So I am re-reading the Ditko Spider-Man and there are a few issues where MJ is being referenced as being beautiful, which in hindsight was a stupid mistake. Betty and Liz run into her and remark how gorgeous she was and again, in another issue. Why would they do the whole gag, if we already know she is a knockout? Seems like poor planning.

So we could enjoy the bittersweet irony of Peter avoiding the blind date.

Interesting but the later issues, especially the Romita ones, make it seem more comedic and if you read those first, like I did, it doesn't make sense.

Trivia: The elderly woman shown in the 1st and 3rd panels was portrayed on film by Marisa Tomei.

And the resemblance was UNCANNY!

Like the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016!

biff

If Jacob Batalon can play Ned Leeds then Marisa can play Aunt May.

Because at that point, Steve Ditko was doing the full plotting --



So when Ditko later left, it's possible that Stan didn't know exactly how Steve planned on working this into the ongoing soap opera. I think Jay is correct about the irony angle, but "Steverino" might have had something big planned with the reveal of her good looks, something worth several issues of build-up, that he never explained to Stan.

Meanwhile, I just saw that Batman and Black Canary "had a moment" in JLA #84 and I wonder if they ever followed up on this?

They sure did---in All-Star Batman & Robin,remember?

Love chunks!

In JLA #88, she lets him down with the old "I think of you like a brother" speech, handled in typically florid style by Mike Friedrich. Apparently Black Canary comes from the Princess Leia school of sibling relations:


Of course the backstory is that Robert Kanigher dropped that bizarre kiss subplot into the one issue he wrote, and subsequent writer Mike Friedrich felt like he had to (as he put it in a later interview) "clean up a mistake." The "seed of bitterness" planted in Batman is never followed up upon in later issues. At any rate, both Kanigher and Friedrich wrote some really loopy stuff... JLA during that period often approached "so bad it's good" territory.

I've seen Robert Kanigher's style of writing described as "flying without instruments." Which would explain a few things I recall seeing in some of my brother's old war comics that he wrote.

Wonder what the context is supposed to be? Black Canary looks in the second panel like she just learned that a dear loved one had died. Was Batman trying to comfort her about something? At any rate, the narration there is either so bad it's good, or so bad it's just plain bad.

I didn't know I was trapped in a universal web of loneliness, like all humans. Looks like I, too, need to grope through the darkness for my soul, then.

I'm pretty sure I read an interview with Kanigher once where he said he didn't plot his stories out in advance, but just sat down and wrote them. "Flying without instruments" is a very apt metaphor for his meandering style and the sometimes-bizarre, out-of-left-field plot twists that characterize his work.

I could try to summarize the context of the kiss scene, but it's easier to just post the preceding page:


Kanigher was trying hard to insert Marvel-style characterization into his writing, but it's just florid and over-the-top. Canary's husband had just died a few issues prior, so she's weepy about that. Batman is pining for a lost love never mentioned before or again, and sees his opportunity to get some grief nookie, I guess.

And the thing is, as weird as this issue by Kanigher is, Mike Friedrich seems to have taken as a gauntlet thrown down, because the issues he writes subsequently are jam packed with even more awkward and out-of-character emoting. The best moment being when he has Harlan Ellison guest star (yes, seriously) and Ellison becomes obsessively in love with Black Canary to the point that he somehow develops the super-power to cast illusions or alter reality (it's unclear what he's doing exactly). The gonzo craziness in JLA #84-99 is not to be topped.

No thank you



Yeah it was all over the place.




I'm not sure why I never noticed it before.

There’s no love in numbers , Black Canary

Okay, Black Canary's emotional state makes more sense in that context. That's still some terribly clunky writing. Sounds like that era of JLA, which I've seen little of, was as nutty as some of Marvel's 1970s "Defenders" comics.

I would never have figured Harlan Ellison for such a sentimental type....

The idea of a hothead like Harlan Ellison having superpowers....

Here's the penultimate page from the Ellison story. Mike Friedrich accomplishes something truly unbelievable... he makes Robert Kanigher's writing look subtle and naturalistic by comparison:



The most remarkable thing of all is that Ellison (who by all accounts was generally a very tough critic) actually liked this story. He was sent an advance copy, and he apparently liked it so much he asked Julie Schwartz to dispense with the pseudonym ("Harlequin Ellis") attached to his character and use his real name in the story. Apparently ego got in the way of his critical judgment here. At any rate, Schwartz decided against using his real name.

Alternate possibility: Harlan Ellison's critical judgment has always been crap, with him arbitrarily tearing apart things that are good and gushing over things that suck, but somehow he's managed to maintain his image as some kind of genius, through the force of an unrelentingly obnoxious personality.