Alford Notes: Amazing Spider-Man #44/845

It’s the long awaited for return of Kindred! Will it live up to the wait?  Will we get Kindred’s identity?  Will you be able to identify Peter from the art? Will someone just grab a can of Raid and kill Kindred?  Folks, all these questions and more will be answered in this review of Amazing Spider-Man #44!

 

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Story Title:  Beware the Rising

Writer: Nick Spencer

Artists: Kim Jacinto with Bruno Oliveira

Colorist: David Curiel

Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramanga

Cover Artist:Carlos Gomez and Morry Hollowell

Asst. Editor: Kathleen Wisneki

Editor: Nick Lowe

Published: July 15, 2020

 

Remedial ASM 101

The mysterious Kindred has been stalking Peter for a while, threatening to cause violence and destruction upon him, but we still don’t know much about who he is or what he wants.

The Story – Pay Attention, This Will Be on the Test

Peter is sleeping and dreams of riding along with Overdrive while Overdrive unsuccessfully tries to get away from Sin Eater.  Then Peter wakes up, calls MJ and leaves a heartfelt message on her answering machine telling her why he needs her and hinting that he wants to marry her.  He then has projectile centipede vomit and rats start exploding from his chest because this, too, is a dream.  Kindred then suggests that this is not Peter’s dream at all, but the dreams of all the spider-heroes.

What Passed and Failed

PASS – Overdrive – What an odd power set, but fun character.  I love that he was able to even trick out a paper airplane made from a $20 dollar bill.

FAIL – Art – I’m going to have to disagree here with new ASM reviewer Peter Norbot (big surprise, I know).  He praised the art, but I found it very distracting in the second half of the book.  The Overdrive dream was OK, but once we got into Peter’s second dream, it fell apart for me.  Kindred just lacked the umph he needs to scare me.  Here are two Kindreds from this issued juxtaposed* against a standard Kindred image:

I hate to comment on art as I have little artistic ability myself, but I found my enjoyment fade as soon as the art fell apart. Kindred is not consistent from one panel to the next.  Peter is not recognizable by art alone. It’s not Eric Larsen Mary Jane bad, but still…

But I am not an artist and since I find that Brad agrees with me judging from the comments on Peter’s review I am beginning to doubt myself, so with Peter pro-at and me anti-art, I’ll let Neil weigh in on his review and be the deciding vote.

Peter’s poor conception of art aside, he wrote a great review and you need to read it (after you and comment on mine, of course) and welcome him to the ASM group!

FAIL – Mistreated note cards – This is no way to treat your research.  Look at them scattered all over the place!  You keep them together with a rubber band and you write them in pen since pencil often smears when they rub together.  I’m very disappointed.

OOTI (Onomatopoeia of the Issue)

On a scale of 1 (POW) to 10 (BLRKBQRKPQRBLNB), VVVRRROOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM rates a 6.  Normally VROOM would be a lower score, but the fact that it contains no less than 29 Ms and takes three panels to hold it bumps it up several notches.  It does lose a point for the fact that the same onomatopoeia was used (with not as many Ms, of course) a few times earlier for the car.

 

Analysis

The Sin Eater Dream – Since this is a dream issue, we do not know how much of this we can believe.  Does Sin Eater have power like this now?  He’s like a Michael Myers figure (you know, no matter how far the teenagers drive or run, he’s still right behind them holding a big knife that someone carelessly left on a counter)!  Is the scene where he rips the humanity completely out of the Inner Demons something that happened and Peter is being given a glimpse of what is coming his way?  Hard to tell.  A lot of time was spent on this scene, so I’m assuming there is more to it than just a dream.

The Dream within a Dream – OK, I know that it is probably more of an Inception reference, but I am going to take the dream within a dream quote to be an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?”** It much more literary that way plus Poe spells Allan the same way Liz Allan does, so it is obviously a big time clue!  🙂  This is the meat of the issue.  While it is all just a dream, we are to pay attention to the confession Peter gives to Mary Jane about how she is the reason for him to be Peter.  We’ll talk more about that later, but it does seem that there is no reason for the phone call in a dream obviously controlled by Kindred unless the lost marriage and/or the impeding proposal is important to Kindred’s plan.  The end of the issue does pose a few questions – Kindred says this is not Peter’s dream and then we see that the rest of the spider-family (minus Miguel) waking up from a dream.  So… Peter is still clueless to Kindred’s presence?  Did Silk and company dream they were Peter with projectile insect vomit?  I followed the whole dream sequence until that.  If I’m just missing something, please let me know, otherwise I am assuming that the “it wasn’t your dream” line was just to be like the Sphinx.

