DECEMBER 6TH, 1993 - MARCH 3RD, 1994
By Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Paul Ryan, & Joe Sinnott
By Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Paul Ryan, & Joe Sinnott
Surprise! We're not quite done with newspaper Spider-Man after all. As I was making my way through the run of 1980s strips we just covered, it occurred to me that there's one more fully collected Spidey story arc out there from a few years later: "The Mutant Agenda", the storyline conceived by Marvel in 1993 as sort of a "multimedia" project. Marvel published a comic mini-series by the same name, written by Steven Grant and illustrated by Scott Kolins, while the Spider-Man newspaper strip did its own version of the story by Stan Lee and Larry Lieber (with Paul Ryan and Joe Sinnott on Sundays). A year or so later, the story was also adapted into the SPIDER-MAN animated series on Fox.
As it happens, Marvel published a collection a while back of the comic series and the strips, so I figured that since it was out there, I might as well purchase the digital version and check it out. You may recall I've mentioned previously that this was my first exposure to the Spidey newspaper strip in "first run" format. Of course I had the old BEST OF SPIDER-MAN book which I've mentioned many, many times here, and I had read it to pieces when I was seven or eight years old -- but our local paper didn't carry the Spidey strip until "The Mutant Agenda" started. When that happened, I decided to follow along in the papers.
...I didn't last long. I just couldn't get into the strip. I don't know if it was reading only a few little panels per day or if it was Stan's writing or Lieber's artwork or what, but at the age of fifteen, I just couldn't get into the strip. In part, I know it was because it felt simplistic and hokey next to the then-ongoing comics -- but even if you take that out of the equation, it simply didn't seem up to par with even the material in THE BEST OF SPIDER-MAN.
