I don’t even… The boy’s bug eyes. Spider-Man’s entire misshapen, deformed body. The enormous amout of wasted space in the image. I cannot. This issue opens with that little boy coming home from school, and I have a feeling it’s going to make me uncomfortable…
If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s definitely not white people doing stereotypical stuff about marginalized people of color. Yer on thin ice, Jenkins. The boy goes to his room and gets out his Spider-Man trading card, which begins his fantasy sequence about being Spider-Man’s secret sidekick.
Next day at school, everyone’s drawing, and this kid is drawing about his fictionalized homelife. Hillllllariously, Buckingham’s laziness extends to the kid’s crayon drawings, as the first one is a repeat of a pose from earlier, and on the next page, he cops a VERY widely circulated Romita, Sr.:
Insane, this guy.
Well, our boy goes home to find a preposterously named drug dealer stereotype named “Devo” beating up his mom, so he retreats to his room, where his imaginary Spider-Man comes to whisk him away to crimefighting to forget the horrors happening in the living room. We cut to his Aunt & Uncle arguing with a guy from social services who doesn’t care about their situation and is golfing, then to LaFronce daydreaming about fighting the Vulture with Spider-Man.
Suddenly, this book becomes very confusing, as the trio return to LaFronce’s place. They’re all dressed the same, so I think it’s the same day, but the authorities are wheeling out to corpses. And then we learn the landlord has sold all LaFronce’s family’s stuff, and the aunt says his mom’s been dead for 2 months? What? What is the timeline here? It made me flip back to make sure I didn’t skip a page or something. As the aunt argues with the landlord, LaFronce goes to his room and finds his Spider-Man card, now crumpled, but still there. So Spider-Man appears.
I just remembered how this issue ends.
People have always said that kids love Spider-Man because he could be anyone under there. 17 years before the now famous “Anyone can wear the mask…” motif from Into the Spider-Verse, here it is. What a grim story.