
“… These go to 11…”
That should make sense to anyone who has read Maximum Carnage and seen ‘This Is Spinal Tap.’ Heh.
Happy Friday, Crawl Spacers, and welcome back to another installment of Spidey Friday Night Fights. Sorry I’ve been AWOL for two weeks with this (and I will explain the lateness towards the end of the article) but better late than never!
Today we’re taking a starting the first in a two-part special looking back at the Maximum Carnage Spider-Man event from the summer of 1993. This was an… interesting time for Spider-Man to say the least. Especially when you consider that Peter believed his parents, Richard and Mary Parker, were actually alive and that they’d returned to him (they hadn’t). The event itself started right after Harry Osborn’s death and offered Spider-Fans an eclectic stable of super-characters pouring into the Spider-Titles to kick the crap out of one another.
I am not going to lie to you folks. This is not one of my fondest memories as a Spider-Fan. To be sure it’s not the worst Spider-Man story ever told; rather it just doesn’t hold up well today and, honestly, it barely held up well back then, either. When I explain this storyline to people I often refer to it as a comic book version of a typical 1990′s ‘summer movie,’ complete with hot chicks, explosions and enough violence to choke a yak.
In fact I even made the ‘summer movie’ observation on the Crawl Space Message Boards and went even further saying that Maximum Carnage was the Spider-comics equivalent of ‘Tango & Cash.’ And that’s a very apt analogy. But Maximum Carnage and ‘Tango & Cash,’ despite being bad, still wind up being fun at different points. Sometimes for legit “Whoa, that was neat!” moments and sometimes for insane “I had to read that twice because I couldn’t believe how ridiculous it was” moments.
Making matters worse? This is one of those windows in time where we see how insane the symbiote craze was in the 90′s and the awful ramifications. Venom had ‘gone plaid’ into inane overexposure and Carnage, despite a fairly cool introduction a year earlier, was quickly being funneled into the same over-played “full throttle extreme” characterization. I’ve never really liked Venom all that much; same for Carnage, truth be told. And their representation in this event explains a lot of my dislike.
So strap in and let’s roll the ugliness.
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