Writer: Brian Michael Bendis Artist: John Totleben, Ron Randall(assists) Publisher: Marvel
Plot: Lizzie. I'm so Lizzie. My head is spinning...
Oh, look, it's the origin of the Lizard. You may have encountered this heavily scaled item in the original issue of The Amazing Spider-Man or the many reprints of the original. I first read about Curt Conners' tragedy in a giant-sized treasury edition Amazing Spider-Man. You could have seen it on television in the sixties. You could have read it in::::shudder::::Spider-Man: Chapter One. You may have lucked onto it in the flashbacks whenever Lizard encounters Spider-Man.
I'm sorry to say Brian Michael Bendis has nothing new to say in the latest Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. Mrs. Conners loves Curt. No! Curt Conners loves his wife. Zut alors! Liz and Spidey fight in a sewer. Gee, we've only seen the sewer setting billions of times, and for the Spidey/Lizard confrontations, let's see, there was the sewer encounter against the Iguana and the Lizard in the mid-eighties and the Lizard/Spidey sewer encounter in Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man. The budget-cutting bureaucrat who motivates Curt Conners into pulling a Jeckyl and Hyde sounds a lot like "Mr. Humanitarian" whose actions led to the origin of Mr. Freeze in Batman: The Animated Series.
Thank goodness for whatever knows fear still burns at the Man-Thing's touch, but this latest team-up ends up woefully shallow when compared to the Chris Claremont/John Byrne Man-Thing/Spidey in a plain old Marvel Team-Up which pitted the duo against D'Spayre. What was Man-Thing doing so far from the swamps anyhow?
The fact that I picked a John Totleben jacketed Buffy the Vampire Slayer over a photo jacketed version should give you an idea about how I feel about the man's artwork. His Spidey swathed in shadows as well as webbing fits his dark milieu, but Mr. Totleben's Lizard is postmodern ridiculous. What made the Lizard cool and different was the white lab coat, the black tee shirt and the purple pants. Making him look like a Jurrassic Park reject seems like a desperate attempt to break free of conventions that actually enhanced characterization and symbolism.
