The End of An Era! What better time for an oversized and overpriced comic with a totally pointless plastic cover???? This month, DeFalco scripts himself, and Sal is credited with “Breakdowns & Finishes,” but Bill is still created with “Finished Art.” How can that be? Maybe we’ll see a couple Sal-inked pages. Not to start, though, as we’re told Spider-Man and The Scarlet Spider are bustin’ up underworld spots looking for info about the new Doctor Octopus.
Once again, our hero is given a moment to think about his own family-to-be waiting at home, just in case they haven’t hammered this home enough. Speaking of whom, MJ is having another modeling session where everyone is raving about how good she is (It almost seems a little much), when she passes out. Uh-oh! Meanwhile, the Spiders head to Pete & MJ’s, Ben once again hammering on that Peter is worried about being in danger now. They get there just in time to receive a call from the hospital…
A decade or so from this, Kaare Andrews will do a truly bizarre, borderline remake of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns sold as a Spider-Man comic set in the future that reveals MJ died from radiation poisoning due to having sex with a radioactive man. The book is a punchline now, as it should be. Trainer reveals to Peter that he anticipated this as a possible complication in MJ’s pregnancy, and rather than worrying everyone, he just went ahead and created an antidote, just in case. What a strange choice, Doc! He makes a call to have it delivered on his primitive cell phone, and that call is eavesdropped on by Doc Ock. Speaking to a mysterious partner on a screen, she says she’ll intercept the delivery to once again try to force him to give her all his VR knowledge. The guy sure has a lot of different areas of expertise.
Good! He should be beating himself up over that! He should still be beating himself up over that today. In the waiting room, Seward gets the call that he’s being extorted, that she’ll trade the antidote in exchange for him. Peter doesn’t want to even consider it, but Seward does. Peter goes back in MJ’s room and tells her what’s going on. She objects to him going with Seward, but he says with all that’s at stake, he’d never forgive himself if something went wrong, and she can’t argue with that. So, once again, the 2 Spiders are on the move, now with Trainer, once again dressed just like a SHIELD agent, heading for the swap. Seward presents himself as being alone, his guardian Spiders hiding in the near distance, but the goon has a metal detector.
The boys find a trap door in the van that drops into the pier below. Webbing up some comical web-flippers, they dive in after. And it’s not long before they discover… Doc Ock’s completely insane, giant underwater citadel. How’d she make this??? Inside, Seward asks if he was really such a bad parent. Signs point to yes…
As the Spiders break into the place, Seward gives the villains the info they want, and the face on the screen starts integrating all Seward’s data into their own. Whatever that is. No memory of screen face, here. Big 2-page spread of the Spiders whooping goons. Matching uniform goons, even! Classic. Peter internal monologues about all the dumb, dark, sad things he’s been through in the last couple years’ worth of comics and suddenly Ben has to stop him from beating a goon too bad.
Everyone is having reasonable concerns about Peter’s future as Spider-Man in this issue, but they’re laying it on so thick. WE GET IT. Back at the fight, Spider-Man finds his way to the antidote, obviously placed as a trap, and walks into it, because he has no choice. And then maybe we get to a page Sal inked, or at least inked part of.
It retains some of the looseness of Bill Sienkiewicz, but it’s a lot more straightforward and a lot more inky. Is this Sal trying to do an impression of Bill? Kinda fascinating. Ben, meanwhile, has found Seward, and also various tentacles and lasers meant to stop him from freeing his pal, all controlled by the mysterious screen-face. An attempt is made to work up some intrigue about who or what is on the other end of that line, but who cares? Not me!
That is some atrocious dialogue.
Woof. Spider-Man finally gets ‘round to webbing her eyes like he did the original Doc Ock a million times, and then grabs a tentacle and starts swinging her around faster and faster and then slings her into a wall so hard it cracks open, sucking her out to sea and collapsing the room on top of our hero. He’s buried under rubble, just like in the classic, original “Spider-Man Has To Lift A Heavy Thing” moment. This also knocks out the internet or something, stopping screen-face from tormenting Seward & Ben. So here’s the thing…
The usual, right? Sort of.
“You did it! I mean, I did it, but you did it, too, I guess!” The boys escape with the antidote, and back at the hospital and some time later, Seward tells them MJ’s already doing much better. Peter rushes to check in on her.
The end! Of course, all this was meant to make it crystal clear that Ben was going to be the real Spider-Man now, and that Peter would, in fact, betray his sense of responsibility if he kept on risking his life. This was meant to be a real, definitive end to this Peter Parker. At one point, the plan was Ben would eventually start calling himself Peter again, even, once enough time had passed. This was for real. But, of course, as we’ve seen, a mere 5 months from now, Peter & MJ were back in the book, and 10 months after that, he was Spider-Man again and Ben was dead. But this is not the end of this block, because marketing strikes again! You might think Ben would just go star in the previously seen Sensational Spider-Man #0 from here, but no. It’s much sillier than that. There’s 2 simultaneous stunts to get through, first. And before either of those, some truly weirdly timed one-offs.