Things look bad for our hero! But will they actually get so bad inside? We’ll see. On the splash, everyone reiterates where things left off, Hitman about to kill Spider-Man just to spite The Vulture.
Despite his rough shape, Spidey leaps up onto the ceiling, webbing Hitman’s gun out of his hands and swinging it right into Vulture’s face. But then Hitman produces another gun and, missing Spider-Man, shoots out a window, which our hero decides to make use of to get some breathing room. Back inside, Vulture attacks Hitman, who throws some gas in his face that sends him shooting through another window looking for relief. Hitman calls a very upset Boss Morgan to report his failure, but says he got tracers on Vulture & Spider-Man, so they can track them. Hey, that’s Spider-Man’s move! Speaking of…
This Sha Shan thing isn’t exactly moving quickly. Peter arrives home to the discovery that the only clean clothes he has are the ones stuck in his web ball, so he boils some water and puts them in it. But then MJ & Flash arrive. Throwing a blanket over himself and pretending he was asleep, he answers the door in time for a cloud of steam to come out of the kitchen, and for MJ to lead them all in discovering Peter has shrunk his clothes. Meanwhile, Hitman sees Spidey’s tracer hasn’t moved in awhile, and decides it’s time to move in for the kill. In a private jet, no less. And yet, despite having just told us Spider-Man is probably settled in for the night, he goes after Vulture first, coming at him on some kind of rocket-cycle. But, as we saw last issue, Vulture’s shop is pretty close to Peter’s apartment, so just as he manages to shoo MJ & Flash out the door, he hears gunfire and an explosion outside as Vulture crashes Hitman’s bike only to fall prey to a flashbang.
As Vulture drags Spidey into the sky as he has so many times, Hitman fires “a boomerang blade” up to sever the webline and send Spidey falling. He makes himself a web net between building to land in, but then Vulture is on him, smashing him to the ground. And as soon as he’s down, Hitman is shooting at him. Spidey heads back up after Vulture, and Hitman calls his boss, saying it’s all going to plan before getting on his bike and following the aerial battle to Central Park. Spidey’s in rough shape, and just manages to avoid being shot by falling off the tower he & Vulture are fighting on due to exhaustion. He manages to shoot a web and hang from it, but he’s about done, not unlike the cover.
And, weirdly, since I jumped forward on the Wein era, that brings us back to where we started last time. TAC 6 is a reprint of MTU 3, and then we saw the Morbius thing get going in 7. And The Hitman show up in a subsequent issue of ASM. Despite Hitman being kind of lame, it’s cool that Len Wein decided to use him almost immediately after this. Doing your best to add to the toybox is always a good thing.