It’s Gang War Time! Finally – this issue has more street level fighting than you can shake a stick at! There’s no sense in us dilly-dallying here – roll the opening credits!
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Story Title: Gang Way
Writer: Zeb Wells
Pencils: John Romita, Jr
Inker: Scott Hanna
Colorist: Marco Menyz
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramanga
Cover Artists: John Romita, Jr, Scott Hanna, and Marco Menyz
Asst. Editor: Kaeden McGahey
Editor: Nick Lowe
Remedial ASM 101
Tombstone was organizing the organized crime of New York until Tombstone was shot. Then Hammerhead blew up Madame Masque and then had Randy Robertson shot (because Randy is the poster boy for the Repeal Fisk’s Law movement). Once that happened, all Mephisto’s realm broke loose (figuratively speaking). Madame Masque, who was not dead, bashed in Hammerhead’s unbashable head and every gang lord in the five Burroughs began to try and take some territory. Spider-Man put together a team to fight back.
The Story – Pay Attention, This Will Be on the Test
Lots of different plot points happening here:
- With all of these cool gang war villains, who else better to start with than Hobgoblin! Only, we don’t. Instead, we start with the Ring Master who is just pulling civilians off the street and hypnotizing them into fighting his battles for him. He and Crime Master are duking it out when Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends (Daredevil (Electra version), She-Hulk, Miles Morales, and Spider-Woman) jump into the fray. Spider-Man proves to be an apt leader and they get the job done before they all split off to cover more ground (except She Hulk, who sticks around with Spider-Man to tackle a group of monsters coming up from underground because, well, why not?).
- In Harlem, Black Mariah is trying to take out White Rabbit in order to claim Tombstone’s territory, but did not count on the Beetle and the Sinister Syndicate. Janice, fresh off of her failure to shoot Randy, decides to ramp it up and bit and drops Black Mariah from a great height to send a message to the other gang lords. She gets greedy and wants to take on all of Harlem.
- Randy is still in the hospital and his father (sans mom) is by his side. When Tombstone wakes, he and Robbie exchange a few words.
- Madame Masque drags Hammerhead’s body all through the apartment building after taking some time to enjoy a glass of wine.
- Spider-Man and She-Hulk punch monsters, but Shotgun is watching and he is reporting to the person who ordered the Tombstone hit in the first place.
- Tombstone tries to stop Janice, but fails to, so he goes to team up with Spider-Man to save the day.
What Passed and Failed
PASS – Spider-Man as team leader – He’s got a odd group here, but he manages them well, even with one of them being rather hostile toward him. Spidey is not Captain America, but doesn’t need to be. I like how they respect him enough to follow his lead even though they are all individuals who would usually rather work alone. The only one missing here? Moon Knight.
FAIL – Miles Morales – He’s acting like a sorry suck-egg mule* here. (Click the asterisk!)
The angst is a bit much here. I’m not a fan of it. I like Miles generally, but I am so glad he is heading back to Brooklyn with his venom sword (rather silly, if you ask me, but I am behind on my Marvel Unlimited reading and haven’t gotten to the part where his venom blasts become something akin to a Green Lantern ring, so maybe when I get there I’ll be super impressed by how cool it really is).
PASS – Spider-Man and She-Hulk’s banter – Feels natural and fun and not like one is trying to be mean at the other’s expense.
FAIL – Randy’s Mother – She doesn’t want to be at the hospital where her son is because he might not survive?
What the heck Wells? This is on the same level as Harry Osborn saying he sometimes forgets he has one of his sons. There are only two potential reasons for this egregious misrepresentation of a mother here. One is that something major is going to happen at the hospital and Wells didn’t want to have to deal with her presence or Wells just doesn’t understand parenting. If one of my children are in the hospital, I’m there. I’m not leaving there. Randy’s mom would be camped out there and sleeping in that uncomfortable chair or, if nothing else, taking turns with Robbie so that one of them is always with Randy.
PASS – Robbie and Tombstone’s banter – Just fun stuff.
OOTI (Onomatopoeia of the Issue)
On a scale of 1 (POW) to 10 (BLRKBQRKPQRBLNB), SLLLRRRCH gets a 9. What a satisfying sound! I love the symmetry of the three ‘L’s and the three ‘R’s. The only thing that could bump this up a bit more may have been to have the blood itself spell out the sound, but we get mighty close with the coloring.
Minor Distraction
See White Rabbit doing a typical rabbity thing like chomping on this carrot?
Why does she do this? Because of Clark Gable. Specifically this scene in It Happened One Night (1934):
See? Not convinced? Well, later, in 1940, Warner Bros is trying to come up with a gag that will make their newest character, Bugs Bunny, more appealing in his first (official) appearance “A Wild Hare”. They decided to mold him after the carrot-chomping Clark Gable.
