As we dive into the final chapter of this odd story, The Smasher has, uh, smashed his way into The Daily Bugle to kidnap Joe Robertson (Instead of smashing into George Stacy’s house, as in the original). Lucky for him, Spider-Man swings in the hole Smasher made in the wall, knocking him to the ground.
Spidey tries to fight Smasher, but all he wants is Robbie. So he gets a tracer on him while being his usual trademark obnoxious until…
He leads Smasher away from Robbie, swinging up above the city, but The Smasher is able to just scale the buildings and chase him. Until Spidey finally gets too high for him to follow and just… leaves? It’s random and abrupt, and then there’s a new sequence that wasn’t in the original, so it’s hard to follow, really. Spidey swings away, but in a new sequence, sees Harry, Gwen & MJ campaigning for Raleigh on the street and heads down to join them as Peter. They’re riding around in a van as MJ reads Raleigh slogans over a sound system while Harry tells Peter about the Disruptor’s attack yesterday. Guess who shows up?
“Could the guy I was fighting 5 seconds ago who destroys anything with Raleigh’s name on it have sensed me in this Raleigh van?” The increasingly unhinged Smasher just destroys the van because Raleigh’s face is on it, bellowing about how he’s gotta die because the Disruptor wants it, and Smasher’s gotta do what the Disruptor wants, before trundling off. Peter rushes away to switch back to Spidey, who uses his Spider Tracer to follow Smasher back to Disruptor’s base. Which puts us back where things would have gone in the original if not for that new campaign scene. That was awkward. As he sneaks into the place, Spidey thinks that Raleigh can’t lose the election because of all the attacks on him…
Disruptor calls in Smasher, of course, and he’s really going in on the little control device he has, making Smasher more and more insane by the second. But Disruptor gets too excited, and his remote shorts out, and the big guy turns on his tormentor.
Thaxton is buried in his tunnel by the collapsing wall, and now it’s just Spidey and Smasher, who says now that he’s free, he’ll start his own crime spree. As they tussle, we hop over to Raleigh headquarters to see JJJ interviewed about his support for a second before getting back to the fight, where Spidey has finally figured out that machinery on Smasher’s head might be a good thing to break.
With the fight finally over, Spidey has one last loose end to tie up.
It makes sense, yeah? Raleigh making the mob hate him to ensure his victory. Robbie and JJJ being on the scene made a little more sense when Robbie was Captain Stacy. JJJ is moved to say Raleigh’s life will be an inspiration to us all.
Hey, isn’t this the end of The Dark Knight? There you have it. In the original, there was no Disruptor. Raleigh was shown to be the villain behind the attacks on himself from the beginning. And all his campaign appearances showed him to be kind of a crazed bad guy, too. Conway made the wise decision to make Raleigh seem more sympathetic and create at least a little tension about who the bad guy was, though it doesn’t seem like it would’ve been too hard to guess, even this way. It’s really something how obvious the new Spider-Man drawings are vs. the originals. Romita was still sort of trying to do a Ditko impression when the original was published, but all the new art is purely his own. Really strange little sequence of issues. One day, when we hit Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine #1, I’ll post comparisons of it these 3 issues. Not any time soon, though… We got crazier things to get into.