Another classic cover. Some of these images got reused a lot. Something’s got awry this month, as Scott Hanna only inks pager 1-19 of 23. Maybe he got sick. Scott Koblish steps in to finish the book, and no slight to him, but the dynamite Romita/Hanna team finishing their run with someone else is rather disappointing. Ah, well, life happens. And ends. Who’s gonna die in this comic? Will anyone? Let’s see. We open on a close up of a bloody and bruised Peter, wondering how he got here, which leads to 2 pages of flashbacks to catch you up. Coulda just embraced the recap page, J. Michael! Anyway, we catch up with the end of last issue, with Peter saying he doesn’t want to fight, and Ezekiel saying he doesn’t, either, but…
Spidey flips Ezekiel over him and away, but he rockets right back, and suddenly has a syringe in his hand, which he stabs into Spidey’s back. Zeke says it’s a neural toxin, to dull his reflexes, and tells him to come along so this won’t be more painful than it has to. Peter can’t breathe, whips his mask off. It falls on the ground next to 2 spiders fighting, which is rrrrrrrather on the nose. And it doesn’t stop there!
One spider gets the upper, uh, leg as Ezekiel does the same, knocking out Peter and telling him it will be over soon. Then our man wakes up bolted to a column inside, hovering over that spider cutout on the floor. Ezekiel says he doesn’t want to do this, but has no choice, as he slashes Peter’s chest with a big sword, allowing the blood to drip down into the spider-slot. Then he cuts his own arm and lets his blood get in there, saying now the powers will come for him, and find Peter instead, and he will be free. And then, like any good maniacal villain, he leaves so the hero can get out of the trap.
Look at those straining muscles. Not every comic book artist could draw the difference like that. Peter keeps trying, trying to focus on MJ, and then he thinks “My life for yours, your life for mine” as he and Ezekiel both freeze in the same position, and then relive each other’s lives in a single montage page each. We know Peter’s story, but he experiences Ezekiel’s, seeing his parents die when he’s a child, seeing him tell himself he seeks the spider power to help people, seeing him build and run his company. A giant, inky spider appears in the temple, descending on Peter, as Ezekiel comes to the realization he’s never done anything and all Peter does is try to help people. Is that… is that true? I mean, yeah, he’s the bad guy here, but we’ve seen he does all these philanthropic things all over the world. I’m not totally sure how getting spider-powers had anything to do with that, but he’s helped people in a way that’s totally beyond Peter pretty consistently, from what we’ve seen. He wasn’t selfless and he wasn’t constantly having fistfights with weirdos, but he was, like, helping whole villages survive and helping kids who’d gone astray find a new lease on life and stuff. That this book chooses to characterize that as “nothing” compared to dodging pumpkin bombs is… pretty stupid. His change of heart should be because he’s been forced too late to see that he’s being evil and selfish and condemned a good person to a death he doesn’t deserve, not that Peter is so much better than him because he’s a superhero. Whiffed it.
Now I am left to wonder, as I have so often reading these 40 years of comics… how does Peter get home? “Hi, I was magically teleported here by a cloud of spiders and I don’t have any money, or, like, a shirt, can I have one free plane ticket to the United States, please?” Well, there you have it. Giving Peter a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi was an interesting choice, but in the end, it turned out kinda cliche. As it maybe had to, there’s only so many places a story like that can go, and only so many places a franchise like this can allow it to. And, kind of incredibly, that really is the end for Ezekiel. While his part in the story isn’t technically done (And boy am I not excited to get there), he’s dead for real. That in itself is kind of surprising, given the nature of comics and all. No one in the last 20 years decided to bring him back as a villain or anything. Altho, when his influence does rear its head again, well… I guess we’ll see. I’m still wrapping my head around that, but that’s off-topic.
And despite that weirdly patronizing note at the bottom of the last page, this is not a vacation, but, sadly, is the end for John, Jr. on ASM for a long while. This book would’ve been out in May, I wonder if they thought he was just taking the summer off. He’ll pop in here and there in the late 2000s, but he’s mostly off to other challenges. In 2004, he produces a 3-issue creator owned Image book called The Grey Area, while also beginning a 12-issue run on Wolverine with Mark Millar that pits him against much of the Marvel U and looks fantastic. As that’s ending, in 2005, he takes a very consequential job relaunching Black Panther with Reggie Hudlin. It’s a tasteless and terrible retcon crapping all over Christopher Priest’s just-ended, monumental 50+ issue run, and John’s only there for 6 issues, but that means he designs Shuri and the military uniforms of the Dora Milaje, the latter of which is pretty faithfully translated to the film. He does a new Sentry series with Paul Jenkins, he does Neil Gaiman’s Eternals mini, which is kind of a dud but looks incredible. He draws a big event book for Marvel in 2007 which we will be covering. Then he spends several years drawing Kick-Ass, the creator-owned series with Mark Millar which is just dreadful, but spawned the 2 successful movies (Mark Millar has this bizarre track record of getting movies made from his material that are pretty successful, but which also more or less throw out his story beyond the log line and do something better. It’s a weird thing to have happen to you over and over). In the early 2010s, he’s on Avengers, and then Captain America, all while doing more terrible Kick-Ass, and then he shocks the world by moving to DC, like Jack Kirby before him. A Marvel lifer, Marvel royalty, it was a big deal. Everyone in the world wants him to do Batman, and he simply does not for most of his time there, beginning on Superman and more or less ending with Superman, doing a little Batman, a random new character and some Justice League. He’s at DC until the 2020s, when he suddenly returns to Marvel to draw a little book called The Amazing Spider-Man in 2022. Like Mark Bagley, he can run, he can hide, he can do other things, he can jump ship to DC, he can tell people he doesn’t want to do anymore Spider-Man for awhile, but… he always does. And I, for one, am grateful. Kinda makes you wonder why he never took a 2nd run at Daredevil. He was willing to revisit Iron Man and X-Men once each, and all this time with Spider-Man. Maybe what he and Ann Nocenti did together seemed too special.