Suddenly, Kaare Andrews is covering ASM for a bit. I don’t really understand the plan, if there even is one, but various cover artists seem to come and go during this run. J. Scott Campbll’s not done with ASM by a longshot, but plenty of other guys are gonna rotate in and out. They even let Romita do one or two. This issue picks up the second ASM 35 left off, with Aunt May staring at thee tattered Spider-Man costume she picked up off the floor next to her bloodied nephew sleeping it off.
Next page, Peter is teaching class, having been visibly beaten up. So now May knows, but he doesn’t know she knows. This, to me, is so much more exciting than the now-standard Aunt May deathbed confession. “Oh, I’ve known for a long time.” Yeah, right. This is much more dramatic. One of the few things the MCU Spider-Man got right was letting Aunt May in on it very early. Will she be angry? Proud? Scared? Will Peter’s excuse for not telling her for 40 years come true as she has a heart attack? Anything could happen! Anyway, that’s for later. Right now, Peter seems to be lecturing about sleep cycles almost entirely because a girl in class has fallen asleep? He gently wakes her up, and the class laughs at her. That’s rude, Peter. How would you have felt in that situation? When class ends (As it always tends to do instantly when any comic goes to a school? Isn’t that convenient?), Peter asks the sleeping girl to stay on a moment.
I still have no idea how old these kids are meant to be. Peter ruminates on how he knows how to take down various supervillains, but you can’t punch your way out of a problem like this. But he’s gonna try to fix it, anyway. First, tho, he calls May’s place, and… Aunt Anna answers. We will recall Aunt Anna was at the hospital when MJ was revealed to be alive in PPSM 30, then said to be in Florida still in ASM Annual 2001, and now she lives in NY. She comes by to clean May’s place every Tuesday, and May is out, so she answered the phone. Sure, man, ok! Anna says May seemed distracted or tired. As she and Peter keep talking, we cut to a silent May sitting on a park bench, staring into space, a bit of Spider-Man costume in her hand. Peter says to tel May he loves her if Anna sees her before he does, then decides to walk home by Jennifer’s address, just to see what’s up. Some dudes try to get money off him to buy weed, and then he arrives at a condemned building at Jennifer’s address, where a very chatty woman won’t let him ask her anything about it. He finally gets her to tell him about the family who lived in the condemned place, how the dad left and then so did the mom, and the kids are living in a nearby abandoned building, and they’re “problems, both of them.”
Kinda feel like a dialogue box is missing in panel 4 telling Jennifer who “she” is.
JMS is really trying to do some things here, you know? His ASM has purpose. It’s very engaging. And, yes, it turns out this girl who looks like she’s, like, 10 is a senior in high school. Every artist has a weak spot. There’s something really reassuring about seeing your heroes be bad at something. I don’t think less of them, it makes me feel better about my own deficiencies. I love the fact that Jack Kirby, the greatest comic book artist of all time, had no idea how to draw Spider-Man as long as he lived. The gods are human after all. Anyway! Peter says he’ll think about it, but he doesn’t often have to deal with this kind of thing. Then he asks where her brother is, and Jennifer doesn’t know, and is worried, and we see him apparently ODing in an alley as 2 guys say to toss him out with the rest of the garbage. Peter is now out on the sidewalk with Jennifer when another kid runs up and tells her what’s happening. She and Peter rush to the scene, and he tells Jennifer to go call the cops and the other kid to try to flag down a car, because Steven is dying. Within moments, Spider-Man is swinging the kid to the nearest hospital.
His second time bursting into an emergency room lately.
The condition is that if she’s ever in trouble, she’ll call him. That he’ll try to help her anyway he can. She’s moved by this. Unfortunately, the guys who were gonna let her brother die now want to know how she got Spider-Man into this neighborhood, and one of them says to find “the Shade.” Hey, that sounds like a supervillain! Or, actually, a name already trademarked by DC, but I guess maybe it’s too generic a word in this case.
Next issue’s gonna be good! This issue was very late. Last issue hit stands in November 2001, this one, in January 2002. Late books became pretty common under Jemas/Quesada. There’s a variety of reasons, but one shared among the various instances is the company didn’t want to do filler issues anymore. If JSM couldn’t make deadline (Presumably due to his work in TV), you didn’t run a Bill Mantlo/Sal Buscema story you had in a drawer like the old days. You just kinda ate it. So much consideration was being given to the bookstore market and trades, and who’d want a fill-in issue in the trade? So they just dealt with delays. A lot! All of which is to say, this issue is able to have letters about #36 in it due to the gap, and it’s a lot of powerful reactions. They ran one guy being upset about the villains crying page, even. At the time, the internet community Brian Michael Bendis had built up, of which I was now firmly a part, was still pretty small, and a big percentage of it was New Yorkers. The Bendis Board was kind of a hub for news and information about 9/11 for a long time during and after the attacks. And even there, the general consensus was crying Doom was absurd. It was cool of them to let that viewpoint see print among the more heartfelt letters.