judge Dredd, showing him to be more than just a cartoonish buffoon with a gun. Don't get me wrong, he's not crying over Urk's death or joining any candle-light vigils...but he does show that his sense of justice and the law is at least tempered with just a smidgen of humanity.

And suddenly the future doesn't look quite as dystopian.

Now it's time for me to get a little maudlin, as we say goodbye to Judge Dredd for now. Hopefully it won't be too long before the Randomizer picks another Dredd book, but in the meantime we'll carry on as best we can knowing that Mega-City One is in safe hands.

All characters and artwork reproduced are (c) Eagle Comics