It’s here. My dread built with every issue last time we hit this period, but it can’t be avoided: Maximum Carnage. An absolutely misguided 14-issue disaster that forced me to buy all 4 monthlies and the first 2 issues of this book when I barely had walkin’ around money. And it was not worth it! I seem to recall this may even be what prompted me to finally create a pull list at the comic shop instead of just buying comics wherever. If I managed to do the math right, I went from spending between $1.25-$3 a month on Spider-Man comics to spending $25 over 3 months on this boondoggle. I’ve not read it since. And… here we go. Starting up this journey, we have Tom DeFalco, Ron Lim, Jim Sanders III, and Nel Yomtov. We open on Cletus Kasaday strapped to a thing and being wheeled down a hallway, being evil and creepy like Great Value Hannibal Lecter. He’s been transferred from The Vault to Ravencroft, making its first appearance, but certainly not the last.
This absolutely is on whoever authorized this ridiculous experiment.
Carnage happily tells the last remaining doctor that he’s going to celebrate his freedom by killing everyone in this unnamed institute. Yay. Speaking of having a great time…
As I mentioned in the TAC 200 post, I literally did not understand Harry died in it, and this scene really shocked me. Maybe I was just dumb, I dunno. It was the first major death during the time I was reading comics. Any Spider-Man fan knew about Gwen Stacy, but that seemed like a long time ago. This was hard for me to believe. Meanwhile, Carnage is carving a path through Ravencroft, babbling about how he’s gonna go find Spider-Man and Venom and get them, when someone starts cheering him on.
As character introductions go, this one sure is random. I wonder if they ever told us why Shriek was in there, how she got her powers, etc. I wonder if I’ve already read the explanation on this blog and cared so little I forgot. Seems likely! Elsewhere, Peter & Mary Jane are getting home from the funeral. MJ is still rattled. As usual for this time period, even though she has just as much history with Harry as Peter, this is still really being framed as something that happened to him, not them. Anyway, they talk about danger and stuff and she asks him to take a break from being Spider-Man for a week or two so they can escape the constant stress they’ve been under, and he agrees. But he’s probably not keepin’ that promise, as we cut to Carnage & Shriek out on the prowl. Shriek says she was out having fun killing people when she “ran into this really weird dude who– quite literally— blew my mind!” So now she’s crazy. I wonder who that wound up being. She then asks Carnage his deal so we can recap his origin. A key thing I did not remember is Carnage says that he thinks the symbiote “managed to mutate his metabolism” through a cut, and now he can “generate a dead ringer for the symbiote.” Which seems to imply the symbiote really was killed last time, but he can just make one from his blood. I don’t think that’s maintained going forward. As they swing along, Carnage thinks he spots Spider-Man, but they instead wind up attacking the Doppelganger, last seen in Web 98.
So now they’re “a family.” We’re putting together the villains who will not do a great job of keeping this story rolling through 13 more agonizing issues. Meanwhile, Peter goes out for Chinese, and hears about the massacre at Ravencroft on the radio. He doesn’t even take the food, he just bolts, which is pretty rude. He’s changed and swinging off before he realizes, yeah, that was pretty rude, but then Shriek is zapping at him, and when he lands on a nearby roof, Doppel comes after him.
Spidey gets Doppelganger on the ropes (He really needed a better name), but then Shriek starts in with her zaps. Meanwhile, MJ has begun to worry that Peter’s taking so long, and turns on the news to hear about Ravencroft, and now knows why he’s late. Back at the fight, Spider-Man’s barely keeping ahead of the 2 villains.
Spidey goes crashing into the alley below as Doppel picks up his unconscious cohort and leaps away. Spider-Man tries to get up and follow, but he says it feels like his ribs are shattered and collapses. Meanwhile, at The Bugle, JJJ is ranting about how Spider-Man has a personal grudge against the Osborn family when Kate Cushing informs him that Carnage is loose. Since Carnage took JJJ hostage back in ASM 364, people think he might be a target again. JJJ immediately decides to flee the country. But…
And we’re off. Got to find a way to get Venom into this story from San Francisco, I guess. But this is Spider-Man Unlimited, so there’s plenty of pages left. Next page begins a story by Mike W. Barr, Jerry Bingham & John Kalisz. Peter is waking up, presumably from passing out in the main story, when Uncle Ben and Aunt May come into his room to wake him up for breakfast.
Alrighty. Peter gets dressed like it’s the 60s and looks in the mirror, wondering if this is a plot by an enemy. Then he goes downstairs for wheatcakes. Aunt May tells him not to dwell on that terrible accident, and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. They say it will come back to him in time, and worry if he should stay home from school, but he’s keen to go. Throughout, he keeps having flashes of a pile of rubble in a construction site, and in one, a rather Spider-Manly hand is sticking up out of it.
Arriving at school, Peter gets knocked over by Flash and some guys playing football, and has a flash of Spider-Man fighting The Scorpion. This is pretty clear by now, but it’s gonna keep going for awhile. Peter goes to class, is a star student, helps Liz with a project, Flash plays a prank on him, Liza invites him to go for sodas with the gang after school, all the usual. He declines, thinking about what would happen if he told Harry about his dad or Liz about Harry. He wanders into the science hall, where he realizes the accident everyone keeps talking about is him being bit by the spider. Mr. Warren has that very spider on a dissection tray now. Peter has more flashes of his real life and rushes off home. He goes upstairs to sleep, trying to decide if this or his real life is the real thing, almost getting the whole picture as he drifts off, but then May comes in and wakes him up, startling him. Ben also comes in, and they can tell he’s troubled, but he says he can’t talk about it.
So, Peter goes for a walk, and then he runs into a cop who tells him there’s been a series of armed robberies in the area, and that makes him rush home just in time to be there when the burglar breaks in.
And we’re back. They do some more fighting, Spider-Man once again ends up in a bad way, but the memory of Uncle Ben helps him power through, and he knocks out The Scorpion. Kind of weird to go from 1964 Scorpion to 1993 Scorpion so soon.
Weird one. Never quite understood what wheatcakes are as opposed to pancakes. But, there you go. The rest of the issue is a short Cardiac vs. Code Blue story that’s not really worth discussing. Way too much Maximum Carnage to talk about in the coming posts, instead.