The particulars in case you forgot: I’m trolling through my comic book collection, which spans 1977-1995/6ish, because I’m feeling nostalgic and want to share. I invite you to tag along with me cuz I hope it’ll be fun – I’m even taking pics of the covers with my iPhone (sorry about the quality there but honestly – who wants to go through and scan all these things?!) so you can see what I see. I’m also telling stories, which is always fun.
And since I’m grabbing boxes at random, we never know what we’re gonna get until we get it. Got it? Good – let’s move on then people! Oh – and you can always click on the images for a bigger photo.
Box #4- When Marvel went 2099
Waaaay back in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-two, the comics publisher known as Marvel, released a series of books detailing what a ‘possible future’ of the Marvel universe might look like. Dubbed ‘2099’, these titles had some familiar and some not so familiar faces and names and I collected them all.
Spider-Man 2099
What would any Marvel universe be without a Spider-Man? Luckily, we didn’t have to find out because Spider-Man 2099 hit the shelves in 1992. Excerpts from Wikipedia follow with some stuff from me too…
Miguel O’ Hara is a brilliant geneticist who gains his spider-like powers from a gene-splicing incident.
He was born in New York City and grew up with his mother, Conchata, younger brother Gabriel, and the abusive man he believed to be his father, George. Brilliant and precocious, Miguel was awarded enrollment in the Alchemax School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester. Huh. Same place as Xavier’s school for gifted youngsters?!?! HUH?!?! HUH?!?!
Told he was poisoned by Tyler Stone with a permanently addictive drug called Rapture for quitting Alchemax, Miguel tried to purge his body clean on a genetic level in his laboratory. He thought that once the drug was bound to his system, he would need it for the rest of his life. Since only Alchemax legally sold the drug, Miguel would have been forced to continue employment at Alchemax or buy the drug through the black market. His experiment to genetically reset his body was sabotaged by his jealous supervisor, Aaron Delgato, accidentally endowing Miguel with fantastic spider-like abilities.
After an explosion in the lab, Delgato apparently fell to his death while Miguel fled, realizing his new powers as he avoided the Alchemax-sponsored Public Eye security patrol. A Thorite (worshipper of Thor), aided Miguel’s escape, deeming “Spider-Man’s” return as an omen of his god’s return, and immediately labeled Miguel’s alter-ego with an epithet that would follow him for much of his career: The Harbinger of Thor.
Here’s what I remember-So Much Freaking Fun!
This was a great series! I want to say that it ran 50 issues but Wikipedia tells me that it was actually more like 46 with some annuals and specials thrown in for good measure.
Our 2099 version of the old Webhead fought future versions of his old foes too, such as: Vulture, The Goblin and, of course, this guy:
Venom: 2099
Really good writing, awesome art and all the updated and futuristic versions of characters we think we knew made this a fantastic series. Fans of Star Trek novels from the 1990’s might be interested to know that Peter David had a hand in spider-Man 2099, brought on board to ‘flesh out the character and the supporting characters’, he wrote issue #1 and apparently stayed with the book through issue #44. Wow. Cool!
I was never really sure why it ended… I know the other books didn’t do as well as this one. They were sort of dropping like flies for a while there. Sad, really. Wikipedia tells me that Marvel wasn’t doing so hot at the time these were published, which probably explains it pretty well. They had to cut corners and these books were the first to go. The others were all gone by then, I think.
We’ll talk more about those other books later. Spidey sorta takes up a post all his own, even when he’s in 2099.
Spider-Man 2099: #25
~P
