Robert Campanella inks solo this month, and presumably into the future.
Really makin’ with the cliches here on page one.
This Mysterio, presumably Berkhardt, says his helmet will allow him to enter the cloud, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and then he goes in. Cop guy says maybe they’ll get lucky and the Mysterios will kill each other. Maybe! Inside, Spider-Man is suddenly enveloped in a gas. He thinks Mysterio wouldn’t know the new suit protects him, and beings overacting being scared until his boss walks up and wonders what he’s doing. Komedy business. Then his Spider- Sense goes off.
Somehow, Spider-Man identifying MJ as his wife is much more surreal than people addressing Spider-Man as “Peter” to me. Meanwhile, in the auditorium, Demonic Mysterio or whatever is insulting Mysterio III, who tried to teleport and gets injured.
Materializing inside someone is apparently how he committed the murder Black Cat was framed for in the aforementioned wretched Kevin Smith miniseries. I don’t remember, of course, but Black Cat’s MO is certainly exploding people, I can see how the charges stuck. In this comic, I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t care. Elsewhere, Flash decides to run down a hallway yelling about football in case its boobytrapped so none of the kids will get hurt (He’s very complicated), but when he rushes through the doors at the end, he’s back where he started. When he tries again, the floor opens up and a big monster is down there. Real Mysterio flavor, just like Mom used to make.
What, the fact that none of this is setting off his danger sense isn’t the clue, it’s the wedding ring?
Hey, those bottom 3 panels are the first bit I’ve liked in this issue. Casual superheroing. Back with Flash, Jeremy the nerd saves Flash from being dragged into the floor by stabbing the monster’s tentacle with a Swiss army knife he’s not allowed to have on campus. But, obviously, Flash decides he doesn’t want to report him. Then that Arrows lady does some Komedy Bits about the Swiss making a lot of knives for a neutral country until she is mercifully dragged into a locker. Well, anyway, Spider-Man has finally reached Mysterio III, but before they can scrap, Mysterio II appears, announcing his intention to help Spider-Man beat up Mysterio III. In the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, they always identified legacy characters like this. It seems very helpful in the context of this issue. As for the alleged Mysterio I…
In the 90s, Peter David and Todd McFarlane had a very public spat that ended in a farcical “debate” between them at a Comic Con, about what’s more important, story or art. David redoing the cliffhanger from McFarlane’s Spider-Man #3, using the OTHER of my 2 least-favorite Spider-Man villains, complete with the exact same headwound on the exact same side of his head, is kind of embarrassing. The answer to that debate, by the way, is neither. A badly drawn comic is disappointing and a poorly written comic is disappointing. You can grit your teeth and read a good story with bad art (Boy, have I!), or you can appreciate beautiful art telling a bad story (Boy, have I!), but neither of these scenarios is a good comic book.