In my clearly incorrect memory, this issue was not supposed to be part of Back In Black. It was to be the beginning of the next thing, but because it was so late, they added it. But “Back In Black” was “part X of 5” the whole time, so I don’t know where I got that. I can tell you this, tho: Another month passed without ASM on the stands. You’d hope that, with Civil War over, things could hit their targets again, but not in the Spider-Office. But, here we are, the final issue for this art team. I think they deserve a round of applause. Garney & Co. signed on just in time to draw uniformly terrible comics, but they made these dumb stories look the best they possibly could. Let’s see them finish out. I guess one of the reasons I thought this one was added to the schedule is it is 100% filler, front to back. MJ is asleep in a chair at the hospital as Peter asks Aunt May what’s new.
Now they can’t spell Reilly correctly. Clownshoes!
So close to getting a religious denomination for the Parkers. Although, if the church May donated Peter’s microscope to in ASM 291 and the church Peter got married in in ASM Annual 21 are any indication, one assumes Christian and Catholic. But who knows? We cut away to a police detective belatedly getting assigned the mysterious case of a woman brought to a hospital with a gunshot but no related crime report. Back at the hospital, Peter is in denial about May’s impending doom, and doesn’t want to discuss services or funerals. And then the absolute filler nature of this issue kicks into high gear. A sequence burned into my memory for how offensively pointless it was, as the unnamed nurse Peter stole that folder from earlier meets with the detective on May’s case, and this book proceeds to spend THREE AND A HALF PAGES on these 2 unnamed people discussing possible explanations for May’s gunshot wound. THREE AND A HALF PAGES of nobodies talking about nothing! Of hypotheticals about something we know for sure! Blatant disrespect for your customer, making filler like this. So, then, after the nurse and the copper have convinced each other MJ “knows something about what happened,” (DUH!) the cop goes to arrest her. Then the lights go out, and most of a page is wasted with the cop telling us the machines are still on, so someone wanted them in the dark. We know who! Stop stalling!
Cut to most of a page with an EMT who turns out to be the guy the nurse was complaining about on the phone earlier eating dinner, so Peter can steal his ambulance outside. Meanwhile, MJ steals a patient transfer form as he suits up in scrubs to go wheel Aunt May out of the hospital, mentally racking up more felonies as he goes. He covers her in a sheet so she’ll look like a corpse and no one will stop him.
So, we opened with May in the hospital and dying, and we end with… May in the hospital and dying. Nothing happened in this comic. Nothing EGREGIOUSLY happened in this comic. Absurd. Totally absurd. And it’s To Be Concluded in One More Day. So, then, May was shot, rushed to the hospital, slipped into a coma. Peter ran all over town tracking down who was responsible and beating people up, all the while her condition worsened. Now she’s on the brink of death and there’s nothing anyone can do for her. That is the story of Spider-Man between Civil War and the above-mentioned One More Day. The whole story. And in One More Day, Peter has returned to his red & blues, because his revenge mission is over. It’s very linear. And yet, he somehow appeared in 65 other comics in the black costume. In most, if not all, of them, he’s wisecrackin’ it up and totally not acting like the things he’s doing are interrupting his mission of revenge and/or preventing him from going to see May. It just doesn’t add up. Wait til you see all the things he somehow got up to in the margins of these 5 issues. It’s so stupid. And, like, ok, the other 2 Spider-Man comics are publishing alongside this one every month, you decide you want a unified front. It doesn’t make sense storywise, but there’s a logic to it publishing-wise. But when Spider-Man guest stars in other comics, or features prominently in another event, or returns to the New Avengers… why not just put him in the red & blues? Why make a mess messier? I’ll never understand. Well, speaking of guest starring in other comics, next time, we’ll take a look at Spider-Man in and around the fallout from Captain America’s death.