We’ve reached the halfway mark in this saga, though I already feel like it’s been going on for 20 issues. Instantly famous cover, this one. I guess all those spiders helped our man dig out. Two weeks into his marriage and he’s been buried alive. And while he’s buried alive, he’s hallucinating or dreaming or something that he’s floating nuder in a white void, curled into the fetal position, being confronted by dead friends who turn to piles of bones when you tell them they’re dead.
Then he get in on that sweet “I am The Spider” action Kraven’s been on for awhile, imagining himself a big spider crawling through holes in the ground.
Spider-Man comics are so fun, guys. The spider dies and gives birth to a fully grown Peter Parker (Strangely not the last time THAT visual will appear in a Spider-Man comic), who begins clawing his way through the darkness babbling about “you’ve killed a mask, you haven’t killed me,” calling on Mary Jane to help him through this, imagining Kraven shooting him over and over, until…
Check out that super misaligned color plate on the “Spider-Man.” I’m surprised that doesn’t seem to be having a more obvious effect on the rest of the page. The dangers of 4-color printing. Our man stumbled a few steps, falls down, gets back up. He finally shambles into the house, where he discovers a pile of newspapers letting him know what’s been going on while he was in the dirt.
Two weeks really seems like pushing it. I mean, I’m actually prepared to accept the explanation that Kraven pumped Spidey full of drugs that kept him alive that long, but nothing in the story before now has really felt like it took place on more than one night, let alone across 2 weeks. MJ is not nearly panicked enough. Kraven took too weeks to find Vermin? This just doesn’t work for me. Spidey rampages through Kraven’s trophy room, continuing to yell “two weeks” and so forth internally while he tears up all Kraven’s hunting trophies. Two of Kraven’s goons come in and are pretty scared, but Spidey doesn’t hurt them. Quick cut to Vermin coming out of the darkness to test an electrified cage he seems to be in, then after a page of a despondent MJ watching TV as Peter narrates about how hard the last 2 weeks must have been for her…
Weird stuff happening with the magenta plate in this issue, too, rarely more obvious than that last panel. I bet another copy of this issue would look very different. Peter wakes up from a nightmare that he’s in the ground again, and then suits up. He’s not really able to speak in more than a whisper for some reason, but he says he has to go stop Kraven killing people in his name. MJ can’t talk him out of it. Then he’s off in the rain (I guess it’s been raining for 2 solid weeks). He swings directly to some building in the city, to a specific window on said building, and guess what, that’s where Kraven is.
Oh, yeah, sure. That makes sense. Why not, man? Why not? I’m just trying to get through this, at this point. I can do this. I’ve faced death. I’ve survived hurricanes. I’ve traveled alone in foreign countries. I’ve moved to a city I don’t know for a job I didn’t know how to do. I can finish Kraven’s Last Hunt.