Spidey vs. Firelord

I'm sorry for not having posted a blog entry here for a week. I've been busy with other things. Nothing really important, though. Why bide my time doing worthwhile things when I can commit myself to doing less productive stuff?

Anyway, I wanted to talk about an awesome two part Spidey story I read about a month ago. I should have came on here to talk about it sooner, but like I said before, busy goofing off. The story, I'm referring to Amazing Spider-Man #269-270. Spidey fought a lot of guys that are his superior in strength and power, but Firelord ranks above a lot of them.

Spidey's desperate battle against Firelord all started with a simple screw up behalf of some ignorant fools of New York. In a pizza eatery, Firelord wants some grub and a few of the locals mistake him for a mutant. These peons would only be so lucky if they were dealing with a mutant. When they attack Firelord things get ugly and Spidey comes in to do his hero thing. He not only strikes Firelord, he takes his staff away from him, something no other opponent has managed to do up until this point. Unfortunately for the web-head, he made the mistake of thinking Firelord's staff is what gave him his power. Proving just how wrong Spidey's assumption was, he attacks the building the web-slinger is stinging to and with one hit, it explodes into pieces. This is when Fireloard let's slip that he's the former hearld of Galactus. Now for the uneducated, if you worked under Galactus, that means you're sporting cosmic powers, meaning most people wouldn't want to screw with you. At this point Spidey realizes just how outlcassed he is and chucks Firelord's staff into the New York waters so he can escape. Peter thinks it'd be a good idea to let someone like the Avengers or the Fantastic Four handle Firelord. Since he doesn't know him as Peter Parker he could easily leave things to someone more equipped to handle the situation. When he's about to change, he spots some pictures of uncle Ben, and Peter's unbreakable sense of responsibility kicks in. Win or lose, he's gonna let Firelord know he's been in a fight. "One heck of a fight!"

It doesn't take Firelord long to recover his staff and once he does, he's out turn Spidey into a pile of ashes. Firelord's attacks are not something that can be shanken off like a jolt from Electro or a hard punch from Venom. If someone like Spidey were to take a hit from Firelord, that'd be the end of him. Game Over. The fight moves from skyscrappers, office buildings, subways and ends at a demolition site. Spidey does everything he can think of to stop this guy, even blowing him up in a building. With nowhere left to run, Spidey lays into Firelord, hitting him with everything he's got. He doesn't give Firelord a chance to strike back. He's just beating the crap out of him. Captain America andt he Avengers arrive to let Spidey know the fights over. Spidey looks to the ground to see that his foe is KO'd. Not only did Firelord get owned, he got owned by an everyday man. That had to be a huge blow to his ego.

What can I say about this story? I LOVED IT! This is a lot better than Roger Stern's two parter which pits Spidey against the Juggernaunt. I have great respect for Roger, but Tom DeFalco wrote the better story. You could really feel the fear and tension of the battle that weighed on Spidey. He couldn't let Firelord hurt anyone but the odds of him dying were a lot higher here than in most of his other battles. Spidey is a guy who mostly uses his brains to outwit his opponents, but every now and then, I think we need to see him pulverize the bad guy and that's exactly what he did here.