Peter Milligan is one of those Vertigo guys that Axel Alonso would’ve been able to bring over to Marvel. Not his last work for the company, but maybe the first. Duncan Fegredo is an excellent illustrator who will go on to a noteworthy collaboration with Mike Mignola on key Hellboy material. And they join standing Tangled Web colorist Steve Buccellato for this Rhino story. This month, they smartly moved the title of the comic off that Spidey face. Giving each story a title on the cover looked cool, but it probably made selling the book harder.
Rhino gets his charge out of there, but then Spider-Man shows up. Hey, remember how Rhino was in issue 1 of this series? That wasn’t so long ago. Anyway, Stella is transferred to a car, and the guy in it tells Rhino not to let Spider-Man follow them. So Rhino starts scrapping with Spider-Man, still mooning over Stella.
Holy crap, that’s Mindworm down there! Mindworm! What a different time that was.
Rhino impales the guy who made fun of him, and then suddenly, he’s in some kind of mad science lab, where a monkey with a thing on his head is conducting a symphony. Rhino says he’s come here because he wants dignity.
I feel like Rhino’s gotten out of the suit before. It’s like the thing with Scorpion last block. People are so used to them being trapped in the suit that they just go back to it, even if they get out. Are these really the guys who Rhino’d him? Wouldn’t that have happened in Russia? Who cares, I guess, is the answer, an increasingly common one. We get a look at Rhino’s everyday life, which is pretty tough, being a superheavy creature who uses a pulley system in bed to make sure he doesn’t roll on his back and lose the ability to get up. Then he goes out to a bar, but he’s not having fun. Until that Romeo guy shows and says the boss wants him to protect Stella.
Really, guys?
A crushed Rhino then spends some time plowing through various buildings, but finds even running through walls doesn’t make him happy anymore. He climbs up on a bridge and considers suicide. But then…
So, yeah, obviously, this is a very odd Flowers For Algernon riff. We’ll see how it wraps next time.