Issue(s): Amazing Spider-Man #277
Cover Date: Jun 86
Title: "The rules of the game! / "Cry of the Wendigo"
Credits:
Tom DeFalco / Charles Vess - Writer
Ron Frenz / Charles Vess - Penciler
Bob Layton / Charles Vess - Inker
Adam Blaustein - Assistant Editor
Christopher Priest - Editor

Review/plot:
This is a nice interlude issue. The first half begins with Peter and Mary Jane reacting to the news that Flash Thompson is the Hobgoblin...

...and then before an argument can really take off, it's interrupted by a call from Daredevil. Peter goes to visit Matt and finds that he "looks like he's been through a meat grinder" and is raving about what the Kingpin has done to him. He sounds paranoid, but everything he describes actually happened.

Thanks to The Comics Curmudgeon i am not quite fortunate to keep up with the newspaper version of Spider-Man, who is much less action oriented, and much less competent, character, and i do notice that he does manifest himself in the comics, too, like here where Daredevil assumes that he's got all sorts of secret plans in place to take down the Kingpin in retaliation for what's been happening to DD, but Peter is like, "Ummmm, oh. Is that happening?".

Despite promising to not interfere...

...Peter does go confront the Kingpin.

Except he doesn't have a plan, and so while he's one step ahead of the Kingpin every step of the way in terms of preventing him from leaving the room, calling his guards, or getting a weapon...

...the Kingpin ultimately asks what Spider-Man can do to him, and the answer is nothing.

Well, almost nothing. He does web the Kingpin to his chair. Slacker. Pure spite!

Spider-Man may also actually be confirming for the Kingpin that Daredevil is still alive. Issue #229 left off with the Kingpin still just worrying that no corpse was found after Daredevil was left for dead, but in #230 the Kingpin seems sure of it and sends for Nuke.

The second half of the book is devoted to a story written and illustrated by Charles Vess...

...and has Spider-Man rescuing the daughter of Canadian diplomats from a group of kidnappers during a blizzard...

...and he's seemingly helped by a Wendigo from her native country (not the Marvel version).

Vess usually winds up in Marvel Fanfare, and this story would have fit there fine, but it's nice to see him in a regular book.

As a kid, it always bugged me that this story didn't even acknowledge that there was a Wendigo in the Marvel universe very different than what was depicted here (not that Spidey had ever met him) and also that there were some superficial similarities between this story and Uncanny X-Men #205, published a month earlier. But both problems are really my own, and not the story's.

Overall, i think the nature of this issue makes it one of the better ones in DeFalco's run. Frenz does some nice things with shadow during the Kingpin confrontation that may have been inspired by Mazzucchelli's art. DeFalco does a nice job making a distinction between Daredevil and Spider-Man ("I tend to go after more colorful, costumed creeps... DD concentrates on the wise guys behind the scenes"!) and shows Spider-Man as being pretty helpless when facing a criminal that he can't just punch out or web to a lamp post. Spider-Man's parting gift for the Kingpin, more appropriate for J. Jonah Jameson, is funny in its own right but also demonstrates Spidey's frustration at being unable to do anything more useful. This could only happen in a story where we're really just sampling what's going on in the Daredevil comic; if this were a pure Spider-Man story the Kingpin would have to eventually overplay his hand so Spider-Man could act and stop him.

All that and a rare Charles Vess story, and it's a good little package.

Quality Rating: B+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: Some of the details are off (like what Matt is wearing and the fact that he seems to be in a private room) but as i wrote in the entry for Daredevil #227-229, this fits best between Daredevil #229-230. For Spider-Man, this should take place soon after Flash is arrested in ASM #276; at least before Pete and MJ have any other interactions.

References:

• The Kingpin tore down Matt Murdock's life in Daredevil #227-228.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

The placement of these issues relative to Power Man and Iron Fist 125 is complicated by the fact that Peter's wearing the red-and-blues in Power Man and Iron Fist 125. More on that when you get to Power Man and Iron Fist 125.

I noticed that the MCP has Daredevil's brief appearance at Iron Fist's funeral between DD #231-232. I was hoping to avoid that. But if that's related to the placement of this issue and Spider-Man's costume, let me know. I'd rather deal with that sooner and not have to break up DD #230-232 after the fact.

This is extremely complicated. The main problem stems from the fact that it's implied that Matt doesn't wear his costume between his defeat by the Kingpin in DD 228 and the end of DD 232. Unfortunately, Matt shows up at Danny's funeral in Power man & Iron Fist 125 in costume, and Peter is there as well in his red-and-blue costume. Unfortunately, Peter's red-and-blues are destroyed in Web of Spider-Man 16-18. There's a slight discrepancy about when Matt's confrontation with Nuke takes place in Peter's timeline- in Amazing Spider-Man 284, Peter says Matt's fight with Nuke took place while he was returning home in Web of Spider-Man 18 but in Amazing Spider-Man 280, which takes place after Web of Spider-Man 18, the Kingpin refuses to hire Jack O'Lantern as an assassin because he has Nuke. But the point is that DD 232-233 take place after Peter's red-and-blues are destroyed.
The alternative would be to place Power Man and Iron Fist 125 before Daredevil 228 and Amazing 277. But Power Man
and Iron Fist 125 takes place after Secret Wars II 9 and Vision and the Scarlet Witch 8. That would mess with your holiday placements, since Vision and Scarlet Witch 8 take place on Martin Luther King's Day and DD 229 takes place circa Christmas. (It's also worth noting that some time takes place between Secret Wars II 9 and Vision and the Scarlet Witch 8, since Wanda's pregnancy is clearly showing in Vision and the Scarlet Witch 8.)
We decided that the simplest solution was that Matt wore his costume to the funeral in between Daredevil 231-232 to honor Danny but that was the only time he wore it in all those weeks. I was curious to see what your solution was.

It never ceased to amaze me that nobody at Marvel at this time remembered that Spider-Man was the only person to have put the Kingpin behind bars, if only for a short while. You'd think the Kingpin would be cheesed off a bit about that.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to lay that all out. It looks like i'll hold off on placing the rest of this storyline until i get to those Web of issue. I was originally just hoping to push PM&IF #125 after DD #232.

I've had Born Again for close to 30 years and I never knew about this issue.

That panel of Peter confronting Kingpin is one of the best panels in Amazing in a while.

The Wendigo from Hulk and X-Men is a bit more like the mythological version; this one is fairly specifically influenced by an early 20th century horror story by Algernon Blackwood titled "The Wendigo," which reimagines the myths' cannibal creature as a kind of wind spirit.

My experience with the Wendigo was a mirror to fnord's as I read this when I was about nine and had no idea there was already a different Wendigo. Later, I read a 90s story with the usual Wendigo and was annoyed that they'd invented a new one instead of going with the 'original' Charles Vess one!

Also, because the UK reprints were so far behind this was a big shock and 'spoiler' as it gave away that Flash was the Hobgoblin. When Spider-man and Zoids eventually reprinted the preceding story it read totally differently as the big revelation was that Flash was innocent!

Spidey's spraying of webbing on Kingpin's chair actually being a show of impotence is a fun and intriguing reading, fnord.

This version of Wendigo seems a lot spookier than the cannibal version that keeps popping up.