EP0011: Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3 (Part Two)

Wrapping up our look at Peter Park's spectacular 1980s adventures in the pages of Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3.
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Transcript:
If you want to view paradise, go to the suburbs? We'll talk about that and more as we continue our look at Essential Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Volume Three.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Welcome back to our look at Essential Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Volume Three. There were not a ton of major villains who appeared in the book. I think more of the really heavy hitters tended to show up in Amazing Spider-Man; nevertheless you did have a few. Kraven and Electro were two major villains from Spiderman ‘s Silver Age; certainly Electro was not looked on as quite the big deal he had been back in the 1960s, although Kraven would have one of the best known Spider-Man story lines in just a few years. In The Spectacular Spider-Man appearance he's notable for appearing besides Calypso, a voodoo priestess who tried to help Kraven do away with Spider-Man, but Kraven viewed her methods as dishonourable and I think in that way showed a greater sense of honor than he had in a lot of his appearances in the Silver Age.
Towards the end of the book we also get to see Doc Ock appear; however, his escape from prison is teased in Issue Seventy-Two but we don't actually see him until Issue Seventy-Three. They do instead an Issue Seventy-Two, I think is pretty clever. They tease the release but instead we made a kid who is part of a group of kids who run around dressing up as super villains for fun, and he's come up with the best Doc Ock costume ever complete with mechanical arms, and so he goes around town in it. Doc Ock is wanted – this leads to some confusion and introduction of a character who would be back about a dozen times or so.
Issue Seventy-Three and Seventy-Four feature The Owl and Darkhawk, as well as Kingpin. I like the inclusion of The Owl since he was always more of a daredevil villain than a Spider-Man villain, and they make some slight reinvention of the character after he had been in a very critically-wounded conditions in his last appearance in Daredevil. There's some great action scenes as well as a battle over McGuffin with a very surprising resolution at the end of Issue Seventy-Four which closes out the book, which I won't spoil for you even though it was published thirty-five years ago. You also have a lot of minor lesser-known villains show up. There's The Smuggler who, in the book, makes a point of…used to be known as Power Man until Luke Cage cleaned his clock and won the right to use that title. Of course, now everybody knows Luke Cage is Luke Cage. Still he was never really a villain who was worthy of that name.
There was Nitro who could blow himself up; there was Jack O'Lantern who had a Jack O'Lantern on his head, but in other ways ripped off the Green Goblin design. To me, the character doesn't look scary or intimidating – just looks kind of silly. There's The Ringer, there's The Beetle who I think they wanted to have as a major villain at one point, like back in the '60s but never quite made it; and he also appeared in the series with The Gibbon – a guy who was a bit of a Spider-Man fan but ended up disillusioned, running around in a Gibbon costume. There's The Ringer, Moonstone, Gold Bug, and probably one of the more interesting ones was Boomerang.
Boomerang was a former Major League pitcher who threw boomerangs as part of his attempts at being an assassin, and he decided he wanted to be the Kingpin's point man to replace Bullseye. And so he decided to kill a witness who is rumored to be giving testimony tha...