The great Dave Stewart randomly takes over colors this week. Morry Hollowell has a very particular, recognizable coloring style, and I think he’d colored everything McNiven & Vines had done for Marvel to this point, so this should be interesting, spotting the differences.
Well, for one thing, Stewart is not following Hollowell’s weird instance that all men have pronounced 5 o’clock shadow at all times, and that’s cool with me. It’s Harry, Lily & Carlie driving by down there. Harry sees Spider-Man swinging off and is very angry. Seeing Spider-Man makes Harry want to just leave, but Carlie gets out, wanting to try to pitch in. She thinks to herself how cool this crime scene is (gross), only to be rudely told off by the cop in charge of the scene until someone tells him who her dad was. Apparently a beloved cop. Meanwhile, the Spider-Mugger, finally named as Sean Boyle, has gone back to his fence to try to get Peter’s wallet back. He tries to web the fence, and the fence uses the web to reel him in and choke him with it, demanding to know what his angle is. Oops! Back at the A plot, Spider-Man… runs out of web fluid. He’s surprised because he’s used to having 2 webshooters, and ok, sure, but… he is covered in spare cartridges most of the time. On his wrists, on his belt. He literally had 1 cartridge him? Come on. He hops onto a taxi and tells the driver it’s an emergency, and is soon more scared weaving through NYC traffic on top of the cab than he was on Jay Leno’s motorcycle. Remember that? What a weird time. He drives by Mount Sinai, which lets the scene switch to JJJ recovering inside.
All beef with creative directions and/or personnel aside, a Spider-Man comic with a large cast and actual subplots again is a welcome change from the “Peter, MJ, May and that’s it” model under JMS. Love those instantly dated pop culture references.
Why “I AM the Editor in Chief here?” Why the accent on that word? Odd.
I just like Spider-Man being cool with Jamaal there. That interaction could’ve been a lot cringier in a past era. Negative’s goons rush in, loudly playing the goon to distract from the situation, as Spidey tries and fails to convince people they’re in real danger. He fights the goons until his Spider Sense points him to the device. He has 6 seconds to get rid of it, and rigs up some bungee cords as a catapult, just like on the cover. He’s able to launch the bomb up to the top of the tent, which finally gets people to start evacuating. While blaming him for everything, of course.
They’re certainly pulling out all the stops to make Mr. Negative a serious new villain. I wonder how long he’s around. I haven’t seen him in the last several years (In comics). But it’s a good bit, a unique threat to Spider-Man, and also I like the Maggia debt thing. I wonder how that goes. We cut to Carlie Cooper in the Medical Examiner’s Office, being asked to work on a guy they fished out of the river. And she finds a Spider Tracer in his mouth. That seems like a problem!
Surprised they revealed that so soon. I know it from being on the internet over the last several decades, but you’d think they’d hold that for awhile. So now they’ve set up Martin Li as a sort of Norman Osborn for their new thing. Cutting back to our guy, his Spider Sense suddenly alerts him to a tracer, which means his Spider-Mugger is nearby. He finds him dead in an alley, still wearing his webshooter, but he arrives just too late to see the fence driving off.
What an incredibly standard pre-2000s ending. Hard to argue with people who found this regressive. But, they had also broken Spider-Man so bad, intentionally, that they had to do some kind of reset. And I do like the expanded cast. Pluses and minuses. By my count, this is the 4th reboot of Spider-Man. You had Ben Reilly taking over, Peter coming back, the official numbered reboot in ’99, and now this. This one had a lot in common with the Ben Reilly reboot. Having to establish stakes, a broke Peter who can’t do much, introducing new friends & villains while trying for a deliberate “old school” feel. It reminds me a lot of a more recent reboot, as well. But… you know. One thing at a time. If you can get past the Mephisto of it all (I simply can’t), it was fine. Not the best, surely not the worst Spider-Man ever. And they’re off. We can assume one of the “Brain Trust” writes the next arc, but I don’t even know who draws next issue. The art teams from this era got no media attention except for McNiven and the returning Romita later. No respect.