Red, Red 9,
What was your deal?

A pathetic joke
But the mem’ries won’t go
No, mem’ries won’t go

I’d have thought
That with time
He’d vanish
From continuity

I was wrong
And I found
That they brought him back in Avengers: The Initiative

If you ask a comics-reading friend what were some of the better runs of Amazing Spider-Man, odds are he or she will mention the legendary Lee/Ditko and Lee/Romita Silver Age stories, Gerry Conway’s stint on the title during the early 1970s, or even the dynamically shallow Todd McFarlane issues. (If they say “the Clone Saga,” however, you might want to consider re-evaluating your friendship.)

As great (or in the case of the McFarlane issues, “great”) and groundbreaking as those runs were, I have a particular affection toward the mid-1980s Spider-Man stories done by the creative team of Tom Defalco, Ron Frenz, and Joe Rubenstein. While not on par with what John Byrne was doing with the Fantastic Four or Walt Simonson’s work on Thor at the time, they (like the Stern/Milgrom/Sinnot Avengers stories of the period) were generally successful in hitting all the expected visual and story beats one would expect from the franchise.

The run also marks the last time a non-flashback, “untold tales” Spider-Man story captured the underlying “hard-luck everyhero” essence of the character, before the trend towards self-defeating and poorly-implemented efforts at tinkering with the fundamentals became the norm. There was the alien costume subplot in its infancy (before it snowballed into fan service hell), alongside the return of Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man’s troubled relationship with the Black Cat, an up-to-date spin on Peter Parker’s personal and financial troubles, non-intrusive nods to Marvel’s shared universe, and supervillains either interesting or interestingly banal.

The run marked the last time I actively followed the title (though I did keep up here and there via my brother or my friends), and I can remember standing in the local comic shop, picking my week’s selections off the shelves, and being told by my pal Brian to avoid Amazing Spider-Man #264 (May 1985) at all cost.

“It’s fucking awful,” were his exact words, and I still being in the completist phase of my comics collecting, failed to heed his sage advice.

ASM #264 was not the product of the regular creative team, but rather a one-off “inventory story,” deadline filler from the days when late books that weren’t acclaimed DC miniseries were viewed as a mortal sin. Rather than make the readers wait for an issue, editors would run something from the slush pile and count on the audience’s loyalty carry things through.

The results usually resembled a stray piece of anthology book fluff imperfectly shoehorned into a current knot of ongoing plots and sublots. In ASM#264′s case, though, they resembled a gas explosion in a home for abandoned puppies. Not only were readers treated to a inane plot about Spidey helping a genuine Old CootTM fight against an evil nursing home administrator and artwork that wouldn’t have passed muster for the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual…

…but the issue also unleashed Red 9 upon an undeserving world.

Red 9 is Wallace Jackson, the pride of Baytown, Texas. With a NASA-designed suit borrowed from a relative and a severe case of walking pneumonia, be-fro’d Jackson decides the best way to prove himself as a gin-YEW-ine superhero is to irritate the shit out of Spider-Man in one poorly scripted and drawn tiresome battle after another.

Boy, howdy! If seeing Spider-Man get stonewalled by the local Social Security office wasn’t heart-stopping enough for you, true believers, just wait until he fights a redneck teen in a stupid-looking suit of power armor for eight pages! Excelsior! Cornpone for everybody!

I was a little uncertain about bestowing the Nobody’s Favorite laurels on Red 9, seeing as he was an obscure throwaway in a long forgotten turd of a story. It was Red’s recent reappearance in Avengers: The Initiative, combined with the fact that he was the worst part of one of the lousiest stories ever published by Marvel that ultimately sealed the deal.  As telling proof that there is no barrel which Marvel can’t scrape the bottom of, either in 1985 or today, Red 9 has earned himself a place in the lowest circles of Nobody’s Favorites.  Yee haw!

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