Blind Spots Archive

Retcons are often the lifeblood of comic book storytelling. I mean, who doesn’t appreciate somebody fixing the mistakes of a previous editorial regime by wiping that older story from existence? While I can understand some hang-wringing regarding how some retcons have been deployed in the Spider-Man universe over the

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Until Roger Stern wrote the “Hobgoblin Lives” mini-series in 1997, Ned Leeds, as revealed in Amazing Spider-Man #289, was the Hobgoblin. The dogged reporter, who was known to have a mean streak whenever another man got near his woman, Betty Brant, was revealed to be one of the most

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Like every other comic book fan with a pulse, I truly enjoyed last summer’s Avengers movie and nearly leapt out of my seat at the very end when (*spoiler*) THANOS showed up in the teaser. It’s Thanos, the “Mad God of Titan,” the man who courts Death, the …

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When I read a few months ago that July’s “dramatic” new status quo shift in Superior Spider-Man #14 would deal with “Shadowland,” I had to rack my brain for a minute to know what the heck the mighty folks of Marvel were talking about. Shadowland? What’s a Shadowland? The

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Wolverine has always been a complicated character for me to have a reader-relationship with – and that’s just par for the course for a mysterious anti-hero whose entire shtick is predicated on the fact that he’s an incredibly difficult nut to crack. But for me, the complications stem from

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In Superior Foes of Spider-Man #1, the reader is asked to lend some sympathy to lifelong D-list crook Boomerang, aka Fred Meyers, a former baseball player who threw games, and then took to throwing boomerangs as his weapon of choice. When I first saw the solicitation for Superior Foes

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A majority of the Spectacular Spider-Man series remains my most shameful “blind spot” since the title churned out so many quality stories, especially during the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of my favorite all-time writers like Roger Stern and JM DeMatteis had extensive runs on Spectacular, but the title’s

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The first 12 issues of Marvel Knights” Spider-Man is exactly why I wanted to start doing a recurring column on many of the Spidey “B” titles that I’ve neglected to write about since launching Chasing Amazing in 2011. Here we have a fairly famous and popular arc, with a

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As I hope most of you are aware, the name of this blog is Chasing Amazing. And while that might sound like a pun on the title of a Kevin Smith movie, the adjective “amazing” is quite intentional. The mission of the site is to follow “one man’s quest

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Spider-Man has long been perceived as a superhero comic book, but at its core, it’s also a love story. More so than any other comic book I can think of, there has always been an emphasis on romantic and familial relationships in Spider-Man – i.e. love – whether it’s

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