Marvel Super Heroes #4 (1990): Black Knight, Daredevil, Spitfire, Speedball, Wonder Man, Spider-Man and Nick Fury

Another anthology of short solo adventures. Because Marvel Comics Presents isn’t crappy enough.  

In order:

A sniper shoots Spider-Man in the leg with an LSD dart, so Nick Fury kills the sniper.  Most of the story is Spider-Man wandering around New York, tripping balls and fighting hallucinations, until Nick Fury cures him. Archie Goodwin wrote only the first 5 pages, with Gerry Conway writing the rest. Don Perlin did the art.  D

Then Daredevil saves Kingpin from being assassinated by one of his rivals Robert Campanella, Grant Miehm, C-) and Wonder Man saves kids from a bear and a snake in the Hollywood Hills (Bill Mumy, Brian Murray, D).

After that, we see Captain America’s World War II ally Spitfire’s powers return and cure her own cancer.

She also punches a guy who is abusing his girlfriend so hard that he flies about 30 feet off the ground.  But he doesn’t die. By Scott Lobdell and Ian Akin; grade is a D.

Next, another Speedball story. Sigh. Marvel never seems to tire of providing short, terrible stories about this inconsequential character.  In this one, a girl with a fatal illness gets similar vibrating powers but dies as a result of an avalanche of her own creation. Scott Lobdell and Ron Wilson were responsible for this grade D story.

A solid creative team (Gregory Wright and Dwayne McDuffie (script), Alan Davis (art)) takes on my least favorite Marvel character, pitting Black Knight against a father who wants to kidnap his own kid from the kid’s mother.  But it turns out she’s got a magic amulet that turns her into a dragon.

Black Knight can’t draw blood with his sword or else the sword’s curse will take over, so he hits the dragon a lot with the flat of the blade.  Plus he doesn’t want to hurt the mom.  So, dude, why carry a sword at all?

It says something that a Black Knight is the best story of this issue. Grade C-.

There’s also a few pin ups.

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