They also threw in catch phrases from the movie like, “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs became such a hit and he continued the carrot gag to the point where people forgot the origin and only associated it with Bugs and eventually assumed that all rabbits absolutely go bonkers for carrots.
Analysis
Pacing – There is A LOT of plot lines converging here. This is where Zeb Wells shows he can handle his writing duties. He spent enough time on each to tell that part of the story without getting bogged down on scenes we don’t care about. He showed enough fight scenes to keep it moving. He made each of them seem like they fit and aren’t just filler or ads for this other story happening in this tie-in over here. I guess credit needs to also go to Nick Lowe for being the editor and overseeing all these comics lining up. Here’s hoping they can keep it going!
Bad Guy – Who is our mysterious bad guy who put all of this into motion? I know he is off with the White Queen or something, but I want it to be Kingpin making his move to return as Kingpin of crime.
Spider-Man not central character – While this may be a turn off for some, I am not upset by it in this issue. This is a massive story with a lot of moving parts. We stayed focused on the Spider-Man-centric parts. By that I mean any scene with Spider-Man or a character associated with Spider-Man (Tombstone, Janice, Randy). That is all fair game for an event of this magnitude. This isn’t Spider-Man’s war, this affects all of New York. We don’t have a main Gang War title, so the Amazing Spider-Man is filling that role. That said, now that all the parts are in play, the Spider-Man issues should be getting more and more spider-focused until they all come back together. Also, I am OK without knowing everything that could be known here. Why is it Electra as Daredevil? How did Miles get a silly venom sword? Who are all of these gang lords? No. If I want to, I can go find those, but I don’t need to know it to enjoy the story. Would be nice to have editor boxes telling a little something here and there, but Lowe doesn’t like those for some reason.
Extra Credit
In the letters pages, Lowe says they have been building toward this since ASM #10. So have some fun and go back to read it.
Final Grade
This is a great start to the event! I enjoyed pretty much everything about it. Hopefully we will get more on Spider-Man in future issues, but for now, it seems worth the build up.
A
Your Turn
What grade do YOU give it?
For Further Research
I was going to research all the gang bosses and put them in a Bad Villain Spotlight, but I saw that RJB already did it in last issues comments section, so I was just going to steal it (with proper accreditation, of course), but then I got lazy and am already on hour 3 of this review, so here’s a map:
What’s Next?
Folks, Craig has next issue for you and who knows, he may wish to grab all of those other ones too (he’s an industrious little bugger). I’ll see you in January for #41. Actually, I’ll see you two more times before then – I hope to get a Cobwebs out for Christmas and I’ll be going for win #3 in Spider-Jeopardy this month.
But Wait! There’s More!
In the letter’s pages, we have a letter from Crawlspace frequenter, Mr. Comics! Congrats, man!
* My mother used this phrase rather often. I asked her about it once and she said to me, what’s worse than a suck-egg dog? A suck-egg mule. That’s all I got. So, I now use it as often as I can. Return I’m trying to use anchors to see if this is a feasible way to jump around through foot notes or not to appease Evan. Let’s see if it works.
Deb Whitman not in this issue (but she was last issue (sort of), thanks to our very own Chi-Town, no less!)
‘Nuff Said!
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@Aqu@ — It’s perfectly okay. Your words were just fine — I just saw the word “gold” and that’s the first character I thought of.
I have the feeling a little misunderstanding caused by my wording created a ripple effect…
Oh, well. *shrugs*
(I should have used “It’s pure gold)
@Dark Mark — I guess if we can’t have Goldballs, then Golden Peter will do.
@Dark Mark — Thank you! While I love “What if?”-type stories, I have to say I’m a little bit tired of the multiverse. I guess there’s a difference between multiversal variants who are just completely different Spider-people, and multiversal variants who are all, say, Peter Parkers who made different choices. I prefer the latter, but maybe I’m in the minority.
Golden Peter……Yep.
@Aqu@ and @Evan
Marvel Solicit: Pure Gold examines the impact of the gold notebook from Secret Wars II on an alternate universe Peter Parker in a parallel look at how each Peter’s life has been impacted by the decision to take the gold notebook or to not take it. Now, 616 Peter, while facing the fall out of Gang War and the decisions he made to end it, will have a choice to make, but is all that glitters gold or is there a more sinister motive behind Golden Peter?
No need to look this up. You can trust me to always be truthful about Marvel solicits.
@Aqu@ — It would make my day if that solicit were a reference to Goldballs.
@Hornacek
We now know what the next spin-off title will be about. Pure gold, or so they solicit.
@Dark Mark:
That’s results-oriented thinking. A psychiatrist who chooses to contact their patient’s friends/family and tell you everything the patient told them has no business being a psychiatrist.
