12th post this block before hitting a regular monthly Spider-Man title. What a horrible cover! They didn’t waste much time bringing “Blood Rose” back. And now we’re all caught up on Rose history for it. However, it’s not Mackie, strangely, who’s doing so, but Terry Kavanagh. For some reason, a Derek Yaniger draws & inks the first 6 pages and cover before Alex Saviuk and Joe Rubenstein take over for the rest of the book. Good ol’ Bob Sharen colors throughout.
In a 2-page splash, Blood Rose is suddenly shooting down off the roof at guys in a nearby warehouse, saying there’s enough ammo to go around. There is much shooting and running around and one grenade going off as BR thinks that you have to know your enemy, and no one knows these goons more than he does. They eventually think they have him and say he killed their boss, Richard Fisk, but then that grenade goes off, and that’s a wrap. BR thinks “Father taught me all-too well…” and then we shift to Forest Hills, where Aunt May, MJ and The Parkers are waiting on Peter to arrive for dinner. I believe this marks the parents’ first appearance outside ASM. When Peter does arrive, he’s got Betty Brant with him, no longer dressed like a 90s ninja like she was last time we saw her, in WEB 92.
Are they trying to gin up some kind of romantic triangle with Betty? That would be insane.
Sure looks like Richard Fisk in that Blood Rose outfit. A bit crazy how Web has become the “pick up where 1987 left off” title, with The Rose, Foreigner, Hobgoblin, etc. Meanwhile, “halfway around the world,” a ship crashes onto some rocks in a storm, spilling Richard Fisk, looking more like he did in WEB 89, onto a beach with some goons.
Ok, hold on are they trying to say Fisk is still shot from Web 89 here, in Web 97?? WITH all the other stuff that’s happened in the other Spider-Titles since then??? Impossible. Sillier than him having divers in place in case he fell out a window. Well, whatever, back in New York, Robbie is being weirdly aggressive telling Peter he can’t be hogging be dark room all night at The Bugle when they’re distracted by an explosion at Fisk Tower. Robbie tries to call in his “mobile news team,” they says he’ll just go cover it with Peter, but Peter’s already gone, swinging to the scene as Spider-Man. He makes a web net in case people come flying out the windows, and then one does in a hail of bullets.
It just hit me who Trench is. I know that was awhile back. That’s… weird. Spidey chases Br down a hall to an elevator shaft, where he’s got a guy by the collar.
A heavily armed tough guy waging a one-mane war on crime? Man, what an original concept we have here! I do like Spider-Man’s bit there, tho. Spidey and Bloody mix it up for just a bit, but then Blood Rose detonates explosives on 3 more floors of the building, and Spider-Man becomes more interested in trying to save people than fighting him. Insanely, completely insanely, down on the street, Robbie has arrived, and seeing the whole building going up in flames, steals a camera off a kid and runs in before the cops can stop him, grumbling internally about how he’;; “take it out of Peter Parker’s hide” later. What… on Earth… is this.
Foreigner has really sunk a lot of money into having a variety of lame goons on payroll. Joe Robertson has lost his mind. Who knows what happens next? As a kid, I was lured in by the alleged importance of Web 100, but I skipped this whole story before it. This issue has a dubious distinction. I’ve never read it before now, and when I came to fill in the holes in my collection, I found a strange number of people trying to jack the price up on it. What could this random issue of Web be such a big deal for? It’s the technical first appearance of Nightwatch. That’s who “Trench” is. We’ve seen him briefly before in SMU 16. Todd McFarlane left Marvel to create Spawn, a character who is visibly a cross between Prowler and Spider-Man. Pretty blatantly, really. And now, a year later, Marvel introduces Nightwatch, a knock-off of Spawn. The snake eats its tail. The thing is, tho, a few years ago, rumor began to circulate that Sony was developing a Nightwatch movie to be directed by Spike Lee. Did that ever happen? No. Did the speculation cause the price of Nightwatch’s first appearance to jump up? You bet, comics are stupid like that. And now there’s no Nightwatch movie, and people are still trying to get $150 for this comic book no one actually wants. This is one of 2 90s comics with pointlessly inflated price tags that I could not bring myself to pay for. In both cases, persistence paid off. In this case, even as people were hocking this thing for between $50-$200 on ebay, I found some poor soul selling it for $0.99. And I was the only one who bid on it. Sometimes my luck in the eBay days was insane. And rarely was I more thankful than when buying something I knew wasn’t even going to be very good.