Comics : Peter Parker: Spider-Man (Vol. 2) Annual 1999

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"The Night They Killed Big Bear"

	Peter Parker: Spider-Man (Vol. 2) Annual 1999  Summary: Song of The Man-Thing
	Editor:  Ralph Macchio Writer:  J.M. DeMatteis Artists:  Liam Sharp, Al Rio, Dan Schaeter	Staff Only Images Review Edit
	No Month 1999 : SM Title : Peter Parker: Spider-Man (Vol. 2) Annual
Characters: Aunt May Parker, Mary Jane Watson-Parker

With annuals, you have all those extra pages - and there's usually three choices as to what to do with them.

1. Write a standard story, and pad the rest with a short story and/or picture galleries, character summaries, etc.
2. Take a standard story, and streeeetch it out with extra fight scenes or graphic art sequences.
3. Take the opportunity to run a more-than-usually-complex story without having to split it over multiple issues.

The original Scrier from the cult of Scriers, is returned. He's a being of great power, who originally formed the cult, but who has been absent for a very, very long time. (I should mention here that I thought the reworking of Scrier, in the final days of the Clone Story, was appealingly devious - and I think it's great to see these guys back in action.)

He drops into a meeting of modern Scriers, searching for one to be his agent in an ambitious task - to gain control of The Nexus of All Realities - currently under the protection of Ted and Ellen Sallis (as documented in the as-yet unpublished final issues of the late lamented Strange Tales).

Spider-Man gets drawn into the tangled plot, and is then launched into a sequence of alternate realities, in an indirect battle for control of the Nexus. This involves a mixture of conventional and computer-enhanced artwork, merged with earthly and cosmic story-lines.

To be completely honest, I didn't fully understand exactly what was going on here. I'm not fully familiar with the background of the Man-Thing, and the subtleties of the differences between the human and cosmic aspects of the personalites kind of left me behind. But, it's still a good story... and one that does motivate me to see if I can pick up a few issues of the highly-rated Man-Thing title, and possibly even some original Strange Tales, to see if I can figure out exactly what was happening.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the story. There's plenty there to keep the reader interested on the earthly level. Peter Parker and Spider-Man is recast into some interesting situations, worth of deMetteis' creative pen. This is a story which has a little something for everyone.

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