Look at these misshapen homunculi. This issue begins with Spider-Man telling us various facts about octopuses as he discover Fusion is somehow not dead. He’s calling for medical assistance.
An extension on the house? When? Shout out to Spider-Man’s Nokia brick.
Hypothetically speaking. One wonders how likely it is that Kingpin has that phone bugged. I guess maybe Matt would know. At that address, some unsavory types are on the phone with Doc Ock, who is telling them how to find the service elevator and meet him higher up in the unfinished building to buy the device off him. They plan to doublecross him, of course, but when the elevator opens on Ock’s floor, he sees his wouldbe betrayers webbed up inside.
Battle begins, and Ock is suddenly as formidable as he’s supposed to be. Again, making him seem like a clown and a chump in the previous issues to sell the swerve was cheap. It’s one thing for Fusion to think he’s cowed, it’s another for everyone involved to think he’s a loser and for him to behave like one. There’s a bunch of snappy banter about how the world is changing and it’s not all about money anymore, but Ock is not swayed as he pummels our hero, now back to being barely able to avoid getting killed by the villain who didn’t stand a chance against him back when the plot called for it. Ock eventually knocks Spider-Man off the building to his doom. I mean, you know, probably.
Spider-Man got hit in the legs with a girder earlier, but not in the knees, and not in a way that implied he’d be particularly injured (I mean, as far as superhero battle injuries go), and since then, he’s been flipping around and kicking and stuff, so that knee comment is pretty bizarre. Spidey is chased to the top of the building, and Ock says to give him the case or he’ll kill Spider-Man and then go kill 100 innocent people. Now that’s a Doc Ock gambit. But Spider-Man calls an audible and jams the case into an electrical panel.
Man, this is frustrating. This issue is a great Spidey/Doc Ock matchup. Why’d we hafta slog through the first 2 issues to get here? Remove Fusion from the story, extend the mystery of what Biotechnix is up to, give Ock some goons to be the villains before revealing him as the mastermind and then follow through with this same issue and you got a stew goin’. Or make Fusion his goon, even, with only the most subtle hints that he’s working for someone else until you reveal Doc. There were a lot of ways to get her that didn’t involve such cheap fakeouts and disparaging Spidey’s best villain. Well, anyway, we’re here, and Spider-Man is back in that alley he talked to Fury in, and Fury is still there. Does he live in this alley? Is Nick Fury homeless? Spider-Man returns the case and tells him where to find Ock ad the stolen diamonds the other guys were planning to pay him with before doublecrossing him.
SHIELD is very soon to become a sort of storytelling crutch in the Marvel U, always there to provide exposition or take bad guys into custody. This is kind of prophetic in that way. Well, this is Fusion’s last appearance in a Spider-Man comic. I looked him up as I tend to do and was surprised to see he later shows up in a single issue of Thor. Written by Paul Jenkins, you see, and in it, he apparently dies. Alrighty.