The fifth annual of Web of Spider-Man was published in 1989, and was tied in with the Atlantis Attacks storyline, and featured a prominent part of it, as it featured Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four fighting an entire Atlantean army as it invaded New York City. As well as this monumental main story, the annual also has several other stories from the Spider-Man universe attached to it.

The main story begins with a gigantic Atlantean fleet surfacing in New York Harbor, challenged by both the United States Army, The Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. The battle is narrated by a reporter, Trish Fox, who exchanges commentaries that turn into insults with her news anchor, as she accuses him of viewing the war as entertainment, reminding him that it is all real. After the initial invasion is repulsed, the Atlantean fleet unleashes a kaiju-like monster, who rampages through Manhattan until Spider-Man tricks it into punching an electrical billboard, shocking its rider and leaving it to wander aimlessly back to water. All of this was, however, a sideshow: the real reason for the Atlantean army to attack New York City was so that Ghaur, the leader of the Deviants, could unleash nuclear weapons on Atlantis, allowing him to summon The Serpent Crown back to earth. He also kidnaps The Invisible Woman to be a "Bride of Set", and I promise that all of that makes sense if you are very familiar with Marvel mythology and cosmology. This story accomplishes a somewhat-difficult task: placing the "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in a military story that is tied into the science-fiction and magical aspects of Marvel. As in many annual stories, Spider-Man turns into a side character in his own title, with the Fantastic Four overshadowing him.

This is only the main story, though. The other stories may provide just as much of an insight into what is going on here. Incidentally, the main story was written by Gerry Conway, one of the main writers of Spider-Man in the 1980s, and was illustrated by Javier Saltares and Randy Emberlin, both of whom were good quality journeyman artists but not specifically known as Spider-Man artists. The second story was written by Gerry Conway, but was illustrated by Steve Ditko, the man who created Spider-Man visually, and who at that point had been mostly retired for some time. The story didn't feature Spider-Man, though, instead being a short story about how one of Peter Parker's professors gains the Captain Universe powers in order to defeat a menacing but comedic figure called "The Quantum Mechanic" who is going to destroy our universe over the fact of quantum uncertainty. This is a short and comedic story, but not as much as the next two pieces, both written and drawn by Fred Hembeck in his own style, a cartoonish style somewhat akin to Archie in both art and content. It is a break to look at Spider-Man in a less serious way, especially because the next story was a more serious story, featuring Silver Sable, a sexy but merciless mercenary that would presage the trend of grim and gritty. Appropriately, this was also the first Marvel Universe content written by Fabian Nicieza, who would become one of Marvel's most important creators over the next decade.

This is where the presence of the reporter in the first, main story, becomes important. The interchange between the reporter and the anchor reminds us that, even within the story, what we are reading is filtered and distorted, and that the people who are viewing it can't understand what is going on. And that is true a step upwards, as the various content of this issue, written and drawn by creators from different eras of Marvel, with varying styles, lets us know there is more than one way to read a comic book. Personal struggles and cosmological struggles intersect. The cartoon story of a young Peter Parker drinking ice cream sodas with Flash Thompson and Liz Allan is followed by a story where Silver Sable denies pension benefits to the family of one of her slain soldiers. And all of these are ancillary to the main story where Spider-Man fights a movie monster while an entire city is destroyed. In some ways, this changing of style and content distracts from the reader taking any of the stories seriously---but also, just like in real life, it is up to us to decide which thread is most important.

As a personal note, I have been doing these comic book reviews for a while, and over time, they have become more involved for me. What started half-jokingly has become a serious project to understand how different levels of story can be given at one time, and how corporate and institutional prerogatives can lead to wide differences in how creators might tell stories. It took me a week of thinking to decide just how I wanted to describe this single comic book.

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