Seven degrees of Bacon, no not Kevin

Welcome to Part 5 of Spidey-man Vs Gnatman and Rotten!

Someone recently suggested I am barking mad

Well I am mad enough to be staying inside the….

So let's not monkey around and get straight to it

So the contract for Gnatman and Rotten to fight Spidey-man has been signed in triplicate and it looks like bad news for "The Dyspeptic Duo" who immediately try and weasel out …

By suggesting no less than three alternatives two of which appear to be Anthropomorphic, "Superham" and "The Green Sparrow"

Of course having a character representing Anthropomorphism is hardly a new thing, even in this strip alone both Gnatman and Spidey-Man themselves are derivatives of living creatures and both will face their "inverted selves" in the shape of Man-bat and man-spider in thier non parody stories (well okay maybe there was no literal man-spider but spider man did have 8 appendages in one memorable story line)

but - The Green Sparrow actually exists (or existed)….

As a member of Just'a Lotta Animals (JLA?!) which is and I directly quote - "a comic-in-a-comic made by Roger Rodney Rabbit that spoofed classic Justice League stories. It turned out the (JLA) was real and natives of Earth-C Minus."

Who all first appeared in "Captain Carrot and his amazing zoo crew" issue 14

But what about "superham"?  

Well, no instead we had Super-Squirrel 

So is Marie Severin slipping? - after correctly predicting the exact parody name of a character yet to have even been invented she gets one wrong?!

Well I give her 50% - as of course we had Spider-Ham

Now spider-ham was published as part of the Star line of comics, comics especially aimed at younger readers and spider-ham is more or less the follow on from the comic version of Super Spidey Stories

Now back in the UK there was a comic that both reprinted comics from the star comic range AND from Super Spidey Stories…

Guess what it was called…




Yes, SPIDEY COMIC!

With each letter of SPIDEY in a different bright day-glo colour this comic couldn't have said "aimed at under 6s" any louder if it tried (not that stopped them putting The Ewoks on the cover...)

So Marie Severin predicted a comic literally just named SPIDEY as well!

And of course having mentioned spider-ham I just have to mention Spider-pig from The Simpsons movie...

Which of course was a direct parody on the infamous 1960s spiderman cartoon theme

And of course the 1906s spiderman cartoon is a ridiculously popular meme…! 

Talk about seven degrees of Bacon and no Kevin was not required

NEXT!

"Won't ol' Mort Wieniburger be proud of us" thinks Rotten…

Well of course this can only be a rotten reference to none other than Mort Weisinger 

The famous comic book editor best known for editing DC Comics' Superman during the mid-1950s to 1960s, in the Silver Age of comic books

But before we can agree if Mort would or would not be proud… The next caption adds "In Joke! If your name isn't Wienieburger, forget it"

Well okay, "Sly Stan" - but I don't think anyone is called Wienieburger so he must mean we should all forget it, particularly if we happen to be called or know of either "Flee Bailey" or "Melvin Belly" (see part 4, last week)

NEXT!

Spidey-man finds an "MMMS Button"

which we can see by the drawing alone features spider-man, but here's the whole badge…

The MMMS was of course "The Merry Marvel Marching Society"  Aka Marvels 1960s era fan club and featured all kinds of goodies like this…

and this

(seriously ALL of this stuff is real, I haven't made ANY of it up!!)

I will resist going meta about Spidey-man being a fan of his Marvel 616 universe counterparts… this time…

NEXT WEEK: It's the return of the obligatory shark jumping episode featuring a cameo from Doc Ock amongst many other things!