I reshuffled my schedule a little cuz I just felt like getting this era done. This is the final block of this period, the end of the Hobgoblin mystery. But first: How is Blaze back? Blaze wasn’t even a real guy to begin with. I suppose we’ll find out. Peter David is once again joined by Dwayne Turner, Art Nichols and Nel Yomtov this month as Spider-Man sees Black Cat’s apartment explode? I guess? Was there a cliffhanger last time I forgot already?
Man, how weird is it that we’re looking at 2 periods back-to-back where Felicia has recently regained her powers and got a new (ish, in ‘92) costume? Comics are very cyclical. Their banter there is pretty good. Spidey thinks Felicia is even more athletic, graceful, and attractive than she was last time he saw her. Maybe the smoke is affecting his vision, considering the giant rat tail flapping in front of him. He then flashes back to tell us why he was at Felicia’s apartment, which I appreciate. Earlier that day, he got a phone call from her saying that someone slipped a note under her door saying that she would be the first to die because she’s Spider-Man’s lover, and then the note “burst into a puff of smoke and ashes.”
They approach the building, but find Candi, Randi & Bambi sunbathing on the roof, as they so often are. So Felicia yells “Run! It’s Spider-Man!” and they do. That’s solid. But as (The ol’ Parker) luck would have it, MJ is downstairs getting out of a cab, intent on heading up and sorting out her relationship with Peter once and for all. A guy friend of her, Alfredo, pulls up in another cab, having seen her leaving her place and had his driver follow. But MJ has other plans and tells him to take off. Upstairs, Felicia is being typically aggressive in trying to flirt.
Hey, this bit repeated in ‘92, also, albeit in a different way. I never saw this issue before, but someone drawing a line in the sand and having Felicia stop being insane about Spidey’s secret identity is nice.
Improbably, absurdly, “JD” deflects the flame burst with his “chemically treated” clipboard, and this guy is gonna be Blaze for The Foreigner, for some reason. At that moment, Felicia has dragged Spider-Man to… The Foreigner’s office. What, really? Saying he could help them. Spidey’s not feeling this at all, and then… And then a woman runs, yelling that her husband has cheated on her for the last time, and…
Foreigner’s thing with disguises is BONKERS. The “I have all your albums” line is funny, tho. So, Foreigner tells them a guy called Kirk Donohue who wanted revenge on “two costumed idiots” who he infers to be them came in here looking for weapons, and of course, Foreigner told him no, and now he’s acquired the Blaze suit and is trying to be a villain. Foreigner helpfully calls Kirk and sets up a meeting so the heroes can go surprise him. So the trap is set. Hard to gauge where Felicia’s going with this. So, soon, they burst into an office full of TVs, like the cover, and Blaze, who says he had a feeling this was a setup and got insurance.
Felicia sure is acting like she’s not in on this. The guy shooting at her soon has an arrow in his shoulder thanks to a crossbow she happened to find, and she demands to know where that woman is. Elsewhere, Spider-Man dispatches his own guy, but then a noise (A scream? A high-pitched whine? It’s just “EEEEEEEEE”) sends him running to find the woman from the TV, already dead. He finds the equipment to prove what they saw on the TV was a recording, and now he’s furious as he meets back up with Felicia. When they go back for Blaze, he now has a small army of goons and a flame thrower, but Spider-Man just rips right through them, having been properly enraged by that woman getting fridged.
We can assume that’s Foreigner in one of his disguises. That’s a complicated con. A blurb in the letter page says this story will continue in the pages of ASM once its Gang War storyline concludes, but… that’s… not true. Surely this’ll get picked up somewhere, Spidey was just framed for murder!