In order to celebrate his first successful year on the job, Marvel issues The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1, a way of putting together a yearbook of Spidey's adventures and a chronicle of how he came to be. Adding some story to the fluff was a tale in which Spider-Man feels like he's losing his powers at a time when a circle of his most brutal villains decide to band together in the name of shameless cross promotion. I used this issue more as a fun subject for the class today, as a way of cooling things off after such a rigorous comics loaded session of summer school.
The annual's feature story is mostly an opportunity to show off the vast world of Spider-Man and the many regular characters that inhabit his comic world. The story also takes the opportunity to tease at the cavalcade of superheroes that inhabit New York City, as this issue is chock full of cameos by the upper echelon of the Marvel Universe such as Thor, Dr Strange, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, Ant Man, Iron Man and even the X-Men : First Class all pop up in the Spider's Web. While the story consisted of a gauntlet style matchup where Spider-Man had to brawl WWE style against The Sinister Six, there was nothing here that furthered along the chronicles of Peter Parker. How it does serve as a great yearbook with outstanding pin up style art and close ups and makes the perfect issue to wrap up Phase One of Comics in the Classroom.
When Betty Brant and Aunt May are captured, Peter Parker quits moping around the city wondering about his risk taking lifestyle when he is driven to slip back into the red n blue to take down The Sinister Six. Meanwhile the hexagon of hellions can't seem to get along but still manage to formulate some ludicrous scavenger hunt style game to play with Spider-Man in order to finally do the one thing they couldn't do solo, take the boy down. So they feel that if he makes it through all six members of the gauntlet, he will die fighting or at least develop a series of awful blister.
Spider-Man swings past the numerous cameos and hops around New York in a menagerie of beautiful splash pages. One by one, he relives The Sinister Six of their cheat cards and consciousness, hitting Electro at the Stark Power Plant, Kraven in Queens, Mysterio at a movie studio, Sandman in the park, the Vulture in the sky and eventually Dr Octopus in the deep dark lair of a large castle outside of the city, I'm guessing it was Scarsdale.
All in all the story plays out like a video game, and ends with a happy ending with Betty Brant back in his arms and The Sinister Six all going Shawshank style into Riker's for the remainder of the year. The issues finishes out with a art gallery of Spider-Man's villains and co stars as well as a historical timeline of his rise to teenage mega stardom. Concluding with a profile on the creators and you've got yourself an excellent idea for the class.
Instead of making their own Spider-Man yearbooks, the students opt to map out a 5 year plan for The DC Cinematic Universe, which ended up being a fun oaktag style class project and invoked numerous debates about who should play Wonder Woman. Of course once the topic turned back to Spidey, we began laying out the curriculum for our master script.
With 22 issues in the can, we have covered Amazing Fantasy 15 -- Spider-Man's origin, as well as the first 20 issues of Amazing Spider-Man before capping it with Spider-Man's first yearbook. We have gathered enough material from the comics and our class debates to layout the origin of our darker version of Spider-Man. We will now use half the class to work on the screenwriting software to start putting the foundation into our graphic novel script.
We will spend the second half of class focusing on developing our villains, making a prime connection to our hero's origin in order to really capture not only the homage to the 60's and it' unique impact on superheroes and storytelling. Instead of continuing to comb through Amazing Spider-Man in order we will be jumping ahead to focus on all stories featuring Kraven the Hunter. No great superhero story is complete without a supreme villain and we want to make sure to show respect to all interpretations of the Golden Age version of my favorite all time Spider-Man villain.
I've compiled a list of 32 comics, which cover several titles besides Spider-Man and include X-Men, Kazar, Daredevil and several of the old horror anthology titles from Marvel's run in the 60's and 70's. Our goal is to have finished draft ready to be shipped to the bigwigs at Disney.
Well before the fun, begins, I'm heading off to Comic-Con this week to promote my new Kickstarter Campaign for The Chronicles of Faro. I hope if you've been enjoying this entertaining and educational blog that i can invite you to be a part of my amazing series about a time traveler who adventures back in time, gets seduced by The Devil and prevents the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Check us out at the link below :)
Thanks again for taking part in Comics in the Classroom
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