I’ve covered the Marvel Holiday Specials here. They are some of my favorite Christmas comics, owing much to my memories of buying them and reading them around the holidays.
I’ve gone on at length about how much I loved those comics as a kid and still find a lot to love about them now. One of them always eluded me though. I’d never been able to locate a copy of the 1994 Marvel Holiday Special.
…until a few months back when I finally stumbled over it at a clearance sale.
1994-1995 was a weird time to be a Spider-Man fan. Marvel Comics was in the midst of an almost three year long storyline wherein Peter Parker found out that he had been cloned. That clone, previously absent from Spider-Man stories for decades, returned under the name Ben Reilly and eventually took on the super-hero identity of The Scarlet Spider. The Clone Saga (as it became known) was by most accounts a colossal misstep for the Spider-Man franchise of books. Fans were disengaged from the shenanigans and became apoplectic when, in a shocking twist, it was revealed that the Spider-Man/Peter Parker character they had been following for years was in fact, the clone… and Ben Reilly was the TRUE, original Spider-Man. Ben then took over the prime Spidey gig, allowing Peter Parker and his wife Mary Jane a quiet retirement… for about 6 or 8 months before readers practically demanded that the ship be righted with the Peter character who had been front and center for most of the comic’s run returning to his role as Spider-Man.
Sound stupid and confusing? Welcome to superhero comics in the 1990’s!
I tell you all that to explain that today we’ll be looking at the Spider-Man Holiday Special, published in 1995 by Marvel Comics. Cover price was $2.99… I got this for a quarter at a comic book convention.
I draw a picture of myself on my classroom’s chalkboard everyday. I collect those pictures as camera phone photos and post them on Sundays. See the rest here.
Last week we did The Avengers… this week, I decided to his some of those solo Marvel Comics’ characters. I know I’ve done Spider-Man and Daredevil on the chalkboard in years’ past, but I’ve never had a go at Doctor Strange. He’s surprisingly fun to draw!
I draw a picture of myself on my chalkboard everyday. I collect those pictures as camera phone photos and post them on Sundays.
I debated long and hard as to whether I wanted to continue posting my chalkboard doodles for the upcoming school year. After three years solid of Sunday postings, I’ve done just about every character or situation I can think of. Further, I often draw the EXACT same drawings, year in and year out. It’s the nature of the job. Just as I teach Romeo & Juliet to every new group of Freshman, I’ll continue drawing myself as various superhero characters on the blackboard.
I’ve decided to keep posting these however, because… quite simply, they’re popular. I understand very little about “site views” and all that jazz, but when I do look at that widget, these are always amongst the most viewed of my posts… and that includes the comic. Over the past six months, a number of these have become popular on the website Pinterest. I know less about Pinterest than I do about site views, but if people are liking something I do well enough to share it somewhere, I should probably keep doing it.
Anyway, here’s the first drawing of the year. I decided I wanted to go big for the first week so I designed an elaborate Welcome piece for the Class of 2016 which took up the entire space of the classroom’s chalkboard.
I have to be honest- this was a larger undertaking than I anticipated! I thought I’d only need a half an hour to draw this beast, but it took double that when you figure in the sketch planning I needed to do to fit in as many characters as possible. I tried to run the gamut of cartoon characters that I found interesting and were relevant to someone who’d be in 9th grade this year. The only one I might have missed the mark on is Yakko Warner, but as established this summer, the characters are making a huge comeback, if only with my sons in our house.
I’ve talked about this before here, but I wanted to make sure I had it in a comic. Henry loves Masters of the Universe, the Fleischer Brothers/Famous Studios Superman cartoons, and recently he’s been watching a lot of old Spider-Man cartoons. Funnily enough, we don’t watch the Spidey cartoons form 1967; I find them to be pretty unwatchable. No, Henry (and Elliot) go in big for Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the cartoon series that aired on NBC in the Eighties.
I was too young for that one when it was originally on, but I’ve watched a couple of episodes with the boys and it’s not horrible. As a superhero comic book fan, I would have appreciated how many guest starts the show accommodated if I had seen it then. Via Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the boys are now fans of Thor, Captain America, and The X-Men. In particular, the show seems to be X-Men crazy, with a bunch of episodes focusing on them. I know Marvel had been trying like crazy to get an X-Men cartoon series off the ground at the time… perhaps this was their sneaky, backdoor way of getting the characters into cartoons.
(I should also point out, theme-wise, we’re only four comics into the summer and this is the SECOND strip about my kids watching old superhero cartoons. THEMES!)
I don’t buy a lot of new comic books at thrift stores.
Please understand, “new” is a very flexible term when you’ve been reading comic books for twenty years. I define new as being anything published in the last ten years… but your mileage most certainly will vary on that definition. I don’t harbor many prejudices against the modern era of funnybooks; there have been some very awesome comics made in that time span. It’s just, as a personal preference, I don’t normally pick up stuff from that time period. They are books I had access to when first published. I passed on at the time, I don’t feel any particular need to pick them up now.
Recently, our local New2You Thrift Store received a huge collection of modern era comic books- most of ’em Marvel and DC. Somewhere mixed in between all the issues of Cable and Extreme Justice, I came across a couple of gems.
Last year, I wrote about one of my favorite holiday comic books ever, The 1993 Marvel Holiday Special. It was one of the first comic books I bought with my own money and thought it was worth every penny. I was therefore quite excited to pick up The 1994 Marvel Holiday Special the following year.
Unfortunately, ’93 couldn’t hold a candle to ’94. Fewer characters, less interesting creators, and a couple of stories which made no sense added up to a disappointment.
I’ve done a better Wolverine in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever drawn him with his mask on.
Teachable Moments 