Cool cover!
Now that someone is writing a version of Peter & MJ together that isn’t miserable for the first time since, like, 1993, it’s interesting to contrast them to Ultimate Peter & MJ. This level of simple trust and devotion that can only come from knowing each other half their lives vs. the messy teenage experience of starting that journey in USM is fun to have going at the same time.
Too bad all that’s over now and MJ is dead. Peter wakes from his nightmare to the phone ringing. It’s Ezekiel asking where he is, telling him to turn on the news. On TV, he sees that half a mile of Manhattan is covered in spiders, millions of them, biting people, scaring people, overwhelming everything. One assumes that should probably be billions, not millions. I mean, spiders are tiny. The newslady, who is running for her life from a spiderwave like everyone else, cuts to J. Jonah Jameson for his opinion, which is objectively the worst possible idea.
Mary Jane is in the process of being belittled and dismissed by the director of that play because she’s a famous model (JMS really puts her through it trying to succeed in her career), and then an out of control car covered in spiders smashes through the wall. Mary Jane immediately takes charge, leading an evacuation. One is reminded, if one has read entirely too many Spider-Man comics, of her behavior during Inferno, especially Web of Spider-Man 48. And, as in that adventure, as she’s getting everyone to safety…
…her plot intersects with Spider-Man’s, and he openly helps her before everyone else, which is kind of funny. “That Spider-Man, always helping the pretty lady first, what a jerk!”
The yell is coming from a lady whose skirt is (Somewhat improbably) trapped in the door of a car she’s standing on top of as a sea of spiders flows around and over it. Spider-Man helps her free, but some of the spiders are forming a shape behind them, becoming the spider-man from last issue. Spidey does his usual quipping as he tests punching a face made of tiny bugs and is somehow surprised they just scatter. But then they start to envelope him.
That’s Flash, Liz and Harry back there, even though Harry didn’t go to school with them and Flash and Liz not wanting to go to this exhibit is a prrrrretty big part of Amazing Fantasy 15. 0/10, Straczynski.
Back in the real world, a still drowning-in-spiders Spider-Man asks why this is happening, and the voice says to show him the truth about the Pretender, and then it’s a flashback to Ezekiel getting his powers, a moment teased during this run but not yet fully shown. The mystery man in the temple tells a young Ezekiel that every generation has “one chosen,” and it’s not him, but Ezekiel says he can make himself that one.
I’m pretty sure milk is the milk of the world.
So, the thing is, none of this holds water. If what the unnamed wise man says it true, about chosen ones, why would a place for stealing his power even exist? How could it? And if Ezekiel’s whole deal so far has been just making Spider-Man fight the things that were coming for him, A) Why didn’t they notice they were after the wrong guy, and B) Why did he keep helping Spider-Man? I remembered vaguely that this story was a (Perhaps inevitable) letdown, but man, it’s not good! Can they pull it out in the big finish? I’m guessing “no.”