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All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

There are two types of Spider-Man stories. 'Kraven's Last Hunt,' and then everything else. 

I'm not just saying that to be mean or to purposefully gloss over decades and decades of Spidey stories. But there's a darkness that emanates from the pages of Kraven's Last Hunt that sets it apart from what we're used to seeing from Marvel's Web-Head. After all, this story did come out in 1987, a time when American comics became edgier overall. For Made in '87 this week, we're highlighting the most impactful stories in pop culture from 1987. And it's my pleasure to tell you about the wild goose chase that Kraven's Last Hunt sent me on, thanks to the talents of J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck, and Bob McLeod. 

Kraven's Last Hunt is unusual because it doesn't really feel like a Spider-Man story to begin with. And that's by design. According to writer J.M. DeMatteis, it was originally pitched as a Wonder Man (!) story at Marvel, where it was rejected. Subsequently, it was pitched to DC as a Batman story, where it would've probably gone down in history as just another good story from The Dark Knight's mid-to-late 1980s. But DC rejected the story's pitch not just once, but twice. Luckily for all of us, DeMatteis didn't give up on it, and it once again landed back at the House of Ideas as a Spider-Man story.

I was working at a comic shop in Santa Monica in 2022 when the phone rang. The voice on the other end sounded a little lost: "Do you have anything with Kraven the Hunter? I'm trying to understand more about this character." Now, that's a call you don't get every day. "Kraven's Last Hunt shows that he's more than just a crazy guy running around in a crazy outfit," I replied. Of course, Kraven's Last Hunt wasn't in print at the time, but the caller and I got to talking about the character and comics in general. As it turns out, the caller was producing the Kraven the Hunter movie at Sony Pictures, and it was important for him to understand what makes Kraven tick on a psychological level.

Before I moved into comics and journalism, I worked in creative development at Sony Pictures. As I held the phone in my hand, I felt the vestiges of my old life crawling out like Spider-Man from his grave. It's a life and career I used to mourn the loss of, but I've learned to live with, thanks to Kraven's Last Hunt. 

Kraven's Last Hunt is Spider-Man's darkest story

I discovered that Kraven's Last Hunt was in a different category of Spider-Man stories altogether when one of my friends loaned me the first edition trade paperback. It sat on my shelf for a few weeks before a certain aura emanated from it that invited me to pick it up - almost like it was keen on recreating that scene from the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie when the Green Goblin mask torments Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn. Some men, like Kraven himself, are compelled to answer the call of the wild, to confront their own mortality while they wrestle with the most powerful beasts in the animal kingdom. And then there are others, like yours truly, who get their thrills from seeking out the edges of the abyss. Reading Kraven's Last Hunt was an exercise in that, an exercise I thought I could only find in stories with Batman or the Spectre. 

To be clear, my buddy's copy of Kraven's Last Hunt isn't cursed or haunted, but there was something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I read through it. I flipped through the pages and was stunned by how dark their contents were. I'm not just talking edgy, angry men being edgy, angry men in New York City sewers. I'm talking about the sheer amount of dark ink I saw on the page, far more than I was used to seeing in a Spider-Man story. Beyond the legendary creative team behind Kraven's Last Hunt, seeing all of that darkness radiating out from the pages made me think, "Oh, I am really going to rock with this." 

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

Kraven's Last Hunt takes place when Spider-Man has his black suit (which would later be revealed as the Venom symbiote). Spidey is married to Mary Jane, but they're living in separate places because they're in a bit of a rough patch. At the same time, Kraven the Hunter decides to hunt down Spider-Man, whom he believes to be the root of all of his problems. Kraven kills Spider-Man and buries him in a grave. And as the villain traipses around New York City in Spider-Man's suit, Kraven discovers that murdering his nemesis has done little to alleviate the psychological burdens he's carried with him throughout life. 

Kraven's Last Hunt brought psychological complexity to a classic Spider-Man villain

Kraven's Last Hunt uses its form as a sequential story to breathe life and psychological complexity into the two cartoonish characters at its core. Each panel of Kraven's Last Hunt is part of a multi-pronged story that examines the skeletons - familial, romantic, or something else entirely - that muscular men keep locked away in their mental closets. It chronicles the ways that obsession eats away at the obsessor little by little, until their skin and bones are scorched by polluted air they were never meant to know the feel of. Kraven's Last Hunt begins with death, and can only end in death. From darkness we are born, and to darkness we return. 

Kraven isn't the only comic book villain to be obsessed with a beloved superhero (looking at you, Joker and Deathstroke), but his preoccupation with Spider-Man in Kraven's Last Hunt is depicted as a maladaptive psychological coping mechanism. And it's painful to read, if you've got any sense of empathy. Over the course of the story, Kraven reflects on how the past century in Russian history led to the dissolution of his family life, and he sees Spider-Man, or at least, "The Spider," as the force behind it all. "They said my mother was insane; that she took her own life: They lied," he ruminates in The Amazing Spider-Man #294. "Her life was stolen from her: stolen by The Spider."

And though Kraven comes to understand that Spider-Man is just "a man," he continues to pin all of his family's (and country's) woes on him: "And yet within him is something more: something great. Something awful. The essence of the demon that brought Russia to ruin. The demon that destroyed my father; consumed my mother. The demon I have at long last -- defeated," Kraven thinks, with a smile. In this sense, Kraven's Last Hunt illuminates how we self-soothe through constructing narratives about the lives we've lived and about the people we've loved. 

Comic book fans may be familiar with a particularly iconic page from Kraven's Last Hunt, where a black suited Spider-Man stands dramatically over a grave in a cemetery while a rat skitters by in the rain, before taking off his mask to reveal that it is Kraven in the suit. Kraven's face twists into a maniacal laugh, his white, oversized teeth gleaming with predatory delight as raindrops splash on his cheekbones. 

It's a page with no dialogue, nor any sounds beyond Kraven's "ha-ha-ha!" that disrupts the solemnity of the scene. Hell, even the rat shows some respect for Peter Parker, who is buried six feet under, while the rain falls with an unnatural sense of quiet. But this is what makes Kraven's Last Hunt so singular: the visuals of the story are single-mindedly geared toward representing the disturbing emptiness of Kraven's obsession with killing Spider-Man. The "darkness" of Kraven's Last Hunt isn't just a narrative plot point; the story shows us that Kraven's personal void also exists on a sensory level. 

For a 'dark' story like Kraven's Last Hunt to truly excel at being a dark story, its darkness must be on both a formal and thematic level. On first glance, it might seem like darkness is an aesthetic hurdle that must be cleared to be achieved, but it runs deeper than that. Kraven's Last Hunt is a marriage of copious dark ink splashed onto the pages and an examination of what happens to men who have a void where their hearts should be. 

Kraven's Last Hunt was originally titled 'Fearful Symmetry' after William Blake's iconic poem, The Tyger. Blake's poetry is scattered throughout Kraven's Last Hunt, reframing the original poem into a statement about how difficult it is to represent the enormity of human experience on the page in a comic book story. Indeed, "what immortal hand or eye could frame" the anguish humans have felt since the dawn of time within a Spider-Man story? By the end of the story, you're convinced that DeMatteis, Zeck, and McLeod are more than up to the task. 

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• The Full House cast addresses some of the series’ biggest continuity errors
• How Spider-Man’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon was saved by a fired Marvel boss — and Ronald McDonald
• How NBC panicked after Diane left Cheers — and why Kirstie Alley’s casting sparked a quiet battle inside the hit show
• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• The 1987 Justice League reboot that made superheroes weird, hilarious, and unexpectedly human
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s