Our boy’s been through an emotional ringer lately. Will things pick up now that he’s getting ready to shoot a hadoken? This is a weird cover. We open on General Nick Fury, dining alone, havin’ a nice evening, when he’s warned of “a recurring energy flux” in his area. He says he’ll look into it himself over the protests of his staff, wanders into an alley, does some kinda zap, and watches someone fall into a dumpster.
Peter choppily explains the Venom situation, which Sharon Carter is cleaning up right now. Fury tells her Peter took care of it, and she says “good job” over the radio. Peter thinks he killed Eddie. Fury says if there’s no body, he probably didn’t, but that’s not the point, Peter thinks he killed someone and he wants out of this.
He absolutely did not say that last bit in USM 27, rather saying, “I own you,” but… whatever.
Well, that’s a big ol’ reversal, huh? But that, at least, was a nice thing for our beleaguered hero. From there, he heads to ESU. He says someone else ends up cleaning up all Spider-Man’s messes, and he has to see this to the end. He goes to Eddie’s dorm room, but finds his roommate cleaning up junk. He says must have taken his stuff and left, because his things are gone but all his trash is still here. He clearly doesn’t like Eddie, and when asked, says Eddie was an inveterate liar and a real creep with women (Using more words). So, Peter leaves, and heads back to the lab, to make sure there’s no more “the suit” in there, and he is caught.
Well, didn’t see that coming, but nice for a Peter Parker to finally meet a Curt Connors. It’s getting fuzzy for me as I get further away from reading the first 30 years of the series, has Peter ever met Curt in the original universe? I’m not totally sure. Surely he must have. If he hasn’t, I think he will, before it gets to the present.
Peter goes smashing out of a skylight, just emotionally crushed from all this. Then we see a figure watching him, and his Spider Sense goes off. He starts asking the empty air if it’s Eddie. Saying he feels responsible and he wants to help. But there’s no response.
Well, no happy ending yet! I’d forgotten about this little epilogue. Once upon a time, they sold USM collected in big hardcovers with a bunch of bonus material. And then, once upon a time, Barnes & Noble got an exclusive gigantic tome containing the first 3 of those, with all the fixin’s. I bought one of those which ends with this issue. And that’s how I have this:
A Clone Saga call, you say? Surely they wouldn’t. Would they? What follows this page in the big book is a fascinating look at Bill Jemas more than anything. Like, he came up with the general principles of this Venom story. And he did something very similar for the first arc of the book, before he’d even hired Bendis. He wasn’t a total fool when it came to breaking a story. But he is FIXATED on the driver for the Venom suit being Peter’s webbing. He sends Bendis a proposal document and then an 8-issue outline of his vision of the story, which keeps getting closer to what was printed, but he sticks to the webbing angle, which Bendis rightly flagged as stupid and bad for the special bond the webbing gives Peter & Richard. Then Bendis wrote his own outline, which is more or less the printed books, and we see Jemas’ notes, and among other poor story instincts, he is STILL fixated on the webbing thing! We also see him point out that “the suit” being a cure for cancer and potential bio weapon is pretty absurd, so point to him for that, but most of his instincts are wrong, wrong, wrong after the initial discussion. He had a lot of bad ideas for the first arc, too. But not all bad. It’s just interesting to me. He wasn’t a creative, not really. But he sometimes had some ok instincts.