Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Spider-Ham, Spider-Ham/Does whatever a Spider can/Gets into lots of scuffles/Catches thieves just like truffles

Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham
Cast of characters from the Marvel/Star comic book Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham, full-page by Steve Mellor from Marvel Age Annual #3 (1986)
(Click picture to ham-size)


Spider-HamI'm very fond of Marvel's attempt at the venerable funny-animal parody comic, Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham...it was one of the few kid-oriented Star Comics that actually had an appeal to pre-exsiting Marvel fans. Populated by characters whose names were groan-inducing, delightfully-bad animal puns on Marvel's super heroes (Deerdevil! The Fantastic Fur! Goose Rider! Ducktor Doom!) and some distinctive fluid and delightfully cartoon-inspired art (mostly by Joe Abelo, Mark Armstrong, and Steve and Mike Mellor), I frequently hope for a Marvel trade paperback...heck, I'd settle for a crayon-it-yourself Essential Peter Porker. After all, it doesn't need to be in color and nobody will get confused...I'm sure every Marvel fan will be able to understand what the pig meant.

Essential Peter Porker


Spider-Ham came back relatively recently in an almost universally lambasted Civil War one-shot appearance, I'm betting the little bacon-ball still has a lot of friends out there: Marvel fans voted him the Spider-Guy they wanted to see on the Mike Wieringo alternate cover of Amazing Spider-Man #528:

ASM #528


Hey Joey Q! With the rest of the Star original characters reappearing in this year's X-Babies miniseries, isn't it time to bring Your Friendly Neighbor Spider-Ham back to comics? C'mon...don't hog all the fun! Look, we'll even let you bring back this guy:

Hambit



5 comments:

Phillip said...

The main problem with that Civil War one-shot can be seen on the cover: they're all pigs! It'd be nice to see someone do it right.

Unknown said...

They should let the X-Babies team take a crack at Spider-Ham. I'd love to see what Schigiel and Chabot would do with them!

Bill D. said...

I just can't imagine why they're putting out trades of the stuff like Royal Roy and Planet Terry but not Peter Porker. They'd sell a ton of those.

Tegan O'Neil said...

It strikes me that Hambit looks less like a pig and more like . . . a Melmacian.

Anonymous said...

I say constantly that Marvel missed the ball when they had Mighty Mouse not to do a crossover with the two. (Even during the Crisis on Infinate Earths parody--instead we got some Bakshi creation I never heard of and didn't care about.) Now that Disney is involved, I've been pushing a Darkwing Duck/Spider-Ham crossover.

And there was an Iron Man, only they called him Iron Mouse.