I understand that when I stopped buying and reading Amazing Spider-Man comics in the 1990s, I missed a lot of major storylines involving the fate of his clone and his family, not to mention the return of one of his long-dead rivals in Norman Osborn. So when I eventually got hooked back into collecting around ASM #500, I was incredibly confused by what I was reading.

No issue sums up my feelings of confusion any better than ASM #501, which, when looking back was really the punch in the jaw that made me realize “holy crap, I missed so much the past 8 or 9 years I almost don’t recognize certain elements of this series anymore.” What about this issue caused me to have such a strong reaction? Just a few words in the upper left hand corner, “Saturday in the Park with May.”

May? May? As in, Peter’s Aunt May? When I was last reading ASM, she died in a very teary, dramatic sequence in issue #400, setting up the nowhere-near-as-epic Peter Parker is accused of murder because his deranged evil clone Kaine set him up (who subsequently has his own comic book series now – go figure). And that storyline in turn led to the “who’s the real Peter Parker storyline” which made my entire interest in the genre exist stage left.

So when I first saw this comic, which I picked up online as part of a run that included issues #490-#501, my first thought was that this was some kind of flashback issue tied into the 500^th anniversary issue (it’s not that unusual for an anniversary issue to feature some flashback stories, so perhaps #501 was just a continuation). But no, this story was in real-time, “present day” if you will and Aunt May was very much alive. And I had no idea how that was possible.

Through the power of Google and sites like Wikipedia, I’ve since learned – sorta – that as part of Osborn’s master plan of vengeance, he hired a look-alike to play May and “die” while the real May was being held captive. And that’s when I learned that when you go poking around a hornet’s nest known as 1990s Marvel, you’re bound to end up getting stung a bunch. Because that might have been the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in my lifetime as a comic book fan.

And thus ASM #501 is a reminder of another bitter reality of my Spider-Man collection: to own every issue of Amazing Spider-Man, means I need to own every issue of ASM, regardless of its quality or coherence. As such, if I was going to go back and purchase the issues that I missed during my collecting hiatus (not to mention all the Silver and Bronze age issues missing from my collection), that would require purchasing a number of issues that I don’t care for. Issues that would probably make my blood boil and have me questioning my fandom once I read them.

So to get around this moral quagmire I decided I wouldn’t read them. At least not right away, and in many cases, despite owning the entire run of ASM from #1 to about #530 digitized, I have continued to be ignorant of a number of these comic books from the mid-to-late 1990s. Does that make me less of a superfan? Maybe. Does that make a collector first and a reader/fan second? Possibly. Either way, there was a reason why I went from hardcore fan to non-reader as these issues were first being pumped out during the Clone Saga, and while my tastes have undoubtedly matured, I can’t imagine that would make me any more tolerant of some of the contrived and inane plot developments.

It’s a lesson that a quest isn’t always easy and fun and in the case of having a quest based around buying and collecting comic books – the pratfalls of such an endeavor aren’t just about finances and availability. In fact, there are a number of comic books from this era that I had to dig very hard to find, and drop more than I was expecting, due in large part to their low print circulation. But I did it to satisfy the needs of the quest. Doesn’t mean the comics satisfy my needs as a fan.

All images from Amazing Spider-Man #501: J. Michael Straczynski, John Romita Jr., Scott Hanna & Matt Milla