Pursuit (SM45, SSM211, WEB112, ASM389)

February 29, 2020

As I noted in my last post, the Pursuit storyline is all about Spider-Man being out for revenge. He’s officially endured enough bullshit and has totally snapped. Even the villains he fights during the Pursuit storyline are taken aback at Spider-Man’s lack of wisecracks and the radical shift from his overall nimblybimbly dogoodery fighting style. Now that Spider-Man is totally pissed off, he is hunting down his enemies while screaming death threats at them.

Sweet Jesus! This never would have happened in the Golden Age.

I think it’s a Spider-Man that we’ve always wanted to see, probably out of morbid curiosity if nothing else. Spider-Man is so dark and violent, he's just a couple extra pouches on his costume away from being in Image comics (cheap shot!). Things are full throttle as we watch Spider-Man smash straight through all of the Chameleon’s tricks and traps rather than have to struggle through and think his way out of each sticky situation. No solving puzzles or relying on asbestos webs to make his way through the dungeon. It's just straight up "fuck yo traps" Spider-Man smashing through everything and one-shotting tigers. Spider-Man is so terrifying and relentless that the Chameleon tries to commit suicide.

Ha ha, Spider-Man! You can't kill me if I kill myself first!

If they had known in the 60’s that by 1994, there would be epic 4-parter Spider-Man sagas published within 4 measly back-to-back-to-back-to-back weeks, it would have blown their fragile LSD-saturated minds. The amount of coordination it must have taken to get the story straight across 4 different creative teams in that short of a timeframe must have been a challenge. There’s no way they would be able to pull this off every month for the next several years, right? WRONG, mister.

The four stages of grief: sadness, rage, webslinging away from your problems, and finally, crushing your enemies with the tombstone of their dead friend/slavemaster

Pursuit was the first multi-Spidey title story where I managed to collect all the pieces. At this point, I was a bit more prepared (a very different situation to that whole Maximum Carnage dumpster fire), though it meant spending all of my savings at the drug store spinner racks.

One of the harder things to get used to when reading the Spider titles in sequence is that the art is really different from book to book. The swings in art style occasionally made the whole story feel disconnected. That's not to say that the art wasn't great; at the time of Pursuit, there was a solid lineup with Lyle on Spider-Man, Buscema on Spectacular (Sal, not John), Saviuk on Web and, of course, Mark mother effin’ Bagley on Amazing.

At first, having the four artists each with their own take on the wall crawler can be a bit jarring as you move through the different parts of Pursuit. But as long as you just go with it, you eventually learn to love the little extra dimension it brings to the experience.

I’ve always been a big fan of Tom Lyle’s art. It's clean and precise. He also came up with the winning Scarlet Spider design (which I will definitely talk about in a later post.)

Sal Buscema was probably my least favourite of the four. He had a great ability to draw intense action (which served him well when he was drawing the Hulk), but I always found his people were generic and ugly looking (notwithstanding that Steve Ditko probably would have approved of that particular element) and that the backgrounds were also very generic, if not non-existent. I’ll talk more about backgrounds whenever I get around to writing about Ross Andru (who was dope as absolute fuck.)

Alex Saviuk has drawn some of my favourite Spider-Man covers. I think he is probably the best artist at drawing a very specific perspective of Spider-Man—it’s sort of an isometric view, but from sort of behind Spider-Man but also kind of from the side. It looks awesome whenever Spidey is jumping into battle or rag dolling a N.Y. city thug against a wall.

Mark Bagley is on a whole other level. Every panel is iconic. His attention to detail really sucks you in. In a fun side note, he actually became an artist at Marvel by winning the Marvel try-out contest. Makes you think: maybe they should have more of those stupid contests because... well, damn!

Everyone has their favourite Spider-Man artist(s), and many prolific artists have drawn Spider-Man over the years. There are also certainly some less famous, massively underrated gems out there, though you won't find them all unless you read all the books (and not just ASM, like some filthy casual.)

It also adds an air of mystery. Mary Jane: is she a total babe? Or is she goddamn wrecked? Maybe she’s Al Bundy's wife? Maybe she’s hot, hot trash. Tom, Sal, Alex and Mark all had different ideas.