This also tells us that Kindred has dream powers, which would possibly make me think that all of his powers are illusionary in nature, but we have seen him kill with centipedes, so he has a mixture of both.  This is not a clue to his former identity as much as it is an ability of his current identity.

Who’s That Kindred?

We get a few more clues to Kindred’s identity here, though not enough for me since I’ve been waiting way too long for this issue to come out.  If you need a refresher on the previous clues to Kindred’s identity, read this.

• Kindred says he did not feel cold when dying – I’m not overly positive that this is a clue, but it could be. My top two contenders for Kindred are Harry and Norman, both of who have died and come back mysteriously.  Norman dies being impaled, which doesn’t seem to warm, but Harry dies either from an explosion or dehydration from the crazy sweats brought on by the goblin formula.
• Kindred says his death is unique – ok, two references to his death means that the death scene is important. Norman’s death would be unique in that, if we go with my theory, he split at death and went to hell as Norman, but continued living as the Goblin.  Harry’s death is unique in that he mysteriously is no longer dead thanks to Peter’s deal with Mephisto.  With that in mind, it would pay to look back at Harry’s death issue, Spectacular Spider-Man #200.  For those of you who still haven’t come to your senses and subscribed to that service, here are a few highlights from the issue.  The first three panel strips are when he takes Mary Jane to the top of THE BRIDGE and the last strip is his last words after pulling Peter to safety.

So, if Spencer is trying to put our focus on Kindred’s death, we see Harry’s death issues has a lot of similarities to Kindred’s comments.  Harry is focused on his friendship with Gwen, his love for Mary Jane, and his focus on how Peter ruined his life.  In the last panel, he claims they are best friends, but this is not necessarily a redemption of his character.  Throughout the entire issue he is flip flopping between “I’m a nice guy, good father, good son, good friend,” and “I’m going to burn it all down!”, so this Barney the Dinosaur I-Love-You moment is not likely to have lasted five seconds if Harry had lived that long.

• All Spider-Heroes are involved – Well, this isn’t the first time we’ve gotten this one and these don’t seem to fit any of the Osborn clues unless they are blaming Peter for being a role model that leads them to disaster as well.  The only identity clue we’ve gotten so far that deals with all the Spider-Family is Mephisto saying he loves to torture “Spider-Men”. This was done in a Mile Morales book and just seems to be more coincidence than Kindred related.

Extra Credit

So, we get this panel and as Norbot pointed out, it was mentioned by Spencer at some convention in a minor town (Chicago, I think):

So, we are Crawlspacers!  We have more knowledge of the webhead than anybody!  What are YOUR thoughts on what Kindred wants? Put your answer in the comments section!

 

Final Grade

I want to like this one, but instead of being the big return of Kindred that I was looking forward to, it turned out to be more of a placeholder before beginning the run to issue #50.  That and the art hurt it for me.  I did like the Overdrive segment and there were some possible new clues about Kindred, so that helps.

C

 

Your Turn

What grade do YOU give it?

 

What’s Next?

“SINS RISING” PART 1!
•  SIN-EATER is back and New York City is in TROUBLE.
•  Who will the shotgun-toting villain target, and can Spider-Man stand a chance against him?

Please note the awful way this official preview is written.  I’ll let you have fun editing it to make it grammatically correct and I’ll let you have fun with the vague pronoun – who the antecedent of ‘him’?  Sin Eater?  The target?  I guess we’ll have to see next issue.  Guess what the editors did NOT do with their extended time of Covid shut down…  And yes, I know that pointing out proofreading errors in someone else’s writing makes me fair game for mine and I didn’t really proof mine either (but then again, Brad’s not paying me as much as Marvel pays its editors).***

 

Nick Lowe has asked people to let the Spider office know how they are doing by sending an email to spideyoffice@marvel.com and to make sure you mark it “OK to print”.  If you get published, make sure to draw our attention to it!

No letter pages this issue – and thank goodness!  Can you even imagine what Chi-Town’s Breakdown would have looked like if he also had a letter in this issue?  Geez!  I shudder at the thought!

 

*Norbot, ‘juxtaposed’ means placing things next to each other purposefully to compare, contrast, or reveal deeper meaning.

** OK, OK! I know that you are all now wanting to read the entire poem, so here it is:

A Dream within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

 

***So now other front page reviewers are wondering if Brad actually pays me.

 

‘Nuff Said!