Spider-Man’s web has often been portrayed as being so strong he, himself, can’t break it (But certainly not always). Ever since McFarlane popularized the image of him hanging in a bunch of his own web like this, I’ve always wanted someone to draw him trying to get out of it. Not so dramatic then, one assumes. Page one here is the last page of 513, only with an inset panel of Gabriel’s voice triggering a computer routine.
I would point out how nothing Norman is saying makes sense, but A) Who cares, and B) I’m sure they’d just say “because he’s crazy!” by way of explanation.
A doctor comes out and says they got the bullet out, but she’s lost a lot of blood, and they can’t get her body to accept any, due to a genetic alteration.
Spidey suddenly blurts out that they should use his blood. He tells us, not the doc, that he knows he’s the same blood type as Gwen was, and tells the doc that his blood is weird, too, so what does she have to lose? SCIENCE. What a crock of shit. “My GOOD weird blood can fix her BAD weird blood! Maybe!” So they get him hooked up for a transfusion. This idiotic page happens…
What an insane comic book this is. Spider-Man wakes up with MJ at his side, and my growing suspicion that she’s played by Liv Tyler becomes near certainty on this page. MJ says a nurse tried to get a picture of him with his mask off. So no one’s gotten word to the press that famous model/actress Mary Jane Watson-Parker is at Spider-Man’s bedside in the hospital? Is this before or after the news was waving his mask around when he was in the hospital in the Millar story? This is really beyond the pale.
Oh, sure, she’s just a groupie. Not famous model/actress Mary Jane Watson-Parker. It’s like if Beyonce was there and the staff uniformly said, “Eh, it’s just some lady.” Well, this bit is inevitable, I suppose.
While Gabriel is pummeling Spider-Man, we learn Sarah escaped the hospital, subduing a guard and stealing his gun. The weakened Spider-Man manages to web himself away, but falls onto a roof, dislocating his shoulder before getting hit with some razor bats, but don’t worry, just in the leg. It’s not Millar having him electrocuted nearly to death and then shot multiple times and then immediately get better.
And so this turkey comes in for a landing, with MJ hearing Peter tell Gwen he’ll always love her and thinking he means her, which is gross, and the threat of having to see these idiot kids again. And, I am sad to say, we will, pretty soon, in a story I’ve never read before. Lucky me. This ending felt very rushed and incomplete. Why’d they waste so much time in the news guys and the hospital angle when they amounted to nothing? I don’t actually care. I have weathered my second miserable storm this block, and I’m still alive. The craziest thing is, with this over, with the curtain down on one of the worst Spider-Man stories ever published… Straczynski has 2 more in his future. That run back-to-back, even. I don’t think anyone has ever gone from such high highs to such low lows on this title, before or since. Some guys have written the very best ASM, and some, the very worst, but no one else has done both. JMS is in this class all by himself. But between this disaster and those 2 disasters, we mostly just have mediocrity, as I recall. It’s just bonkers to me how this title, which was better than it had been in a decade thanks to JMS, goes 0 to 100 off a cliff. The drop in quality is so immediate and drastic it’s like someone else took over. It’s really insane. I’m no fan of Deodato, but what a thing to come blundering into. “I get to draw and/or trace Amazing Spider-Man! What a dream, what an honor! What’s the story?…. I’m sorry, what?” I might have rethought my whole career…