Spider-Man Adventures #8 Pg. 21

It's Symbiote Spider-Man vs. the Rhino and it's pretty easy to tell who's winning!

While I haven't collected any Spidey Adventures (based off the 90's animated show) I'd been meaning to snag a page from the series and this seemed as good as any! I guess that's partly due to the fact that we have Spider-Man in black, and as we all know, black costume Spidey pages are not the cheapest. Luckily, I got this one for a fair price point!

I'm also going to rant for a minute about my love-hate relationship with the TV show and the Spider-man Adventures symbiote-related issues in general. For while they were (and still are) awesome, they came with some problems: changing the Spider-Man canon in ways I wasn't happy with. The cartoon and Adventures comic both altered the idea of Spider-Man and the Venom symbiote. Following Secret Wars, the suit originally only gave him neigh-unlimited webbing and could change his clothes at will; the show and Adventures comic both claimed that the symbiote made Spider-Man stronger and a rage-fueled beast. Someone out there is going to debate me on this, but I promise you, if you go back and read all the black suit Spider-Man comics from the 80s, it never once made him stronger or more aggressive, as it did in the animated series, comic, and even the Spider-Man 3 movie.

Even the most recent Spider-Man comics from the last few weeks at the time of my writing this, featuring the symiote and Spider-Man, have completely retconned the character's history, claiming that Spidey was more powerful and angrier when he was possessed by the black suit. So while I love Alex Saviuk's artwork here and Spider-Man himself, I can't get over the misinformation (or fake news) that this series and the cartoon would later come to spread and make dogma.