"Jackal, Jackal... Who's Got The Jackal?"
Words by Gerry Conway.
Art by Ross Andru.
Inks by Esposito and Hunt.
Lettering by John Costanza.
Colours by Petra Goldberg.
There are well over a hundred frames in a typical comic book but a single frame is all it takes to define an issue. Steve Ditko allegedly quit Spider-Man in protest at the Green Goblin being revealed to be Norman Osborn. God alone knows what he'd have done had the Jackal been revealed to be Professor Warren.
And yet that's exactly what happens here.
Happily, Ross Andru didn't quit in protest but you wouldn't have blamed him if he had. It has to be the stupidest revelation in the history of literature. A twist that must have been born of desperation. All these months there's been the mystery of who the Jackal was and what he was about, so Gerry Conway had to come up with something. And it seems like, in the end, this was the only thing he could think of. Not only is it ludicrous but it deprives us once and for all of Professor Warren who's been a good old reliable mainstay of the strip for years. The only worse person it could have turned out to have been was Joe Robertson.
That aside, what did I actually make of this tale? It's a good, solid story with some nice character stuff, that seems to fit more than usual into its twenty pages without feeling at any point, crammed in. There's even time for Peter Parker to take a nice relaxing bath.
There's also time for a good old fashioned punch-up, plus the revelation that Spider-Man's spider-sense only works when he's being snuck up on by people it already knows to be his enemies. How it already knows them to be his enemies is anyone's guess.
One final point is that I don't understand this issue's title at all. I have the feeling it's a reference to some sort of catchphrase but, if so, I don't have a clue whose catchphrase it might be.
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5 comments:
I'm guessing the title references this children's game: "Button, button, who's got the button":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button,_Who's_Got_the_Button%3F
It is a game of deception and guessing who has a hidden object. Does that relate somehow to this Spidey story?
Hi, John. Thanks for the info. I'd never heard of that game till now, so it's nice to be enlightened. I can't say its rules relate to anything that happens in the issue, as far as I can recall but it clearly must be where the title came from.
Might you even say a clone of Peter Parker would've been a better choice than about the only named professor they had who had lines before? I've been playing with revising this storyline to gain a couple of useful ends that would be nice to imagine in some alternative world's Amazing Spider-Man comics. My plot would play out in #150. Check me out on http://integr8dfix.blogspot.com/2015/11/no-to-90s-clone-saga-no-to-women-in.html I think I'll unveil the whole cockamamie retooled scheme in the next few days.
I never realized what a disappointing reveal Professor Warren was to anyone. I just didn't feel like he should be able to provide the proper level of danger, even with Tarantula. I do have this issue and really loved it. Got mine for a dime when I was twelve! Lucky duck. #149, too, and other Conway/ Andru issues.
Hi, Cecil. It always seems to me that if they were going to reveal that the Jackal was someone known to Spider-Man, that it would have made more sense for it to be Harry Osborne who had an established reason to hate Spider-Man. Sadly, they were clearly determined to turn him into the second Green Goblin instead.
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