I’ve never read this, but I know who that is on the cover, and yer not gonna believe it. This month, Talent Caldwell is inked by Norman Lee. We open on Spider-Man waxing poetic about life and change, and the how people look like ants from his vantage, etc, before getting to it.
He does know this guy, and so do we. The guy gets a whole splash page as it is suddenly raining on him out of nowhere. Having switched to Peter Parker, our hero approaches the guy, thinking he’s changed, that he used to “BE somebody” (He most certainly did not), but now he’s “just another drunk,” only he’s projecting all his misery onto the people around him.
This page really hits like a ton of bricks, huh? MINDWORM. A character who only appeared twice (ASM 138 and TAC 35), and yet Jenkins somehow brings him back and totally botches the history. A couple of jewel heists?? When??? Last time we saw him, he’d realized “with power comes responsibility” and seemed eager to go on the straight and narrow. But he never committed any “jewel heists!” He wasn’t that kinda villain!
Ugh. Peter is upset that he doesn’t know how to “solve the problem,” giving Mindworm his umbrella and going home. Now he’s at dinner with May & MJ, but he’s not really there, he’s thinking. When May prods him to talk about what’s bothering him, he asks if there were 2 people drowning and you could only save one of them, who would you save? He offers no context, just “two people.” I mean… that’s not enough for your hypothetical, dude.
I do like May’s last line there. Over 2 pages of montage portraying another couple days, Spider-Man and Peter both can’t stop thinking about Mindworm, beating himself up for all the choices he made during their previous fights that didn’t actually happen, thinking “he was probably always mentally ill, and I treated him like a CRIMINAL.” He was a psychic vampire who killed his parents and happily fed on the people in Flash’s old neighborhood from his home in a cartoon haunted house, Peter! It was not subtle! Well, now it’s a week later, raining again, and Spider-Man has decided to come see if he can take Mindworm to “a doctor I know.” so he knows (Somehow?) that Mindworm was psychically making this whole part of town miserable and just left it. What are we even doing? Well, now he arrives and it looks like a war zone.
So that guy just got hit by a train? Everyone’s fighting vision of monsters that they think are people who’ve hurt them (What sense does that make? Is this guy imagining the giant green creature he’s imagining is also his dad? What?). Spider-Man’s barely holding it together. A guy cuts him, and then the guy with a gun who thinks the green monster is his dad now thinks Spider-Man is his dad, and he doesn’t like his dad.
WHO IS BENNY? WHAT IS GOING ON????
Is he dead? What even happened in this comic book!? Ugh. This series ends with #27. Is put out of its misery, maybe. Jenkins only writes 1 of the remaining issues. But the ones he doesn’t do aren’t much of a reprieve. I’m hurting during this period, man. I’m getting hit from all directions. Well, almost all. New Avengers is gonna keep my spirits up. But first…