Summary: <br> It’s the 1980s which means the Vulture, Peter making a big decision about college, and the kid who collected Spider-man.<br> Affiliate link included. <br> Transcript below:<br> Spidey battles Cobra, Mr. Hyde and the Vulture, while making a tough decision about whether to continue on in grad school. We’ll tell you all about it as we look at Essential Amazing Spider-Man, Volume Eleven, straight ahead.<br> <br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here’s your host, Adam Graham. Volume Eleven was the last of the black and white reprint Marvel Essential lines for The Amazing Spider-Man, so we’ll cover most of the issues in that book and I’ll tell you about those that we won’t but will be covering on a future program. This book collects Amazing Spider-Man Issues 232 to 248 and Annual 16 and 17. The book begins with Cobra and Mr. Hyde appearing as the villains in issues 232 to 233. They were originally two Thor villains but they really work well here in Spider-Man. And the way that they are introduced is that the first issue is just all Spider-Man dealing with Cobra and then Mr. Hyde appears determined to get at Cobra because he has a grudge against his ex-partner. It’s just a pretty solid super villain battle featuring two villains from another character that works pretty well.<br> Then we get into the Brand Corporations saga which happens over Issues 234 to 236 and involves the super powerful Will O’ the Wisp, and you also get the Tarantula into the mix. The stakes are not particularly high but it’s a good story where there is just enough ingredients used with Mad Science, the question of justice versus revenge, and a guest villain and character in Will of the Wisp whose morality is a little bit more grey than Spider-Man. So it’s a really well-balanced tale and it’s a nice reading. I believe that there were several Issues that kind of set the groundwork for this as well. <br> Issue number 237 is all about Stilt Man, in this case Wilbur Day, a character who is been a bit of a joke in the comics and certainly in comic fandom, as he’s just really upset about how his life has gone, and tries to make yet another comeback and of course he runs into Spider-Man. This is a pretty good character piece, taking a character who hadn’t gotten much play over the years and really making him interesting. This type of thing is done a lot today. You see it like with Tom King’s take on Kite Man, but wasn’t as common back then and so this was pretty innovative and it worked out fairly well. <br> Now we come to the Annual which served to introduce a new Captain Marvel. And it reminds me of…if you’ve ever seen a TV show say from the 1960s and ’70s, oftentimes the TV show will air an episode that’s billed as an episode of this particular show, but is actually a backdoor pilot for another show. And I can think of examples of that with Star Trek in Season Two airing the episode of Assignment Earth which was a backdoor pilot for that series, and the series Green Acres ended with an episode which was actually a backdoor pilot for another entire, completely different type of series. And so this book feels very much like this. <br> The story is about Monica Rambeau and how she got her powers, and I, you know, fairly unlikely why but certainly not for the Marvel Universe, and as she’s actually come to New York to get help controlling her powers, and she goes to the Fantastic Four, and unfortunately for her Reed and Sue Richards are out at Martha’s Vineyard and then goes over to the Avengers. Spider-Man sees her and assumes that she’s up to no good and actually intervenes and nearly blows up the Avengers headquarters, if not for some fast thinking by Iron Man and some later fast thinking by him. This is an OK story.