Deb should hire a lawyer and sue that psychiatrist for violating her trust and breaking all of his doctor-rules.
@Hornacek – To be fair, it *did* work. This guy just did let all that legal mumbo-jumbo get in the way of helping his clients. Fairly admirable, I might say. 🙂
@Evan Berry:
But it reads like Mantlo thinks this guy is being a good psychiatrist by doing all of this.
@Hornacek — That just means Bill Mantlo is really good at writing really bad psychiatrists. 🙂
Ha! Ha! Well, you got me there!
@Dark Mark:
The problem with that answer is that Mantlo was also the one who had Deb’s psychiatrist break every professional rule and told Peter everything Deb had told him in confidence, and also let Peter secretly witness one of her sessions.
Hornacek, I’d have to go with Bill Mantlo, but only because he was the one, I think, to see that her story was all over the place and decided to do something with how things just happened before getting rid of her for good.
@Mark — I remember that article! That was one of your best — along with the Hostess Snack Cakes one (parts 1 and 2!) . I’m surprised we both forgot about it.
@Dark Mark:
I will see if I can use links to my footnotes in the next review. Fingers crossed it works!
So who in your opinion was the definitive writer of Deb Whitman? Who was the one writer who wrote her correctly, and everyone else wrote her out of character?
@Dark Mark- FWIW, the preview for Miles Morales:Spider-Mann 13 is out:
https://aiptcomics.com/2023/12/08/marvel-preview-miles-morales-spider-man-13-2/
This issue was written by Zigler, not Wells. We can see that Miles really does feel neglected by Peter but we also see that he feels a little bad (or at least uncomfortable) about mouthing off to him like that.
BTW, I love Miles’s reaction in that preview to seeing Frost Pharaoh and Bumbler. He’s basically like “Don’t tell I’m stuck fighting these losers for the rest of this crossover! Everyone else gets to fight cool villains like Kingpin or Owl or Mr. Negative!”
@Evan and @Hornacek
Evan – I think it is safe to assume that Chi-Town endorses and approves of everything I write. You know, I went through the hassle of learning how to jump around inside a WordPress article and when I was done, I realized that I had already learned to do that a few years ago when I wrote a Cobwebs article on a Choose Your Own Adventure/D&D style Spider-Man book and I wrote the whole article in that same style (If you choose to find out about… click here, if you would rather see how they…click here). It is extra work, so I don’t know how gratified Craig will be. In fact, he may already know and decided it wasn’t worth the time and just pretended nobody knew how to do it until I came along and ruined his lie.
Hornacek – Your idea that Miles is behaving badly because it is two different writers with one not knowing the character as well and going off of what was presented has merit. That’s what happened with Deb Whitman. Nobody really knew what to do with her and saw that Peter ditched her in a date, so they just did that in their book and when you string the different Spider-Man titles together, she’s being ditched all the time and then it became a story point.
@Geiseric:
Betrayal after betrayal after betrayal! That’s get us through to the spring.
Wait gang war is going to march? I don’t think it has enough for that honestly
“Story Title: Gang Way”
Is the title really Gang WAY? Or was this a typo?
Agree with you about Randy’s mother not being at the hospital, that’s just ridiculous. If this was a TV series I would say that the actress playing her was not in the main cast so they didn’t want to pay her to appear for a brief scene where she might not even have any dialogue. But for her not to be at the hospital at all – no way.
Regarding Miles still calling out Spidey, I liked it in First Strike because it was part of the other characters being a surrogate for the readers and telling Spidey “Get your act together, get your head in the game – you should be doing more, you’re Spider-Man.” But I felt that Miles and him hashed through that in FS – there’s no need for Miles to still be saying stuff like this to him. He made his point in FS and he sees that it got through to Spidey. I put this down to Ziglar co-writing (guest-writing?) the FS issue, and he was able to write Miles in that FS scene, and this issue is just Zells, so he doesn’t know Miles as well as Ziglar – it’s like Zells thinks “Oh, Miles acted like this to Spidey in FS? Well, that’s how he should act towards him in the entire GW story.”
@Mark — Hey, there’s Chi-Town once again at the top of your review! (I take that to mean he endorses and approves of everything written below.)
I’d like to report that your asterisk link worked very well — And, whereas the CTRL F function works fine, albeit less easily, it necessarily reveals later parts of the article, so there’s a potential for spoilers, as it were. The link, on the other hand, displays the footnote at the top of the screen and so conceals from view the later portions of the article. I know that Craig will be very gratified if you share your method with him.
