Blastaar. One of Kirby & Lee’s weirder characters, for sure, a Fantastic Four villain from The Negative Zone, another dimension that Reed Richards discovered (Until we learned Dr. Adam Brashear discovered it way earlier, but that’s getting even further afield). We get it cracking pretty much immediately. An opening page of Peter suiting up as Spider-Man while MJ recaps the last few months lets us know they went for dinner on Yancy Street, but now our man’s getting into costume because some kind of vortex has opened up right in the street, and is threatening to pull people. Thus we get this issue’s title, “It Started On Yancy Street,” also the title of Fantastic Four #29 way back in 1964. We see 3 teens hanging onto a lamppost for dear life when Spidey arrives to try to help them, and first has to assure them he’s not a killer.
Still trying to make SHOC a thing. Spidey finds himself in a whilte void full of weird shapes, but not the usual Ditko kind. Spidey exposits that he’s been here recently, that this is the “distortion field” between realities through which the Heroes Reborn characters came back to Earth, which also leads to The Negative Zone, and that’s where Spider-Man, the 3 kids and their cat are all falling to.
A 2-page spread reveals a full-on cosmic war going on where Spidey’s touched down, and he quickly ascertains that the side indiscriminately targeting civilians and also capturing those teens are the bad guys. But then he’s spotted.
As always, good thing everyone in The Negative Zone speaks English. Spidey covers “Dusk” as he/she/they/something fall, causing an avalanche that cuts them off from their attackers. But then the “rebels” pick up Dusk and leave, accepting defeat. But that’s not gonna cut it fr Spider-Man. Back at the rebel base, Dusk asks why Spider-Man’s here, and the answer, “to protect innocents,” is enough. Dusk says Spider-Man has to lead the rebellion against the big bad’s fortress, and says if Spider-Man puts on the Dusk costume, the people will follow him, because Dusk was a mythic hero.
This is some immensely rushed worldbuilding, but they only have 1 issue. The kids bolt, and when they run into some guards, those guards are attacked by “Dusk” and his forces. Spidey says it’s game over now. But…
There’s a whole buncha fightin’ across a couple of pages, as Blastaar rants about him ruling The Negative Zone (I never quite got how he and Annihilus both seemed like the big bads of this place) while Spidey outmaneuvers and annoys him. But all the usual Spidey banter lets Blastaar know he’s not the real Dusk, which only makes him more angry.
Spidey is awfully cavalier about maybe killing Blastarr there. This is a very 1970s Marvel Team-Up feeling story, only without a team-up. Well, I guess SHOC and the other Dusk did help.
So rushed! This is SHOC’s final appearance in a Spider-Man comic. He wouldn’t appear in anything until 2005, when he turned up in a wild Wolverine story in which he and a whole passel of heroes and villains were killed and resurrected as agents of The Hand/Hydra and sent to destroy SHIELD. But, of course, Wolverine got deprogrammed, and wound up killing his way through a bunch of the heroes & villains, including SHOC. And those comics were drawn by one John Romita, Jr. I wonder if it was his idea to throw his guy in there. When he dies with 3 claws sticking out of his chest, his horrified compatriot doesn’t even spell his name right. RIP, I guess. Well, anyway, MJ had a plan, and Peter went to Hobie for some help, and now he’s got this Dusk suit… seems like a lot of avenues for not being Spider-Man are opening up. Who knows, there might even be one more…