It is utterly insane to me that this is a 3-issue story. Professor. Power. Is meant to keep Spider-Man and the X-Men at bay for a 3-issue story! Bonkers. Bananas. Other such terms. PP stands over the unconscious forms of our heroes as some cops show up. They draw guns and say if he moves he a dead man, but he says he’s already–
Richard & Mary are not adding much to this. Cops are still shooting at PP until the crowd begins to panic, and he’s happy to know HIS FLYING CASTLE HAS ARRIVED.
How could he possibly have no quarrel with Spider-Man!? He’s the only one of these heroes who was there when his son “died” in MTU 118!! What??? Well, The X-Men find themselves in one of their most familiar positions, trapped by a ranting villain, with one of their number unaccounted for and able to mount a rescue. It’s, like, every X-Men plot. He’s flying them back to their school to get revenge on Xavier for MTU 118, which, again, was just him and Spider-Man, and yet Spider-Man is blameless in this, somehow. Crackers. Power broods about his son and recaps things and whatnot for a surprising 2.25 pages. Then a random centurion comes into his room and is cast out, and that centurion disables 2 others and opens a door all without lifting a finger. So, you know…
Ta daaaa. Literally almost every X-Men story is, “We were minding our own business when someone who hates us showed up out of nowhere and imprisoned all of us but one, usually Wolverine, and that one frees the rest and we defeat the villain and go home.” It’s a good thing X-Men was always more about the personal relationships, because the super-plots got pretty repetitive.
So, Spidey goes and pries the big doors open, and is face to face with Power’s ludicrous mob of Roman centurions for the first time since 1982, and It’s Fightin’ Time. Spidey leaps in with abandon, quipping and having fun and generally acting like someone else wrote this issue as we cut back and forth between his fight and Jean working to disable this weird prison without hurting the guys inside, and she finally does it as Spider-Man seems to finish off most of the goons.
Spider-Man TOTALLY WAS THERE, how does DeMatteis insist on Power holding him blameless? It makes no sense!
Good Spider-Man stuff right there.
Jean gets into Power’s head, forcing him to confront all the lies he’s telling himself, including not holding himself accountable for forcing his son to go to war in the first place, and he breaks down. As she continues her sort of psychic version of Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare, it maybe works a little too well…
So I guess next issue won’t so much be them vs. Professor Power as them trying to not die as this castle falls down and, presumably, keep it from falling on anyone. But the cover to next issue will let you know, that’s not all it’s gonna be about…