I love Frank Capra’s movies (not to be confused with Franz Kafka — He didn’t make movies, to my knowledge). Did you know that much of the initial critical appeal of Back to the Future stemmed from its being Capra-esque? (Wow, how did that Back to the Future reference get in there? Where was I?) I believe I was reading a book on Warner Bros. animation and learned that Bugs Bunny was based on Clark Gable, and that is how I first learned of It Happened One Night. Incidentally, any of the Looney Toons with caricatured celebrities (e.g., Slick Hair — “Your pie, sir!”) are among my favorites. This is something that Animaniacs later did quite frequently.
Excellent rating on “SLLLRRRCH.” It has a visceral element that actually made me cringe as I heard it in my head. I always imagined Hammerhead’s head to be slippery anyway (doesn’t light glint off of it sometimes?), but blood seems like a pretty good lubricant on top of that (in the figurative and literal sense).
I was confused about Randy’s mother not being in the hospital, too. If that doesn’t play a part in the plot later, as you said, it will confuse me even more, because what other reason could there be to write that? If I were in the hospital for a wound like that, I couldn’t get rid of my mother if I tried.
Thank you also for your opinion on Miles’s behavior — There’s a point when reminding someone of his responsibility changes from helpful to outright obnoxious, and Miles has already passed it. Maybe Wells is playing up the teenage angst here, but Miles has had to mature beyond that sort of thing ahead of his time, so I’m not sure that’s a good explanation. He isn’t very likeable here, to me, and I’m not sure that is the intention.
Looking forward to all the comments on this article to come — as well as to the Cobwebs article!
Michael – Well, if that’s the case, I completely missed Madame Masque being the one controlling Shotgun. Why would it be presented here as a mysterious voice? Seems like it was setting up a shadow figure behind it all.
As for why they all converged on Hammerhead’s death/concussion, I think it was about to happen anyway. Hammerhead’s shenanigans had everyone primed for action and all it took was one spark to ignite that powder keg. Once the war started, everyone was all in. I don’t think it was the news that Hammerhead was out so much as it was opportunity was there for any reason and everyone was ready to take it. You had Tombstone and Madame Masque’s territories up for grabs already and people positioning themselves to take it or to take other territory in the confusion that entails.
I get what you are saying about everyone grieving in their own way, but I’m doubling down on my irritation in showing Randy’s mother as not even wanting to see her son in the hospital because he may never leave. She’s abandoning him and, for that matter, Robbie as well. I just don’t buy it.
I don’t have a problem with Hobgoblin, Diamondback, Owl, and Mr. Negative being given to these other heroes. The main story is about Tombstone, Masque, and Hammerhead. Spider-Man gets those guys, and thus the main story. It is fitting. The monsters that he fought this issue were just a place holder to position Tombstone into place. Spidey’s in the heat of the action here. Besides, Hobgoblin is a far cry from his ’80s glory days. Let Miles tackle him with his venom sword. I’ll pay a Hobgoblin in exchange for getting Angsty-Boy out of the title. And that’s not a dis on Miles – I love Miles, but if he is going to be constantly sniping at Peter, then let him go. Spider-Man has his hands more than enough full with Tombstone, Masque, and Hammerhead.
Re: the mysterious bad guy- it’s not so mysterious after all. It’s Madame Masque. At the end of Gang War- First Strike, we see Madame Masque calling up Shotgun, implying that she was the one who ordered the hit. I almost don’t blame you for missing it, because it was such an understated way to reveal who shot Tombstone- Masque doesn’t even say “I ordered you to shoot Tombstone.”
One thing bothers me- if Hammerhead wasn’t killed, and in fact is coherent enough to say things like “They’ll come to you”, then why did all the mobsters stop being afraid of defying him? The captions say it’s only been six hours since Hammerhead was attacked. I’m not buying that they’d all be at each other’s throats so quickly just because Hammerhead received a concussion.
Re: Randy’s mother- every parent deals with grief differently. I could see some parents reacting that way. Besides, Robbie says he’s not sure if that’s the reason she’s not here. This is nowhere near as ridiculous as Harry saying that he forgot about his firstborn child now that his second child is born.
The weird thing is that in Gang War- First Strike, Robbie looked like he was at Tombstone’s bedside out of concern, as Hornacek pointed out. In this issue, Robbie says he was only there because he wanted him to see the damage his “business” caused, and to see if he could get Tombstone to help. It’s like the artist in First Strike drew Robbie looking concerned and Wells felt the need to explain it away.
So what’s going on with Hammerhead? He said “They’ll come for you.” And Madame Masque pointed out the captive Silvermane and Count Nefaria and he said “No”. Did he mean “No, I can’t believe they’re captured” or “No I have other partners besides them.”?
The problem with this issue is that it featured minor villains that were no match for the heroes, so it was a quick fight. That’s because the major villains aside from Masque, Beetle, Hammerhead and Tombstone are all farmed out to the crossover titles- Hobgoblin to Miles, Diamondback to Spider-Woman, Owl to Elektra and Mr. Negative to Shang- Chi.