Spectacular Spider-Man 159 - Acts of Vengeance

The next Spider-Man chapter in the saga sees him put up against the Brothers Grimm, one of the more obscure pairs of super-villains in Marvel. The original brothers first appeared in the original Spider-Woman series, but these are the second pair who have been used so sparingly that it's actually a surprise to find they consider Iron Man to be their arch foe. Meanwhile Spider-Man is continuing to explore his new powers and keeps thwarting the attempts of Doctor Doom to discover more about them.

Spectacular Spider-Man #159

Script: Gerry Conway
Breakdowns: Sal Buscema
Finishes: Mike Esposito
Lettering: Rick Parker
Colours: Bob Sharen
Edits: Jim Salicrup
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

This is another issue that feels like it's treading water and isn't even fully in sync with other things happening. Early in the issue Spider-Man is astonished to discover that he can now fly, yet he discovered this power in the previous chapter of the sage (Amazing Spider-Man #327). It would have been so easy to modify this to his powers getting out of control again, but this part of the script hasn't been fixed. There are also a couple of subplots shown in the title, but both don't really advance. One sees another conversation about the possibility of getting Joe Robertson a pardon, but this is a storyline that has dragged out interminably and the angle of his lawyer being interested in a sleazy Daily Bugle photographer is something that we could just do without. Meanwhile J. Jonah Jameson has plans to launch a new photo journal magazine in order to get himself back into news publishing and is trying to recruit Peter to the project. Although it has long-term possibilities, at the moment this just feels like a distraction.

The battle itself feels rather too much like a throwback to the Silver Age, but then this issue is written by the man who once did a story of Manhattan Island being stolen by terrorists and then dragged back into place by Hercules. So in this regard the Brothers Grimm using the Wizard's anti-gravity disks to raise the whole of Madison Square Gardens isn't the silliest thing to have appeared from Conway's pen (and Sal Buscema has certainly had to draw some nonsense in his time). But it's not only ludicrous but also highly repetitive after Graviton also used his powers to float a building in an earlier chapter in the same arc. "This is getting ridiculous" declares Spider-Man but "getting" is the wrong word. Spider-Man's powers continue to be difficult to control, as shown when he declares he's taking charge, only to immediate overact and destroy yet another of Doctor Doom's spy cameras when he wanted to examine it.

It is an unfortunate case that this storyline feels insufficient for the number of issues assigned to it. Consequently we're getting inconsequential chapters that do next to nothing to really advance the story and just show the problems of having too many series for a character all trying to tell the same tale. If this was a deliberate attempt to show why the three books should be running their own stories (as indeed they largely did for the next three years) then it proved the point. However I think it instead reached that by accident.

Spectacular Spider-Man #159  has been reprinted in:

• Spider-Man: The Cosmic Adventures (1993)
• Acts of Vengeance Omnibus (2011)
• Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: Cosmic Adventures (2013)