Advent 2008: Window 3

It’s Day 3 of the Snappish Thoughts Advent Calendar, and we’re still drowning in Title Case and Nostalgia. This time it’s a comic from the 1980s, a Spider-Man Annual no less, featuring Spider-Man (no, really?) and Arno Stark, Iron Man of 2020. This was originally serialised in Britain in the back of Transformers UK, and the final few pages were rather bleak for an impressionable eight-year-old.

Years later, I discovered that the credits on the story were a fabrication. The comic was actually written by Jim Owsley, who would later change has name to Christopher Priest (not the sci-fi author) and writer of titles such as Xer0 and Black Panther (still the best attempt to meld The West Wing with the fantastic world of the superhero. Sadly, Marvel only printed the first twelve issues in trade paperback, and even they're long out of print). Being a fan, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that he wrote one of my favourite Spider-Man stories ten years before I started following him.

(To read the comic, you'll ideally need a reader application like CDisplay. Failing that, rename the file to have a .zip extension and you can extract the images out of the archive)

Window 3: Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20