Welcome to Part 6 of Spidey-Man Vs Gnatman and Rotten!
Have you ever heard the expression "Don't poke the hole as you will make it bigger" - in reference to highlighting apparent continuity mistakes in a obviously completely surreal fantasy environment…
For example "How did Indiana Jones survive his ride on a submarine in Raiders of the Lost Ark.."
Well obviously I am completely unfamiliar with this expression which is why I am currently residing in the…
And is why despite jumping the shark last week and thus meaning a decline in quality hence forward I still carry on my journey..
Starting where we left off last week
Gnatman has (presumably) found that he just so-happened to have some Spidey-man repellant gnat spray….
and Rotten seems to employing a dart gun or a pea shooter…
Thus finally provoking an actual fight between all three "masked adventures"
But as was very very well known to anyone who watched the Batman Tv show and as shown here, you don't get to see any actual violence as such
Just some very large onomatopoeia, in this case ZONK! WAP! and BIFF! (No, not the guy from the Back to the Future Movies)
"Hey, Butt-head I don't belong here.."
What did I mean by very well known… ? Well, let's see
In the opening credits of every single Batman Tv show, we get to see a SOCK!
(Not the things your wear on your feet),
(Not the weekly British comic published by Odhams Press (which featured Spider-man))
And then we get a ZOK!
(which most assuredly is not what would be the equivalent of SOK! in the comic "The Zaucer of Zilk")
We have a brief break before we get a whole deluge of onomatopoeia with a POW!, BIF!(with one F?), BAM, SOK(without the C) and a BLAP!
A WHAP! (which almost seems to be legitimate - "Whap. The act of smacking someone over the head, using the back of the hand in a fast motion")
Another BIFF!
(This one most definitely not the evil older Biff from an alternate future caused by - well it's too long to explain here, just go see the movie already and just for fun there's a shark jumping moment in the same movie as well)
"I already told you I don't belong here, what are you, stupid or something"
And finally OOOOF! which is probably how you feel right now
But just in case you was a glutton for punishment (as all of Batman's villains apparently are) here it is in all its glory
And here is an actual "fight"
In features a POW!! a BOFF!! a KAPOW! (copyright Mark Millar…) A Z-ZWAP(??!!) a WHACK! a THWACK! and finally a BONK! thanks to Aunt Harriet herself (pun definitely not intended)
And yes there's still more sounds in the form of some music with an actual song called Biff Bang Pow
Yes this must be the domain of Kevin Smith's Onomatopoeia…
Oh and back in the comic strip Rotten is holding his "Working Papers", these are Documents required for a minor to get a job in certain states within the United States. Such papers usually require the employer, parent/guardian, school, and a physician to agree to the terms of work laid out by the employer.
So to quote from The Dark Knight Returns "add child endangerment to the list"
NEXT!
In the next panel Spidey-man is hanging upside down from a clothes line (which also holds what looks like a captain america pair of long johns) and Spidey-man says those immortal words "SMILE YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA"…
Which is another multi - meta reference to :-
A very popular tv show in which unsuspecting members of the public was confronted with unusual situations while being filmed by hidden cameras and after the joke was done they would be told "Smile, you're on Candid Camera."
That spider-man always had a camera hidden away taking photos of all his fights with villains and as Peter Parker he would sell the same pictures to JJJ at The Daily Bagle… I mean Bugle
NEXT!
This pushes the whole entire strip into yet another dimension of surreality as almost none of which has proceeded so far has made much sense, so to have Spidey-man defeated by Gnat man picking a hole in the plot is simply sublime!
We are left not too sure if it is just the fall or also the fact that the large old style camera and massive bottle of aspirin falling onto Spidey-man which causes him to hobble away into the night on crutches
In the bin in the same panel we can just about see "Nobody" from one of the other strips in the same issue of Not Brand Echh / Marvel Madhouse "The Blunder Agents" which is a parody of the legendary Wally Wood T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents
with "Nobody" parodying "No-Man", see how there's a whole bunch of nobodies in the bin here...
Anyway having defeated Spidey-man Gnat man's reward is a No-Prize!
The stoy sort of goes like this - Way back in the day Stan Lee had the notion that competition might not be such a good thing as there is winners and losers and no-one likes loosing. Stan's solution to this problem was to not have either by not having any prizes - no prizes in fact
The next stage was to send a sealed envelope containing nothing (as seen above) and used to be given away typically to anyone who could not only spot a continuity mistake but also explain how it could have happened in a plausible way
The problem was the empty envelope became an item that people wanted and actually became a prize in and of itself!
No, I am not mentioning Alanis Morissette again we have had enough of that already…
NEXT WEEK: We conclude our journey into Gnat-man and Rotten with a foray into media over saturation, over use of product placement and a guest appearance by one John Romita Sr and of course a whole lot more!
