This cover sure doesn’t evoke a labyrinth. Probably wasn’t made with this issue in mind. But what if it was? This cover is looking pretty wonky. Inconsistent perspective and proportion. Spidey is huge and not at all sticking to that building. Anyway. Inside, we have a guest writer & penciler in the form of Tony Isabella and Lee Elias, a totally unfamiliar name to me. Mike Esposito inks. I believe this is Isabella’s 2nd appearance on the blog, but his first chronologically. As we get going, Spider-Man is engaging in one of his most frequent pass times: falling to his death. Some malignant force is influencing his brain and making it impossible to think.
Is this gonna be The Mindworm?? Someone actually brought back The Mindworm!? I guess we’ll see, I’m getting ahead of myself. Spidey is pretty banged up, but his head is clearing as 2 cops come for him for breaking & entering. Then the voice says he won’t be robbed of his plans and orders Spider-Man to kill the cops. He knocks them both out with a single punch, and then the voice tells Spider-Man he can’t resist it, and makes him smash his own head into the wall just for fun. Then it forces him to… ugh, to swing out to Flash Thompson’s old neighborhood, this is really The Mindworm! Whyyyyyyyyy Spidey thinks to himself that they were supposed to knock down the old houses there to put up high rises, and “has a bad feeling” as he’s made to enter a house and, well, you know…
It’s him. Perhaps the dopiest villain in the history of Spider-Man. Also: Chapter 2? What a dated move for 1979. Mindworm recaps his sole previous appearance since it’s been over 5 years and the readership probably didn’t see it, then goes on to explain where he’s been. I love that he’s still wearing the shirt & shorts he was wearing all those years ago.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s stories that turn on the debunked notion that people don’t use their whole brains. Just kidding, I don’t like them at all. Exposition out of the way, Mindworm starts zapping Spidey with his ill-defined mental attack to punish him for… doing this to him? I guess? Then tosses him through I guess a window, it’s not terribly clear, but it also seems to drop our hero into a basement or dungeon or something. It’s a very muddy page as a woman in business wear runs up and says thank Heaven Spider-Man is here. She turns out to be a Dr. Joyce Phillips, who says Mindworm was her patient ‘til he escaped. Spider-Man confirms we’re in “this poor man’s labyrinth,” and then, before Dr. Phillips can offer her thoughts on why they’re here, they… they’re attacked by giant rats? What?
What?? It is very unlike Spider-Man to just execute something, even a giant rat! The doc says she was Mindworm (“Mr. Turner”)’s psychologist, and says they were attacked by giant rats because Mindworm was bitten by one as a child. When Spidey suggests they’re “trapped inside his neuroses,” she agrees. What in the world is this? So are they hallucinating all this? Then they get picked up inside a hurricane all of a sudden. Maybe Mindworm was also bitten by a hurricane as a child. It picks them up and carries them to Chapter 3.
Folks, I am really not on board for this issue. Mindworm blasts Spidey again and produces some tentacles, so now he looks even more like Krang from Ninja Turtles. Dr. Phillips yells to Spider-Man that he can only defeat Mindworm by reminding him that he’s human, and so Spider-Man tells him he can’t quit the human race, and asks if his parents ever told him that (I’m guessing they did not).
Aaaalright. It was all a dream. I will not do the Biggie quote a 2nd time on this blog, but I did think it. Possibly the least essential Spider-Man comic of 1979, this. I mean, also probably a fill-in, so you can’t give the creative team much trouble for it. Probably done quickly to beat a deadline, and also unable to tie into any ongoing subplots or anything. A random return of an obscure villain will at least get you another issue on the stands. But… woof.