Let’s just hop right in there:
Certainly not a splash you had seen before.
Oh, Robbie, I missed you.
Wow, a Spider-Man comic with Spider-Man in it, how novel. Seems like something you would do in your first issue. With all the extra eyes that were gonna be on this relaunch? Crazy. McNiven’s star rose pretty quickly at Marvel, and Civil War cemented him as perhaps their biggest star. He follows that by slowly descending into this truly bizarre career of just copying other artists. So his Spider-Man begins to look really Todd McFarlane-y here, and next thing you know, it’s 10 years later and he’s doing an entire Wolverine miniseries pretending to be Barry Windsor-Smith. Like I do not understand what happened to this man. The only thing you can count on from Steve McNiven by the 2020s is art that looks like someone else. You can’t even be sure who. Meanwhile, Harry and the girls have arrived at the Coffee Bean, which the info pages last issue told us he owns now. Carlie is worried about Peter, and also about reporting her credit cards stolen. That segues us to the guy who stolen them trying to fence them. He’s not getting a good deal, and as a mob guy who self-identified as “Lil’ Baby Bruno” whose complains about not being invited to the meet Robbie mentioned, the fence refuses the webshooter, aka “the watch that has no watch on it.” The thief starts messing with it, accidentally puts a spider tracer on the guy complaining, and then shoots a web on the wall. Suddenly, he knows he robbed Spider-Man.
That’s Bruno, of course. Spidey catches up to the kidnapping just in time for the van to wing a crane, dropping a giant Daily Bugle billboard on the crowd below. Spidey catches it, and is of course berated for it by the people standing under it, unsmashed. Meanwhile, an unrecognizable Marla Madison has arrived at the hospital to see JJJ.
She doesn’t even have glasses on! And she’s selling the Bugle! JJJ’s gonna be so mad he’ll have another heart attack.
Reasonably good Spider-Man banter. Not especially funny, but in-character for sure. I don’t know about any of these guys… I mean, everyone’s taste is different, and who knows when egos come into play… But I think I would have been genuinely intimidated trying to write Spider-Man banter while Bendis was doing it as often as 3 issues a month (Across 2 Spider-Men, even). Bendis had the good or the quipping in a way very few do. Slott’s, like most things he does, is pretty old school. Mr. Negative reveals Overdrive was his courier in Swing Shift, and while Spidey didn’t know he was after Mr. Negative then or now, it’s ample evidence to Mr. Negative that Spidey is after him. The ol’ Parker luck. Hey, if Spider-Man’s been missing for 3 weeks, and it’s ruined the Bugle, uh, what about him appearing in Swing Shift? Then Spider-Man notices the tablet, and asks if that’s THE tablet.
But in order to use any of them, you have to sign the tablet of Terms & Conditions. At least we’ve reached a point in human history where they’re smart enough to say it’s Lemurian instead of saying it came from a real culture they’re Orientalizing. Spidey overhears Mr. Negative’s name, and his incredulous reaction to such a goofy moniker lets his foe know these really were coincidences. So he packs up his goons and tells Spider-Man he has 5 minutes to save Lil’ Baby Bruno’s life. Oldest anti-Spider-Man trick in the book. We cut away to the robber guy, now mugging people with the webshooter, and only now realizing that if that guy he robbed had Spider-Man’s web, he must have been Spider-Man, and he had his ID and everything, but he gave it to that fence. What a dumby.
This book’s kinda full of dumbies. But, hey, continuity! That’s nice! Spider-Man swoops in and tries to warn them all that they’re in danger, but of course, they just start shooting at him.
Editor Stephen Wacker is stealing my bit in that caption! I been doing that bit on this blog since 2019! Doing some pretty classic Spider-Man stuff here, with the mob and all. Feels a little too classic. Kind of regressive, like they want to totally purge all the change and innovation of the past 5 years. But… I’m a sucker for Spider-Man in his natural element, so I dunno. This 2nd issue was better than the first one for sure.