Oh boy, The Jury! Trying to get some color on those generic cybersuits, it seems. Part 1! It somehow takes Spider-Man 3 issues to deal with these losers. I do not remember how this goes at all. David Michelinie, Mark Bagley, Randy Emberlin & Bob Sharen at the helm as The Jury are setup looking for Spider-Man and spot Nova instead. Then they get 2 pages to recap who they are and their incredibly flimsy rationale for coming after Spider-Man (Because without him, there wouldn’t be a Venom). Then one of the sensors they’ve set up stops working, and they send a tech out ot fix it.
Spidey lets us know he’s been sensing those sensors all over town and avoiding them, and wonders if it’s Alistaire Smythe again. Cameras all over town does seem to run in the family. He goes home and tells MJ he’s planning to go look into this after class. Kind of a dead end conversation for the purposes of this issue.
A nice recap of where we left off last time. Man, Dr. Swann. When’s the last time we saw him? Survey sez: ASM 350! And this is his final appearance in a comic. Wow. Peter’s schooling really fell off the radar in this period. Come to think of it, I have no idea how he once again ends up not in school so he & MJ could go back in 1996. Was it just let lapse during the clone crap? Hm. While Peter runs off, Aunt May’s destination turns out to be Peter & MJ’s place. She tells MJ she has to confide something to her (She sure is lucky Peter wasn’t home and MJ was). She reveals that she & Ben secretly got married six months before their public ceremony because they couldn’t wait til after high school. He only witnesses were Richard & Mary. But when Richard got the anniversary wrong the other day, he was remembering the public date, not the private one. MJ says she’s sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and May drops it immediately.
Bagley’s MJ looks different this issue. Wonder why. Maybe he was trying a new face out. Well, anyway, Spider-Man’s out doing his thing, intentionally getting spotted by one of those cameras so he can find out who’s after him. Pretty direct! And it works, as The Jury shows up guns blazing, no “hi,” no nothin’.
“If we have to let a child die in order to murder a man tangentially related to the creation of Venom, that’s just a fact of life, soldier!” Sheesh. They then proceed to gang up on Spider-Man, who I think goes down way too easy, caught by one and punched by another, then punched from guy to guy like they’re playing catch in a pretty silly fight sequence, with this result:
Hard to imagine how this goes on for 2 more issues. It kinda feels like they’re just stalling til they can lower the boom on the parents thing. Meanwhile, in Bullpen Bulletins, Tom DeFalco decides to defend Marvel’s flooding the market with garbage…
This month saw release of six Spider-Man titles (The core books, SMU 3 & Lethal Foes 3). And that will look like a light month a year from now. In the next 3 months, they will run miniseries Spider-Man: The Mutant Agenda and Spider-Man: Friends & Enemies, garbage so inessential even I didn’t buy them for this blog. Marvel, and to a lesser extent DC, are filling the stands with junk. The industry is about to collapse as a result. The spin is not working.