The gimmick is they don’t tell you who the team up is with. That’s shaky ground for only issue 5. Speaking of shaky ground, yet another artist is on deck this issue, Tom Grindberg, inked by Dick Giordano. The stylistic whiplash of this series! This issue begins with Spider-Man bursting into The Authority’s lair, then recapping the whole rest of the series so far. The Authority says Spider-Man has cost him a lot of money. I don’t understand how.
What??? Now some OTHER mysterious shadowy figure is watching since this one was revealed??? And The Authority’s name is Tito! Man, this comic is crazy. This is the very next page:
I mean this is jarring. Spider-Man says he won’t work for the guy, then the guy says wait, then Spider-Man says the guy is probably gonna tell him he has a job too big to refuse, to which Authority says yes, and Spider-Man says he’s in. WHAT? Literally, just that fast. And then the mystery watcher is revealed to be The Watcher, in his words if not yet visibly, as he briefly looks at other timelines where Spider-Man said no like in What If?. Man.
So… so something that happened in a Hulk comic so old they won’t even tell us which it is in the footnote is suddenly an end-of-the-world scenario? Why? Why now? Why anything in this series? Random page of more of Authority’s history, becoming a hitman for his crime boss dad, ok, sure, then back to the present, where Authority says he has a replicat of The Leader’s teleporter, and sends Spider-Man to this old base, where he is instantly surrounded by those robots or whatever.
Spider-Man quickly finds these weird rubbery robots are not easy to punch or web as they overwhelm him, and we’re back to Tito, I guess being tricked into planting a bomb in his own dad’s rental car by their bosses, and then his wife turns out to be on their side and tries to kill him, and he kills her. And then he spends his fortune starting this goofy information gathering cult thing. Ok, sure, whatever, Spider-Man locates the orb. It seems to hurt him when he grabs it, and then not hurt to touch any more after, which makes no sense to me, but whatever. Then Spider-Man thinks The Leader wouldn’t have all these killer robots around without a failsafe, and then just knows what it is and breaks a pipe, filling the room with…
What a shocking twist. They show Spider-Man is absorbing knowledge by running all the words in his sentences together, but there’s no way to know that at first, so it just looked like a lettering mistake. Poor choices abound. Spidey and all Authority’s goons are being flooded with knowledge by an outpouring of it from the globe and they all see they gotta stop him and Spider-Man fights through the pain and such and—
There are few tropes I like less than “And then they all forgot.” It renders everything that came before pointless. Which seems a fitting end for this story. Man oh man, this was messy. This series has 2 more issues that star Spider-Man (7 more total, ending at #11), and I sure hope they’re better than this. Next time, we see yet another issue outside the core series, but it’s a whole different experience.