She’s back! Is she back? She might be back, we don’t know yet! Same gang as last month as we dive right into the moments after that crazy final page:
Is she real? How could she be real? She turned into a real specific corpse! Or maybe she’s… a clone! Hey, we also left MJ in a crazy place.
Ultimate Kaine! Altho I’m betting he’s never called that. I can’t say I remember with total certainty, but him being called Kaine was so lame anyway. It was such an “edgy” name. This doesn’t feel like the place for such things (Except, maybe, to make fun of them, but this certainly isn’t that kind of story). Meanwhile, at the Baxter Building, the FF has woken up Scorpion, who asks if he’s “back in the zoo.” He becomes agitated when they mention Spider-Man, but they keep reiterating that they’re only trying to help. He lashes out at the force field Sue has him in, saying the zoo is where “the others” are and passing back out. Reed & Sue discuss how taking him out of that suit would kill him, and then decide they have to call in Nick Fury, despite not wanting to betray Peter. That this is too big. So they call him. But we go back to the A plot.
I don’t usually like to run a lot of consecutive pages, but there’s no way around this one.
Oh yes. We’re doing this.
So raw. So raw!!
Now, if Richard Parker walks in the door in ASM, you know he’s a robot or something, and then he is. But if Richard Parker walks in the door in ULTIMATE Spider-Man… man, it’s anybody’s guess. But I just have to keep going, because…
Is ANY of this real?? Is even Aunt May real???
And Nick’s first instinct is to go kill Spider-Man about it!? I mean, can you imagine having to wait 30 days for the next issue in this moment? Excruciating! You have to put yourself in the shoes of the average reader, or even just me, specifically, going into this. The incredibly charged nature of just touching the clone mess at all has you going in trepidatious. And then this story hits you like a train. And then all the cars it was pulling hit you, too! Rarely, if ever, had a comic had me and others like me so on the edge of our seats. Before or after! AND! And this issue and 98 both came out in the gap between Civil War 3 & 4. I mean, the world is upside down right now, as a Spider-Man fan. It’s all chaos all the time. And it’s interesting to contrast the two, in a way. To contrast Mark Millar’s issue after issue of hollow, pointless shock endings with the absolute emotional carnage of THIS series’ shock endings, running parallel to that. Surely two very different approaches to keeping people coming back for more, that’s for sure. A book this small, this personal in its storytelling, has an unfair advantage, but Millar is still playing with all your favorite characters. He could’ve done things that felt like they meant something instead of “OMG it’s the Marvel version of Suicide Squad!” Ah, well. No sense relitigating all that. We’re through it.
Also feels worth mentioning that, from here, there’s only 1 more month during Bagley’s tenure where he does 2 issues. I have no insider knowledge as to why he might’ve slowed down. Maybe he just needed a break after being run ragged on this title for so long. It’s a well-deserved break, that’s for sure, but it’s not coming next issue. It is insane that next month is an oversized 100th issue spectacular, and Bags did 2 issues this month. Guys like Bagley are a dying breed.