Sigh. Big sigh. Ross’s Spider-Man is really off-model from his usual McFarlane-by-way-of-Campbell impression here. Looks like he jumped to the future and started aping ballpoint pen-era Steve McNiven. That’s a very inside baseball kind of sentence. I am thinking about anything other than this terrible, stupid comic book I’m about to read. Glenn Greenberg scripts over a DeMatteis plot and Dan Green & Al Milgrom ink this month. I guess JM couldn’t be bothered to finish this dreck. Spider-Man swings over the city recapping the Chameleon stuff as various New Yorkers somehow mistake him for the Human Fly and Ant-Man, respectively. “Hilarious.”
It’s not often the “big bad government representative here to shake things up” trope character is 100% right about everything, but we got it here. Ravencroft is the crappiest institution in history! There was a bit on the old sketch comedy show, The State, about a prison with no bars or doors where the prisoners stayed because the warden asked them to, “as a favor to me,” until one man had the courage to just walk out the front gate. That place was more secure than Ravencroft.
Justice! “Hey, my friends here have let Carnage loose several times to kill literally hundreds of people, you can’t talk to her like that!” Meanwhile, the insufferable villains of this issue use The Spot’s powers to enter a bank vault and rob it while Kangaroo babbles about “the Sharper Villain Catalog” and Grizzly is so stupidly, single-mindedly focused on getting revenge on Spider-Man that he opens the vault door and triggers the alarms. Ugh. Grizzly and Gibbon are immediately set upon by the police as the somewhat smarter Spot & Kangaroo leave via portal. I legit do not care. At The Daily Bugle, JJJ is working late, and Marla is on the phone, very cross about this. She hangs up on him, and he decides he better go home. But when the elevator opens, Jack O’ Lantern is on it.
Carnage is 1000% not deserving of compassion. He’s not crazy. He doesn’t have a tragic backstory or understandable motivation. He loves killing people. He’s as one-note as it gets, and Spider-Man and Dr. Kafka have the blood of his many rampages on their hands. The gunfire is the cops chasing Grizzly & Gibbon into the night, after they’ve realized they’re not bulletproof. They duck into an alley to hide, but…
Marvel’s first superteam in the 40s was The All-Winners Squad. Didn’t exactly make it into the hall of fame. This comic sucks. As the villains prepare to take Spider-Man away, we mercifully cut away to something even worse: BEtty Brant going to visit Flash Thompson and finding him black out drunk. Even that is better than the main plot of this issue.
“I’m a supporting character and/or villain in Spider-Man, so I had an abusive dad! Me, Harry Osborn, Vermin, Chameleon… say, there’s a theme here…!”
Betty is right that agreeing to help someone through addiction is a serious choice, but Flash did help her get out of a cult once (Back in WEB 43), so she kinda owes it to him. What a history characters can develop if people have to find stuff to fill pages with for 30 years. We must sadly turn our attention to Grizzly’s apartment, where The Spot has all of Spider-Man’s limbs in different portals and is asking the group how they want to kill him. Except, no one else really wants to kill him, and things are getting contentious.
Everyone starts fighting, yadda yadda. Eventually, the 2 furry ones defeat the other 2, and the way they beat Spot is utterly preposterous, but I’m just trying to get to the end of this.
Egad! JJJ is dead! For real! Certainly! This comic sure seems like I’ve had it since it came out. No sticker, no backing board, no tape. But, A, I don’t remember it at all, and B, I cannot imagine why I would’ve bought it. Very strange. The “NEXT ISSUE” box in this issue’s letter column describes… this issue. Strange things afoot in the letter columns this block.