Wonder why everyone had Norman Osborn on the brain this year. Why did he figure so prominently in The Pulse and 2 Spider-Man titles. Pulse 5, MKSM 6 and ASM 512 are all the same month! Norman’s being arrested, bragging about killing that guard’s wife while in prison, and being revealed as the father of Gwen’s children at the same time. What was in the water? Nothing about Spider-Man’s legs and pelvis makes sense on this cover. Deodato going from a tenuous-at-best grasp on anatomy to a too-perfect, sometimes obviously 3D model-based version later is so jarring. The primitive models he was using in the 2010s, like, when you lift their arms up, the pecs don’t move properly. It was such a tell. I had the same software, I knew exactly what I was looking at. One assumes Poser models are more sophisticated today, and yet his art remains as completely devoid of life and energy as ever. I just… don’t want to talk about this comic book. But I guess I gotta.
On page one, Peter and MJ recap at each other under the guise of “going over what they know” because JMS just won’t embrace the recap page. One wonders why the Goblin formula makes Gabriel & Sarah age so rapidly if it’s, you know, never done that to the myriad people who took it (Including, but maybe not limited to, Norman, Harry, Roderick Kingsley, and didn’t Jason Philip Macendale finally get it in the early clone 90s? I can’t recall). MJ says they don’t know how to get in touch with the kids to try to help them, but Peter says he has a method, that “once loosed, is as unstoppable as the juggernaut and twice as ugly.” Oh, do tell. Then a mindboggling 2 pages are wasted on a protracted Komedy Bit about the news reporting Spider-Man is going to hold a press conference, and consulting their resident Spider-Man expert, who’s some weird, sweaty nerd with a bunch of increasingly stupid, I mean funny, bits of video footage. I guess they thought this story was getting too serious. They then throw to the steps of the Daily Bugle.
Deodato sucks so bad he can’t decide whether there’s 5 lines or 4 on the bottom of the Spider-Man mask in all these mostly-the-same drawings on a single page! Spider-Man swings off, and a news van follows. What… about having this press conference was so catastrophic? Was that a joke? Nothing happened! Then Spider-Man’s back on a the friggin bridge, and hilariously…
Bro you are on this bridge twice a month! That’s hilarious. That’s so “I don’t care about what’s come before” of Straczynski. Well, Spider-Man stands there for half an hour, then the kids show, telling him to say what he has to say, but no tricks. Meanwhile, the news van is below, deciding to send out their footage of this live, but without audio, because the supers are too far away.
Why bother pretending Peter isn’t Spider-Man??? That makes NO SENSE. I mean, I don’t expect much from this pile of shit, but that is a completely unnecessary overcomplication.
Again, if any of that were true of the rapid aging, how is Norman alive? How is Kingsley? Go fish, Straczynski.
I still do not understand the giant pole for Gwen’s DNA. It’s so specific I feel like I’m missing something.
Look at that awful, awful face. Ugh. They fight for awhile, Sarah doing the “Oh, Gabe, no!” helpless female thing that was played out and dead tired even in 2004, then the cops start shooting and order them all to surrender. Gabriel naturally thinks this was all part of Spider-Man’s scheme.
I mean, it’s almost comical. Spider-Man being forced to redo the Gwen death fall TWICE IN 2004!!! UGH. Spider-Man catches her, of course, and swings her to a hospital, where a guy who identifies as a compose is being a real jerk to a nurse, which has to be a reference to someone in JMS’s life. Then Spider-Man bursts in with Sarah and says he’ll tear the place apart if she doesn’t get care. Very cool, dude. Meanwhile, Gabriels sloshing through the sewer to a secret safehouse Norman told them to go to when they’d killed Peter and Spider-Man someday, and you’ll never guess what’s inside.
Small kudos, I guess, for that not being variations on the Ramos costume. Like it woulda been for Doc Ock earlier this year. The past is allowed to exist in this story where you wish it didn’t.