You can see why I’ve paused USM for awhile. This stuff just kinda daisy chains together for awhile. So. Civil War is over. Spider-Man is a fugitive, and everyone knows who he is. And Aunt May has been shot. Dark times. And amidst all that, Spider-Man 3 is hitting theaters. So, Spider-Man has to get back in the black suit since he has one in the movie. But for SOME unfathomable reason, Marvel Comics mgmt swore up and down it’s a coincidence. No one believed them, OBVIOUSLY, but they did. Why the wildly unconvincing subterfuge? At any rate, thusly, Back In Black, an event that will make the terrible continuity of the original black costume story look totally seamless and well planned. An event whose continuity issues are more like the run up to the clone returning. Sound fun? It’s not! And when we get to the end of this one, well… things really will never be the same. For once, that’s true. Nothing that happens in Civil War is permanent. Not registration in general, not Cap’s death, not Speedball becoming an emo. But the end of this… Well, we’ll get there. In a relatively brief 26 posts, even. Sort… of… This segment is also the swansong for all current Spider-Man creatives and even the group editor. Big thangs. Peter is holding his shot mother figure in his arms and MJ looks on in shock. Then the sniper guy is stupid enough to shoot again.
I mean, I don’t care how good an assassin you are, you just shattered the world of a guy who can throw a bus and then reminded him you’re there. To wit:
In really frenetic couple of pages sold really well by Garney, Peter scoops up May, smashes through the hotel window and swings her to a hospital as fast as he can. While in transit, she tries to talk before passing out, and he smashes through a hospital window to put her on a bed. The idea that he shattered 2 windows without cutting either of them to bits is pretty silly, but the urgency is really well done.
In prison the next day, Kingpin receives the news in a coded message, and gloats about it for a bit. He, too, is not being very smart about this. He’s always been able to tie Spider-Man up in legal and moral quandaries, but he’s turned his longtime foe into a wounded animal now. Downtown, Peter meets MJ in an alley, so JMS can screw up a particularly egregious bit of lore:
“Fitzgerald.” They had a whole character running around named “Ben Reilly” after May and Ben, pretty (in)famous, and not only does he screw it up, Axel Alonso doesn’t check him on it. Ludicrous. Peter goes to where he threw that Jeep, silently webbing a cop to a wall who tries to keep him out, then finds the piece of the scope that got a special panel breaking off earlier. Chekov’s broken scope! How many times have I done that lame reference on this blog? I wonder.
Peter goes to a warehouse that “everyone knows” big time criminals hang out in, “untouchable” guys, and it looks like any other dump of a warehouse in any superhero comic, and the guys in there are your standard cannon fodder guys, probably with names like Ace and Skrag. Peter tears into them silently and insanely, real Daredevil hours. He thinks “No jokes. No punches pulled,” but he threw a Jeep earlier, if he really wasn’t pulling his punches, these guys would be exploding like they’re in an anime. Writers never seem to grasp what superstrength really means.
Boy, he’s lucky he picked a mook who knows EXACTLY what this rare item is, right down to a hilariously long list of attributes! He should buy lotto tickets!
Ok, we’re almost out of comic, we need to get Back In Black.
Bzzzzt! Like four bzzzts! Nothing he said about the black suit is true, and this is the 2nd time JMS has decided Spider-Mans’s webbing can last forever if he wants it to.
Yes, yes, very scary. So, look, here’s the thing. Here’s the insane, insane thing. Aunt May has been shot. Peter has magically produced his black costume to wear specifically in the act of avenging her. It’s to send a message to the people responsible that he is coming for them. That’s pretty straight forward, right? What if I told you Spider-Man appeared in roughly 70 comics in the black suit in 2007? He sure musta gotten sidetracked a lot! And where does that leave me? If you see Spider-Man in a black suit, he’s on a bloody mission of revenge where he doesn’t care who gets hurt. And yet, he will also be wearing the suit in completely unrelated stories in his other 2 titles, in New Avengers, in issues of Blade, Captain America, Punisher, Spider-Man Family and a randomly appearing Sensational Spider-Man Annual (And those are just the ones I own!), in a special miniseries about the fallout from Captain America dying, in an entire new crossover event (Sort of a mini-event, not really the next Civil War, but a big one nonetheless). All told, I own 58 of the 70 comics I turned up in my research. And the circumstances in ASM as it progresses only make it harder and harder for him to do anything else aside from what’s happening in ASM. And the fate of Aunt May isn’t even resolved until he takes off the black suit, so not one of the 64 issues JMS didn’t write has anywhere to fit in. How am I to square all this? I cannot. I simply cannot. We are RIGHT back where we were with Aunt May having a stroke in ASM and Peter becoming a violent psychopath while he had 5 other comics and they couldn’t really be happening. This stuff really is cyclical. Thus, I have chosen to approach it like this: The ASM arc first. Then all the solo material that couldn’t really be happening but clearly did. And the vast majority of the guest appearances as a separate block. 26 issues covering the “real” stories and 32 covering the “couldn’t possibly be happening in any way” stories. I don’t know how else to do it.