Time Has Told Me

So, as a little break from my coloring (which I find terribly relaxing), I've been reading the first three issues of the Spider-Woman: Origin mini-series, and I'm having some difficulties parsing some of what I'm reading and keeping it in sync with what I remember from a lot of the characters Bendis decided to bring in.

Generally speaking, issue #1 isn't much of a stretch and pretty well follows my vague recollection of Spider-Woman's early history at Wundagore Mountain and what-not. I was somewhat confused by the fact that Herbert Edgar Wyndham, the High Evolutionary, was 1) an older gentleman, and 2) being referred to as 'general.' Furthermore, where's the Puppet Master? And then there's a notable lack of werewolf Gregor Russoff, father of the one and only Werewolf By Night.

Okay, so in issue #2, we get to see the High Evolutionary outfit, but now we're being told that the High Evolutionary was some bigwig in HYDRA (which I'll not capitalize again, for all of our benefit). And then Jessica Drew's (she's Spider-Woman, dig?) mind gets probed by Mentallo, who I haven't seen used in a comic book in twenty years (although I guess he's been around lately, lord only knows why), and then she gets trained by the Taskmaster. Now, up until this point, the only thing that's been keeping me reading is the fact that I know Bendis isn't going to give me a shitty book, and here he brings in the fucking Taskmaster, and I'm like, "Sold!"

Issue #3 starts with Jessica Drew infiltrating some SHIELD (which I won't explain the acronymical properties of, due to the fact that it's changed at least twice since I've been reading comics) compound, and here's Nick Fury, who has managed to make an appearance in virtually every book Marvel has published in the last eighteen months. If they don't kill him off soon, I'm going to throw him in the heap of over-used and now-uncool characters with Wolverine and Gambit. I mean, the guy has a few funny lines, but I'm just getting tired of him.

Anyway, she gets lost, she gets found, lost, found, and she gets the funny line in the Nick Fury dialogue by the end. Not quite as funny as Spider-Man and Iron Man breaking the fourth wall while talking about Mary-Jane's not-so-broken arm, but still worthy of a chuckle.

Anyway, I just wanted to lodge this little continuity complaint with management, given what I picked up during my reading of the backstories in the Evolutionary War annual-crossover back in 1988. I have no explanation for Bendis' reinterpretation of what I consider to be canon, and therefore am not eligible for a No-Prize. I mean, maybe I just want more Wundagore, because there was a lot of shit going on there while Jessica Drew was in a ten-year coma. You've got the Darkhold, Chthon, goat-men, cow-women, werewolves, the birth of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch... lots of stuff. Maybe I'm just nitpicking Spider-Woman, because it doesn't exactly jive with something Mark Gruenwald wrote, and he is the patron saint of continuity.

And it's going to be really bad when I see what they've done to Captain America when that DVD-ROM comes out, whenever that might be. The Amazing Spider-Man one has been pushed back to June, but at least the Avengers disc has been pushed up from late-April to the end of this month. I'm going to geek out until the end of the year, at this rate.


AIM: therbmcc71