You know what, gang, maybe we don’t want MJ back. What in the world is going on with this cover? “Hi, I’m the demonic entity that has possessed Mary Jane, how are you?” Is she supposed to look sinister and menacing? I get the feeling she isn’t, but jeez. “MJ is back, and she’s here to eat people!” Tangent city and the comic hasn’t even started yet. Well, another month, another art team, but at least Fred Van Lente hung in there, I guess. I find it very weird that this story seems so hogpodged together. Even more so than the previous one. This issue’s line art contestants are Robert Atkins and Victor Olazaba, with Jeromy Cox hanging in there on colors, also.
Our premise here as that Peter Parker keeps his high school yearbooks with him at all times? Come on, son. Those burned in Aunt May’s attic. Or, you know, magically reappeared when the house did. A guy who’s used to having no money isn’t carting around a bunch of dead weight possessions, especially if he has a place to leave them. Even funnier on the next page:
“There’s no details about this man in this room, except the yearbooks, for some reason.”
Oy vey. While I am usually loathe to run a bunch of consecutive pages, I feel like these have to go:
Ouch. It’s a good thing Peter died last issue, he’d have a hard time fixing this one. No memory of her at all, eh Chameleon? You’d think you’d remember someone who beat you unconscious with a bat. While you were wearing this exact same face. What must have been “a few months ago,” Marvel time. Also, must MJ always wear her debut outfit? Come on, Robert. Well, just then, a crazed fan interrupts their conversation, and “Peter” takes him into a nearby alley and pistol whips him til he promises to forget MJ’s name. He comes back in, and MJ says she doesn’t want to fight, just to help Harry. Chameleon says he’s on it. Next, we’ve off to Peter’s secret meeting, where Chameleon makes fun of Flash for being in a wheelchair. Again, really lucky Peter is dead.
After this meeting, JJJ is mad that Flash didn’t look happy, and wants to take his job away, which Glory obviously advises against, and also he calls her an idiot. I do not like Fred Van Lente’s JJJ at all! Also, he’s gotten his Spider-Slayer from ASM 25 out of storage, because of course he has. These guys gotta learn to declutter. Chameleon checks in with the Pakistani colonel who’s funding this, having found the location of the secret headquarters and left a tracker in there. There’s some verbal sparring between the two, and then Chammy has the colonel look behind a picture in his office and find a mask of his own face. this is not a good story.
He goes to the cemetery to see the graves of Richard, Mary and Ben Parker, now all one giant tombstone with an empty space for May, despite never looking that way before, and, presumably, again. Why is he here? He narrates that he looked up Uncle Ben’s murder in the DB archives, but why was he there? He just thinks about how MJ knew Peter better than she thinks, and now he knows what he needs to do. Why… did he come to the cemetery? A cop chases him off because it’s about to close.
What is it about Chameleon that makes writers just make up a new character so often? Is it because his whole thing is disguises? Would the sniveling Russian scared of his dead brother DeMatteis wrote know a Jackie Robinson quote? Seems unlikely. But, again, this is the era of “who cares?”
Oh, it’s you! We thought you were really dead this time! His injuries look pretty superficial for the amount of acid all over the floor. That other guy was bones in seconds. Well, we’ll see how all this shakes out next time… This sure hasn’t made me regret not buying the other 3 parts of this story at the time…