He’s back! This could be weird. It opens with a pretty striking minimalist splash:
Yes, former Spidey group editor Danny Fingroth is the new writer for now. Vince Colletta and J. Ferriter round out the art team as Greg LaRocque hangs on a couple more months. Spider-Man has followed some goons who stole “3 truck loads of furs” back to their hideout. Three? That seems excessive. Spidey launches into the superheroics.
I bet Vince Colletta, notorious for erasing backgrounds he didn’t want to ink on Kirby’s classic Thor pages, is really into this darkness. Our guy makes quick work of all but one goon, who almost runs him down in one of their trucks before smashing through a wall and trying to escape. But he tries to drive under an overpass that’s too low, so…
LaRocque’s Spidey has a clean, classic look without aping Romita. That’s very rare. It’s a shame he didn’t get to do more. Spidey tells the cops where to find the other guys and takes off, so Peter Parker can deliver his photos from the warehouse. But Robbie’s not interested, saying the public is tired of these kind of shots and the low lighting makes them too weird to print properly. But when Peter literally bumps into JJJ, Jonah sees them and thinks they’d be perfect for his oft-mentioned new venture, a revival of “Now Magazine.”
Hey, it’s the debut of Doc Ock’s utterly delusional psychiatrist! We’ve seen him before, but that took place after this, because confusion is fun!
Otto wakes from a nightmare to see a spider on his ceiling, which makes him flashback to his brutal defeat in TAC 79 and also to the rather insane way he got home from Secret Wars, all positioned as part of his breakdown. He gets so agitated his arms break loose from “a facility deep underground in another part of the city” to come protect him.
The arms smash through cops and sophisticated SHIELD tech alike searching for their master. Peter Parker hears a news bulletin about it while he’s shopping for camera equipment, and soon Spider-Man is on the case. He doesn’t catch up before the arms more or less kidnap an unconscious Doc Ock. He tries to talk to them, but feels silly, and it doesn’t seem to help. They smash around until Spider-Man is left Lifting A Very Heavy Thing, as he is wont to do, to protect people from the building collapsing.
And yet that psychiatrist still thinks he can rehab Ock next time we see him. Some people never learn. This month’s Bullpen Bulletins is not written by Jim Shooter as normal, because he’s writing Secret Wars II, and Roger Stern fills in. Over the course of his column, he says, “No, I will not tell you who Hobgoblin is!” Funny that he didn’t even know at this time. At least, according to what was ultimately published.