Looks like trouble! They forgot the credits this issue, so we’ll have to assume it’s the usual suspects. We open on the introduction of The Enforcers.
Bit of a troubling thing I’ve noticed in comics and really any media trying to be more diverse: the big guy is always made black. Whether it’s making Ox black or making up a whole new cast of characters, the muscle man is always black. I think we can all marinate on the deeply ingrained stereotypes that would cause people to do this, even people who genuinely have no ill will, but have grown up in Western society. Anyway! Montana says they can’t do something like that without Kingpin’s approval. Dan says he’s not scared, that Ox could take Kingpin, and now Ox wants to try it. Montana says he’s met Kingpin, and Ox could not take him, and they shouldn’t even joke about this, you never know who’s listening. And as they go inside, we learn Spider-Man is listening.
Our man tries punching Ox in the gut and it doesn’t even faze him, so he gets socked across the room, right into Dan. then Montana gets the rope around Spidey’s neck, and he’s in a bad way. Montana says they can’t have this, that they should get rid of whoever this is, but Ox wants to toy with him awhile. This lets Spider-Man leap into the air, getting ahold of the rope and swinging Montana into Ox. Spidey starts webbing everyone up, unable to talk from being choked so badly (That’s rare in superhero comics).
Seems worth comparing this to Spidey vs. the Enforcers in ASM 10. Ditko’s enforcers fights were remarkable for taking some of the dopiest villains of all time and making them thrilling. Bendis & Bagley give them a fun workout, but comics being much different in 2001, it can’t really be the same, because it can’t take up half the comic. Still, it’s a fun and dynamic battle. Enter “Mr. Big,” the closest we’re getting to the Big Man in Ultimate Marvel, who tells Spider-Man he’s going about this the wrong way. He says if he really wants Kingpin’s attention, he needs to find something Kingpin loves and try to keep it away from him. He offers that Kingpin is throwing a fundraising gala Friday night, and this would be a better place to get to him. When Spidey asks why he would tell him all this, Big says just because they work for Kingpin doesn’t mean they have his best interests at heart. Then the feds show up.
Some readers would call this a waste of time. Others would say it depicts the rapidly rising tension in the room very well. I am in camp 2.
Soon, we find Peter Parker reading the Bugle talking about how Spider-Man is mob connected, frustrated that they don’t even mention the Enforcers, but more frustrated that he just busted in there without thinking or planning. Then he gets in trouble with the newsagent for reading the paper without buying it, and loses some of his lunch money for the paper. This is pretty classic Spider-Man stuff. Also a magazine has an interview with Reed Richards in the background, which is going to be problematic. At school, Kong is vividly describing what he believes happened when Spider-Man took on the mob to Peter’s amusement until Liz freaks out, yells “Enough with Spider-Man already!” and starts crying.
Might that dark haired girl be Ultimate Sally Avril? Or, Ultimate Delilah, even? We’ll never know.
Very sweet! Very real. You just didn’t get a lot of teens like this in comics before this series. As we have seen! At the Bugle, Jonah wants some updates to the Hulk story added to the website, and Peter takes the chance to ask JJJ, smoking like a chimney, why they always portray Spider-Man in such a bad light, and why they don’t give a more well-rounded picture. JJJ gives what turns out to be an answer that is sadly far more resonant now…
The extremely successful Fox News strategy in a nutshell. We skip to Friday night and to Fisk Towers, which looks more or less like it does in the regular comics. I don’t think I could’ve told you what Kingpin’s building looks like the first time I read this, but I hadn’t read literally thousands of Spider-Man comics at that time. “Just” hundreds, mostly at a rate of 1-5 per month as opposed to at least one per day. Anyway.
For all that this series can be radical and different, Spider-Man breaking into Kingpin’s office only to immediately realize it was a mistake is extremely on-brand. How much of a mistake, we’ll see next time. I’ve been thinking a lot about pacing. USM more than any single comic really, really launches the “decompression” trend at Marvel, and later, everywhere else. We saw them take 7 issues to do the origin, etc. But for all that certain people complained stories were “padded” or took too long, I’m kind of amazed, looking back, and how traditional these issues can be. This one has a fight scene, a high school scene, a romantic scene, a Bugle scene, and then a cliffhanger. That could describe any of thousands of Spider-Man comics before this. And the thing that gets me about that is how different it is from comics now, where I think a lot of the things people complained about in the 2000s that I didn’t agree with are true. Now you’re likely to open a comic and only have 2 or 3 characters in it, only 2 or 3 scenes. Maybe one! Supporting casts have shrunk or been discarded altogether. Comics still take 5 or 6 issues to tell a story, but so very much less actually happens in any of them now. When Nick Spencer was doing his dreadful 3-year run on ASM from 2019-2021, almost every story had Spider-Man, a villain, and 1 supporting cast member, either MJ or Randy Robertson, who was once again Peter’s roommate. Peter was unemployed and not worried about it for 3 years. Spider-Man was the focus of the book, Peter Parker was a background character. These days, the comics are just as “decompressed,” but now the focus is on the superhero instead of the person in the mask. And that’s a big part of why I’ve gone from buying as many as 20 comics a month to, like, 4. And now I look back on this stuff, famous for the conflict over “decompression” among fans, and I’m just shocked at how much incident you get in a single issue. This is probably not the best place for this rant, but this is where it’s happened, I guess.