After a page with the Two-In-One news people reminding us the election is coming, we’re back to the Statue of Liberty…
Prrrretty reasonable, Lily!
Ominous shadow! Is Harry Menace? Wouldn’t that be the least interesting choice? He’s done his Goblin bit. But they sure wanted you to think it was him. Meanwhile, across town, Vin has walked in on Carlie in his bedroom, having forgotten his locker key. Peter is still stuck to a wall in the bathroom. But before they can talk about the bag of tracers, Vin’s partner busts in the say Menace is attacking a Hollister rally. Peter overhears this, and briefly tries to talk himself out of going before going.
Can he be the killer? I don’t know who the Spider Tracer Killer is, but getting Vin out of this book would be great, thanks.
Still hard to accept our man is dying from that shoulder wound. 15-year old Ultimate Peter Parker shrugs off gunshot wounds easier than this. And, I mean, maybe he shouldn’t, but… he does! That last caption is JJJ on the news, doing his thing for those 2 anchors. They raise the point that it doesn’t have to be Spider-Man just because it’s his tracers, but JJJ is very angry in a Republican way about it. Which I just don’t like. He was definitely more conservative in the old days, always wanting to support the “law & order” candidates and such, but he’s never had a very well defined political agenda. Remember him marching against surveillance in ASM 106? Is that a guy who supports the Patriot Act? I prefer him being pro-JJJ rather than pro-Republican or Democrat. But it was the times in which we live, I guess.
Our hero manages to web up the collapsing scaffolding long enough for the people below to get away, and then basically passes out. I just… have seen him shrug off so much worse than this. It really seems like a lot. I guess it makes him more “grounded” for a shot in the shoulder to be so detrimental, it just flies in the face of decades of precedent.
So the Spider Tracer Killer is a bunch of people? Cops? That’s pretty good. But we cut away to Spider-Man trying to get out of the debris he got buried under, only for Menace to come back and declare his intent to kill our hero, and start working on it. Spidey tries to web his face, but…
Around this point, and for the rest of his career, Romita, Jr. gets really into panels where a punch just doesn’t have much energy? We saw 2 of them awhile back in this same issue, but that top panel, for example. It’s not like he can’t draw kinetic action, look at the rest of this page, but there’s this weird thing he does, and I don’t understand it. Well, Menace has our hero dead to rights, and about to be just dead, preparing to break his neck, and then for no obvious reason… does not. Tosses him on the ground. A cop rushes in, Menace says he’d like to make citizen’s arrest, and flies away laughing. So that was weird.
Our man has never looked so high tech getting arrested before! But wait:
Well. There you go. More on that next issue, one assumes.