Those nubby little fingers. Like an animal paw. Look at the size of the Goblin’s glider. That seems inconvenient. Only 2 more issues of this… but so much more Ramos in the future… We open on a despairing Peter Parker, whose internal narration in pages 2, panel 1…
… is CRAZY. “I got a madman’s mind raining on my heart like a storm on Jupiter?” WHAT? Is this a rejected Grateful Dead lyric? What just happened? Peter smashes the pumpkin, says it doesn’t have to be this way, and looks out the window, moodily. This is a fine example of why I hate Norman being back. This is the only kind of story you can tell with him, Green Goblin out to ruin Peter’s life. It’s all he would do. It’s all you can do. And, one, it’s boring, and two, every time he stops trying to ruin Peter’s life for awhile, like when he flew off for no reason at the end of PPSM 25 and just laid low for awhile, makes zero sense. This should be the plot of Spider-Man forever until he dies. And no one wants that! I hate Norman so much. Speaking of, he’s at work, being told their company is liable for Flash’s “accident” and they could be sued for millions.
These people look insane. Just endlessly flabbergasted. Well, Peter’s decided his dreams are a warning, which is extremely stupid, and he comes to work to find Norman there. When introduced by the principal, Norman pretends not to know Peter? Why? He has, of course, come to give the school a whole lot of money. Then he IMMEDIATELY starts referencing Harry to Peter, making it clear they know each other. This is really bad. Blah blah blah, trying to make Peter be his heir still, blah blah blah, allusions to killing Flash, tiny hands, big faces, Norman consistently portrayed as having beady little eyes like a teddy bear, blah blah. This is so not engaging. The principal is picking up on how they hate each other, and then Norman quietly tells Peter to meet him at his chemical warehouse at 7 to finish this. Please do! Then a page turn to an image that’s burned into my brain from 2002:
Ramos’ idea of a cool shot of Spider-Man swinging through the sky is a picture that looks like he’s had all his limbs broken and been tossed off a roof. I cannot. I just can’t. This is awful. If anyone reading this is a fan of this issue, fix your life.
Spider-Man has come to the hospital to apologize to a comatose Flash (As his hero Spider-Man, not as his I GUESS friend Peter? After what they’ve been doing to Flash in the last couple years…), and to swear he’s getting revenge and this ends tonight. Except we know it can’t, it won’t. Pandora’s box isn’t closing, we’re stuck with Norman forever now.
Anyone who wasn’t reading comics at this time may be shocked how relevant this idiotic page could be…
Fight fight fight, recriminations, explosions, etc. Peter pulls his mask off and says he won’t play Norman’s game, and then a canister of green goo… somehow explodes on Peter’s head. Like, I guess Goblin’s meant to have thrown it at him, but this is in no way communicated in the art. It’s just there, shattering. Quality comics.
We’ll see how you feel about Normie when Dan Slott does perhaps the stupidest in his long line of stupid ideas…
There’s not enough hallucinations for his taste, but if he saw this, I’m sure JM DeMatteis was loving it. Come back next time for the end of this dreck. As you can imagine, Peter will savagely kill Norman and he’ll never appear in a comic book again. Brian Michael Bendis was the king of the cliffhanger around this time. While his and basically all other Marvel comics were encouraged to be 4-6 part stories that fit nicely into a collection, his individual comics left you begging for the next issue. Many of his peers followed suit. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you had this approach, where Jenkins knows he’s writing an 88-page story in 22-page installments, and his issues just kind of stop rather than leaving you on the hook. I guess maybe he thought this empty threat was a shocking last page, but certainly no one else did.