El Asombroso Hombre Araña Bs. 80 No 3

First up out of Ye Olde Longbox is an issue of El Asombroso Hombre Araña. This is by no means the worst comic I've got lying around, but it is, alphabetically, the first. My Spanish is a little rusty; I'm pretty sure the title reads "The Shadow Bear Spiderman", which is a pretty interesting direction to take the series in (n.b. - I know "asombroso" doesn't mean Shadow Bear - it means Hatless, which is perfectly reasonable).

Anyway, this is a Spanish-language translation of Amazing Spider-Man #334, drawn by Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen. Specifically, it's the first issue of the "Regreso del Siniestro Seis" (Return of the Sinister Six) storyline, in which a coalition of six villains who have nothing to do with fellow Marvel baddie Mr. Sinister hatch an evil plot against the ol' webslinger. The first thing I noticed upon reading this is that perfectly ordinary names, like Doctor Octopus, sound really funny in other languages. Doctor Pulpo? That's insane! The second thing I noticed is that Larsen was still kinda trying to figure out backgrounds and faces:

(Above: YOU CAN DRAW: Horrific caricatures in a poorly-defined space)

The plot of this issue is that Electro, Doc Ock and Sandman are teaming up to defeat El Hombre Araña. Or, at least, that's what I think the plot is supposed to be. Most of the book is taken up by an Iron Man cameo, a totally unnecessary chunk of pages about Mary Jane's acting job, and a subplot in which Aunt May's boyfriend is attacked by a tastefully diverse gang of thugs.

(Above: Aunt May's still got it, despite being a walking desiccated corpse)

All in all, it's not actually so bad a comic, although the art's kind of hit or miss, and the translation just doesn't quite work (For example, there's a panel in which Aunt May's necrophiliac boyfriend says "May!!" while being robbed, to which the thug answers, "Mala pronunciación, querras decir 'permitame'," which translates to "Bad pronounciation, you meant to say 'let me'." I can only assume it was a pun on the May-as-name/may-as-in-"may I" homonym, but it just sounds weird in Spanish). Also, there's only one advertisement in the entire book, which is just plain weird. Are there no consumer goods for children in Venezuela? In any case, I could have definitely started out with worse.

Introduction

I've been reading comics for a while, from my popsicle-sticky days of Archie Double Digest, to my nerdy adolescence collecting X-Men issues, to my current cool adulthood reading only critically acclaimed graphic narratives and certainly not japanese romance manga for teen girls. Over the years, I've read a lot of great stuff: books that have made me laugh out loud, books that have almost brought me to tears, books that have proven that yes, comics are art.

This blog is not about those books.

This blog is about the titles that no one remembers fondly, the ones that we bought from the CVS and then cut up for art projects a year later, the ones that, instead of being lovingly preserved in a mylar bag, were rolled up and used to swat flies. But someone has to preserve their memory, right?

Not me, though. I'm just having fun with a pile of crappy old comics.