100th issue spectacular! Extra pages! Extra madness! A whole extra cover of Spider-Men on the back!
I’ve been drawing pages like this my whole life, I feel compelled to note. During school or a boring meeting as an adult, I’d just fill a page with Spider-Men. He’s fun to draw, you can draw him in a million poses, it’s a good time. A better time than the Parkers are having.
In the chaos, here, I think maybe you’re not supposed to wonder about Richard knowing who Gwen is. Meanwhile, as the ruins of Oscorp, the Kaine one has MJ in a contraption, and is yammering about how she’s about to transform into something that can protect itself, and they can be together again, when he gets a swift kick in the face.
The more the merrier! What’s the count now, 5 Peters? Speedrunning the clone saga AND doing “Peter’s parents come back,” Bendis is just daring any bad story to come at him. At this rate you almost expect Gwen & Norman’s kids to show up. Back at the house, Richard wants to explain. He begins to explain the suit, but Peter knows about it. And he knows Peter knows about it, but he didn’t know Peter knew it was meant to cure cancer. Around a flashback to the first Venom fight, Richard reiterates that Trask turning into a weapon was very much against his wishes, but he couldn’t fight a corporation, and when Trask offered him & Brock Sr. jobs, Richard took one.
Ultimate Richard being a slightly older regular Peter is a nice touch.
Pretty convincing reason he’s alive! Is it real? Is anything real anymore? Back at Oscorp, MJ is watching the 2 clones beat the blue hell out of each other, until the one in the black suit seemingly dies, which does not make her feel any better. At the house, Richard explains that with his life in ruins and everyone thinking he was dead, the last thing he felt he could do was raise Peter. He says he always thought he would come back for Peter, but then in the flashback, we see him get approached by Henry Peter Gyrich, government stooge and longtime foe of the Avengers and X-Men in the regular books.
He IS taking awhile to get there. Then we see Gyrich showing Richard footage of the Venom fight in USM 33, and Richard learning Peter is Spider-Man and Fury is grooming him for his program. THEN we see Richard catching May outside her job at some point in the past. She’s horrified and tries to run.
THEN we see Richard spying on Peter & MJ in the wake of Gwen’s death and the Carnage debacle. He’s happy for his son, and then Gyrich drags him away, saying he can never reveal himself to Peter because he would be revealing himself to Nick Fury. And also that they now have all of Curt Connors’ Carnage research. So now we’re finally getting to him cloning Gwen, but before he can talk about it…
But if they cloned Gwen AFTER the Carnage debacle…
Absolute. Chaos.
AND Ultimate Aunt May’s first heart attack?
AND whatever that means!? This is the craziest story ever. Even having already read it and everything, it’s intense and insane. Woof! This is followed by a text page by editor Ralph Macchio, mostly fluff, but pointing out that the record for the longest run on a Marvel comic by the same writer/artist team is Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s 102 issues of Fantastic Four, so Bendis & Bags are about to make history. Then there’s a gallery of previously unseen Bags pencils, like this unused cover…
…and this unused opening splash.
These are followed by 2 unused covers, with a note that confirms my suspicion that Bags just churned out “Heroic shot of Spider-Man” images for awhile under Jemas, making so many they didn’t even use them all. Light work for him. Then these spreads collaging character designs from the early days to this very storyline…
This is followed by a recap of the whole series so far, billed as “Ultimate Spider-Man Saga.” This references a bunch of books they did in the 90s giving their much longer running series the same treatment across 4 and 5 and 6 issues. I bought the first issue of Spider-Man Saga, and it told me a whole lot about the early days I didn’t know at the time, but for some reason, I didn’t get the rest. The books concludes with a 2-page letter col addressing the news that Bagley’s last issue will be 110. People are understandably sad to see him go.