I assume Spider-Man really falls to his death for a change in this issue. Let’s find out. It’s been a bit since I did that riff. It’s been a bit since Spider-Man fell to his death in a cliffhanger. But now it’s Ultimate Falling to His Death. But first, we’re with May & Gwen in the house. The teacher from last issue has called to complain about Peter skipping his class, and this only makes May more scared and upset. Gwen swears she doesn’t know where he is. May yells downstairs for him, and when he doesn’t answer, she gets a fire extinguisher and smashes the door open. What will she find? We don’t know, because…
Kinda like when Spider-Man woke up in the X-Men’s care after passing out way back in MTU 4. Peter is shocked and dismayed about it, Kitty is only more infatuated with him now that she’s seen how young he is, and he wants to know how he got here. We flash back to everyone falling out of the plane. Storm and Jean swapped jobs, with Storm catching the plane in a big tornado as Jean zoomed through the sky to grab Spidey and Geldoff. Geldoff was easy, but Spider-Man was really plummeting, and she was running out of time.
The lastest of last second saves.
Oops! Back in Queens, May snoops around the lab, but doesn’t find anything. She tries to get into Peter’s computer, but doesn’t know the password. She gives up and leaves, barely missing one of the lenses in his spider-mask on a table.
Chuck goes on to say it appears someone injected the isolated mutant gene into Geldoff’s mother’s placenta to see what would happen, despite this being tremendously illegal, even in Latveria, so he’s sort of a mutant, and sort of not.
There’s our boy.
In a 2-page action/comedy sequence, Spider-Man slugs Beast, kidnaps Geldoff and runs for it, only to be stopped by Professor X asking what good that would do, and we find it was just something he imagined doing.
Dun dunnnnn! This is gonna be the showdown of the century. Forget Doctor Octopus or the Green Goblin. This is the main event. And that’s it for Geldoff. They didn’t do themselves any favors hyping him up as the first original villain in the Ultimate Universe knowing it was gonna go like this. This was a fun, unorthodox story, but the hype machine had people come in here looking for the next Venom, and they sure did not get that. So this one got a lot of blowback it 100% would not have if they hadn’t marketed it that way. Comics is tuff.