Striking cover by Bob Layton. Interesting guy, Bob. Successful as a writer, a penciler and an inker, but rarely all in the same book. He writes this issue, but doesn’t draw it. Steve Geiger pencils, Vince Colletta inks and Bob Sharen colors. We find ourselves looking at The Liberty Island Ferry, on which Peter Parker has started laughing, and Mary Jane wants to know why.
The notion that Peter would routinely hang out on, let alone store his gear on a statue that requires a boat ride, is pretty hard to swallow. But I guess he did end up out there more often than you’d think. Anyway, he had no idea what to do, he says, so he went home and tried to figure out where the restoration of the torch was being done. He went to The Bugle to find that out, and discovers the answer is California. The President was having it shipped there to appear in a parade. Peter fumbles up a story about wanting to do a feature on the restoration, and Robbie tells him he should go to CA and shoot the parade, too, on The Bugle. That’s lucky!
This is getting wacky quickly. And gets wackier, as Peter went to shoot the torch, but it was still in a crate, and not to be opened until a public unboxing, if you will, the next day. So he went to the beach and fell asleep, missing a beautiful woman wanting him to put sunscreen on her (He says he was told by some old people later), and cooked in the sun. Meanwhile, the rich weirdos who wanted to steal the torch got into their crime clothes and prepped their “tasers,” which look like Star Wars guns, to knock out its guards with. They tested the guns on that poor Reuben guy, then took off. Peter, meanwhile, cooked on the beach for 5 hours, and was so badly sunburnt he could barely move. MJ finds this hilarious, which seems kind of mean.
Nothing like a bit of casual racism to really settle you in. This goofy plan worked, and they tasered the guards. The rich kids began loading the torch onto their truck.
Peter tells MJ he fought to stay conscious and hopped on top of their fleeing car as they order hot dogs. MJ wants to know why Hershel betrayed the others, and Peter says that, rather than execute the plan he sold his buddies on, he’d made a deal with “a somewhat shady French business tycoon” to sell him the torch for seven million dollars. So, there they were, speeding through LA with the torch, when Hershel drove right into gridlocked traffic.
So now Spider-Man and the torch were zooming downhill on a car whose brake lines had been severed in the crash, he soon discovered, and about to slam into a bus. So, our man webbed the entire intersection rather implausibly, creating a net for his car to drive into and finally stop. Crisis averted, Spidey searched the torch for his clothes, but they weren’t there, because the torch was a replica. The rich kids went to jail, the parade went on as planned, but MJ is impatient to know where the real torch was.
This issue has had occasional missing letters in word balloons, probably a printing error, so I don’t know for sure, but it looks like that word balloon says “Very good French?” In French? What? This was definitely a strange one. But again, one of the better fill-ins. At least it was entertaining.