Halfway done. And it’s into this tumult that new regular (Or perhaps more accurately, “regular”) penciler Steve Skroce drops in. Skroce had been making a big splash in the X-Men comics. To be honest, not a fan at all. His art is not to my taste, then or now. He’s picked a weird time to get involved here. I mean, look at this…
It looks like he drew this referencing a bad claymation special or something. Tom DeFalco still writing, Bud La Rosa inks, good ol’ Bob Sharen hanging in there. Things are looking bad! Elsewhere, in part 3 of this 4-part story, the Spider-Men are STILL just fighting this jobber Gaunt/Robotmaster. Seems like the wheels are spinning and this was only 4 issues because there are 4 titles. Ben tells Peter to go be with his wife, but everyone there knows he can’t win against Robotmaster and his various, uh, robots without help, so Peter is staying. But is that really true? I think Spider-Man should be more than able to handle this, whoever’s in the suit. Ah, well. Meanwhile, in office gossip…
Indeed, Robbie. Indeed.
Peter incapacitates one of the robo-children who is named Willis just so DeFalco can do a horrible “What’chu talking bout, Willis” joke. Whew. At the hospital, MJ is deep into labor, and the mystery man is watching from the doorway! Back at the fight, Peter finds a phone and calls Anna to get the bad news, all while fighting the robo-kids and lying about being trapped between stations on the subway. Complicated. But there’s still more complications…
A gathering of various past cop characters from the books is a kinda fun. Tork is more of a Daredevil guy, tho. Shoulda been Keating. The Spiders are sssssstill fighting Robotmaster, and he releases a gas that only seems to effect Peter. He thinks his mysterious employer said it would work on both of them as this interminable attempt to drag this story out into 4 issues continues. Seriously, the Spider-Man parts are the most superfluous and unnecessary parts of this Spider-Man story, jeez. Case in point:
The Bugle is in trouble with exploding pumpkins! Say… exploding pumpkins…? Back at the fight, Ben finally gets told his friend Seward was not his friend, and is also dead.
Peter fffffinally goes to be with MJ as Ben tries to get Stromm to tell him what’s going on. But then Ben is zapped by the mystery man. He sees who it is, but is quickly disabled by him. Then the mystery man blows up Stromm for failing him. Utterly pointless filler, that guy ended up being. But if you thought that was bad…
Not to be overdramatic, but the horrors these idiots visited on Mary Jane during the clone debacle cannot be forgiven. Like, for real. This is disgusting. They had the absolutely asinine idea to replace Spider-Man with a clone. They made it irreversible by making MJ pregnant, because surely Peter’s responsibility means he can’t be Spider-Man if he has a child waiting at home. And then he assaults her, and then they make her be like “Oh, it’s ok that you punched the hell out of me, I love you,” and THEN they change their minds, so MJ has to suffer this absolute tragedy, and Peter isn’t even AROUND to know what happens. This is just… disgusting. But wait, it gets worse.
The Spider-Office was in a panic about how to end all this by the time they arrived at this point. They had so many trashed ideas they later published a kind of joke comic called 101 Ways To End The Clone Saga, because nothing would stick. Time travel was even broached, an approach that would’ve meant revealing both Peters were the real Peter, nothing was off the table. And then… we got this. More on that next post, as this sorry garbage comes to its terrible-but-beautifully-illustrated conclusion.