It’s my birthday. This is a rotten gift. We get through all 3 issues with no creative changes. Amazing. Spectacular. The bare minimum in ages past, but not now. We open on a retcon of last issue’s abrupt final page.
Sara takes her daughter to the Baxter Building, telling them her ID’s been compromised and she doesn’t know where her kid would be safe. Then she runs off to get revenge, refusing offers of assistance from Marvel’s First Family, who also offer to call DD or Spider-Man. Which is stupid, but your Jackpot comic can’t have other heroes saving the day, I suppose. Or can it? After a montage of her beating her way through the underworld looking for Boomerang’s boss…
Even these weirdly colored gutters feel very 90s.
So, our depressed heroes swing off to mete out justice, and Spider-Man worries aloud whether Jackpot will kill the Rose, and she says she honestly doesn’t know. They go over to the Rose’s place and start bustin’ it up, but don’t find him. Instead, they get attacked by… the Armadillo.
Of all people.
Jackpot manages not to fall to her death, but lands conveniently surrounded by goons apparently mind controlled by the Rose. Using the Ebony drug? Her theory is it lets him control people? What sense does that make? Then Spider-Man swings down to her rescue. Spidey is bantering up a storm to this woman whose whole world has been shattered, like a real jerk.
This sequence is so confusing I feel the need to run all of it.
Does he have a neck wound? Did she stick her fingers in it? I really don’t know what’s going on. I thought she sliced his chest open back at her house. Shouldn’t he have gone to a doctor?
Now she has a boomerang out of nowhere. Did she cut his throat with it? How many non-fatal throat injuries can one 3-issue miniseries have? Spidey gives her the usual “if you kill him you’ll be a bad person, too, think of your daughter”-type speech, and she I guess doesn’t kill him. It’s pretty vague, again. Then she just walks away. “Later,” at the Rose’s penthouse, the cops have somehow called Sara in (Is that part of being registered, they can just do that?). The Rose says he’ll only talk to her. Also they say Spider-Man really beat him up. Rose says Boomy told him she was sloppy and inexperienced, but that wasn’t anything he didn’t already know.
Oy vey. Are you serious right now, Guggenheim? Are you for real? And editor was like, “Yep, it’s her old boss, that’s fine, that’s not a rage-inducing coincidence or anything.”
I don’t really know how Melo has managed to make her drawings of this guy look like the face of an action figure, plastic and immobile, or why she would do so, but she keeps doing it.
I’m glad this is over. What a terrible book. Jackpot apparently has appearances in 3 upcoming Web of Spider-Mans. Presuming she survives, she is simply not heard from evermore after that. Not a big loss. What a strange comic. Stay tuned for more side quests tomorrow!