That’s one skinny ankle on that back foot! I wonder how boring Bags found these covers. I dunno, maybe it was a relief to just be able to crank out a random Spider-Man and get paid the same as he would have for something more complex. So many of the covers in this period are interchangeable. When Jemas leaves/is forced out and policy changes, it’s really obvious. This month, we open on May seeing a psychiatrist, who, after some awkward small talk, says she had an incident with her nephew. Bendis really likes this construction, for some reason, setting up a cliffhanger and then resolving it in flashback. This is 2 issues in a row of that, even. But flashback we do, to an understandably irate Aunt May demanding to know why Peter wasn’t in school today. She’s really hit her limit, grabbing for Peter’s backpack and refusing to let him lie to her until something falls out of the bag.
Dodged that one! Really had Peter’s back up against the wall. An excuse so specific it’s a bit improbable, but pretty airtight.
May flashes back to the events of USM 22, as we learn she was there when Spider-Man took out those goofy rollerblading goons. One of them went right through the front window of the place she was in.
And so, once again, we get a classic Spider-Man trope– “Aunt May is scared of Spider-Man”– presented in a whole new context, with a degree of realism and nuance that just wasn’t possible in the old days. We learn that May feels guilty about seeing a therapist. Because the death of her sister didn’t send her to therapy, and then the death of her husband didn’t send her to therapy, but when George Stacy died, that’s what did it. She says there’s something wrong with her.
May says she knows Peter has had little love in his life. That the kids at school are mean to him. She says she lets him sneak out and lets him work in the city, lets him do whatever he wants, as long as it gets him out of the house, because if she lets anyone get too close to her, they’ll die. She says she knows that’s not really true, but she can’t help feeling it. She says she pushes Peter away while smothering Gwen, a stranger, with affection. She says she’s not a good person. The therapist says she’s unusually hard on herself.
And, for my money, that’s the end of the most daring issue of USM to date. A whole Aunt May issue! No Spider-Man except in a 1-page flashback, and very little Peter, even. And this book depicts a world where an Aunt May issue can be really great. May doesn’t get to be on panel a whole lot, but she’s so much more a real person here than she’s ever been in the prime universe. But even so, a whole Aunt May issue was probably a hard sell for a lot of people. I was very impressed by them even doing this. I wrote about this and about how I thought the issue was extremely successful on Bendis’ forum, and that’s what got me a character named after me in a comic, an in-joke Bendis didn’t dole out to just anybody. But, unfortunately for me, he used my alias on the forum rather than my real name, so no one would really know it was me getting the shout out. The Ol’ Parker Luck hit me for a change. Back in the days before social media, everyone used a handle on the internet, and I was no exception. The one that stuck for over a decade was The Kraken, pulled at random from a Clutch song playing when I signed up for a forum one time. And so, Agent Kraken appeared in Ultimate X-Men. And, even crazier, when Bendis gets to writing the Ultimate Spider-Man game for PS2, there’s a Kraken Aquarium in New York, even.