Surprise. It’s a sequel to Kraven’s Last Hunt. Fashionably late, this is. And, actually, it was published almost a year in the future, but it turns out it goes here. I wonder if this was inspired by McFarlane’s illusory Kraven zombie in his first Spider-Man arc? At any rate, the gang’s back together to continue the misery! Now joined by barely-credited colorist Steve Bucellato (The three name creators’ names are on the cover, a title page and a credits page while Steve just gets that last one).I forget when I got this, but I don’t recall reading it, ever. Surely I did. Unless I got it in the Great Ebay Hysteria of 2018, but I don’t… remember. One can’t know the provenance of thousands of individual comics, I guess. We open on a full page shot of Kraven’s tombstone, which I guess is in the same cemetery as a funeral Peter & Mary Jane are attending which is right off the bat absurd. Does that mean he illegally buried Spider-Man in a regular graveyard and not just somewhere on his estate, as I assumed? Under Peter’s fake deep internal monologue about death and how you can’t really comfort people who experience it, we appear to be joining a service for the mother of Roger Hocheberg, Peter’s one-time lab partner, tho his last name is not given. Also MJ is the first to talk to him, and I don’t think they ever met.
It is immediately apparent that Bob McCleod is putting more of a stamp on this collaboration than he did last time. Not that I mind. He’s adding some depth and hard edges to Zeck’s often very loose style, they still work very well together even if the dynamic is different. MJ finds Peter in another room, obviously freaked out, trying to pretend he’s getting a cold to explain it, still seeing himself in the grave. She says he’s been acting weird for weeks. Peter snaps at her and says he needs a little air, heading out as Spider-Man just as the service is about to start. A+ stuff, really enjoying it. Swinging around, Peter rightly beats himself up for being crappy to both his wife and his old friend he hasn’t seen in a long time as his dueling inner monologue from Kraven’s Last Hunt starts intruding again, reminding him about being buried alive. Yay. He tries to shake it off when his Spider Sense goes off, thinking he can go do some good and get it together.
I wonder what I paid for this. I begin to think I got it at McKay’s, took it out of the bag to put on a bookshelf, then later reconsidered and put it back with the single comics. I dunno. But I suddenly think I got it for under $2 at McKay’s, and I sure hope so. Peter makes it back to the funeral in time to hear the last of the sermon for Esther Hochberg (Good to confirm who this is for the audience, eventually) and put a hand on Roger’s shoulder to silently let him know he’s there for him, but he’s still shaken up, and MJ can tell. Later, at home, MJ is trying to tell her husband about something that happened at work, and he’s not listening. She tries to get through to him, but he’s obsessing over a metaphor the rabbi used at the funeral about death being like the shedding of an old coat. So then MJ helpfully tells him one time, when she was a kid, she was at a friend’s house where he dad just keeled over dead.
Has JM randomly decided Peter is an atheist, all evidence to the contrary aside (Most of it written by no less than Stan himself)? Or is that not meant to be so literal? No idea. In a dream, Peter, in the black costume, mask off, wanders through a very dream-like, snowy cemetery, demanding Kraven show himself, saying he can’t trick Peter into thinking he’s dead, saying he’ll find him and he hates him, over and over. As he reaches Kraven’s grave and begins to pound on it, a hand shoot up out of it and grabs his throat.
I assume ghost Kraven’s face is not supposed to be funny there, but it is. Also, it must be said, head-blowed-off zombie Kraven in the McFarlane story was a far more arresting visual.
Our man decides he’s been drugged, one of Kraven’s signature moves. Ghost Kraven says his life was lies before looking very sad and saying “Please…” Peter asks what he wants.
Peter asks the shape who it is, and it says it doesn’t matter. He’s still not sure if he can believe this is happening, but the shape helps him up off the ground and says he has to trust his feelings, because due to the bond he established with Kraven in life, only he can save Kraven’s soul. I am so ready to check out on this nonsense. What bonds??????? Aside from Kraven’s Last Hunt, when did Kraven ever MEAN anything to Spider-Man? He was, is, and always will be a Z-List loser. Anyway, the shape says Kraven is neither alive nor dead, gestures to the sky, and shows Peter a huge swirl of souls, and says they’re all suicides. Oh, boy, so that’s the angle.
I imagine the look on my face reading this page is not unlike if someone just farted in my face.
Ugh. He tells her what’s been going on, and she refuses to let him deflect as she tells him she knows exactly what this is. That he never really dealt with what happened to him, and it’s festered inside him for months, and now it’s bubbling to the surface. Which is all quite reasonable. MJ sure has to deal with a lot. She says this is his subconscious trying to make him deal with his pain and guilt, and he bristles at the idea of feeling guilty.
(At least until 2007) “No. Never” “Yes. Always” is a good exchange between them on this topic. Spidey returns to Kraven’s grave, which is, in fact, on his private estate and not in the graveyard Esther Hochberg is in now, and finds it turned over like it was in his possibly hallucinated encounter with Kraven’s ghost and the other ghost. The shape reappears, telling him if he wants to end this, he has to to face a trial like nothing he has before. Then he summons Kraven’s ghost from the swirl and Kraven’s body claws up out of the ground.
“They’re singing to me… the spirits of the suicides.” Feel like Spidey’s well on his way to writing a song for Switchblade Symphony. Spidey dives toward the corpse, misses, looks down into the grave, and totally bails on the premise, yelling at the corpse that it’s not his fault it died, that people suffer all the time, and runs away. But, of course, the corpse appears in front of him, Jason Vorhees style. Spidey declares that, if he’d known Kraven was going to kill himself, he would’ve tried to stop him. That he wouldn’t have let him die. I mean, obviously. Then he hears Kraven’s voice in mind reminding him how Uncle Ben died, which is pretty low.
Spider-Man thinks of all the other people who’ve died on his watch, wondering as usual if he could’ve done more to save them, and then Kraven the Corpse inevitably tackles him back into his old grave, now a seemingly bottomless pit. Spidey thinks he doesn’t want to die. But then, hanging from the edge, the corpse hanging fro him, he thinks he has to die for not saving those people. But theeeeen, he sees images of him and Uncle Ben when he was young and him and MJ earlier this evening in his mind, and decides he doesn’t have to die. How heroic.
This book’s treatment of suicide as a topic is certainly well-meaning, but I don’t think it’s terribly nuanced.
The storm disappears along with all the ghosts. Spider-Man rights Kraven’s tombstone and tells him to rest in peace. The next day, as the sun is out and people are clearing the snow, Peter & MJ walk down the street, MJ telling him his mind made up the whole thing as a coping mechanism, but he’s not convinced. And as they reach an apartment door and knock, he says he doesn’t want to talk about it, not like before when he was scared, but because talking about an experience like that too much can cheapen it, and they embrace, balance restored (For, like a minute).
And so, Peter’s trauma over being buried alive is finally over. Until next post. Because DeMatteis just loves to wallow in it, I guess. Too bad for poor Roger. He seemed like a good character despite not getting much face time. This is his 2nd-to-last appearance in any comic. I’ve not managed to cover the last yet, but it’s on the docket.