Such awkward poses. Inside, the docs can’t get a heartbeat back for Sue, and she flashes back to…
Then she snaps back to life on the operating table, but not conscious and out of control, using her powers at random to cause even more trouble than Johnny already did last issue.
Sounds bad! Meanwhile, Doc Ock is explaining to the Roxxon gang how he created Spider-Woman in a lab, and she’s his greatest achievement. He seems to have decided she’s somehow responsible for the attacks on Roxxon as a personal insult to him. Which is… really hard to imagine, especially since she obviously didn’t even know he was there, but he’s a little insane, so you know.
About time he showed up.
High quality Spidey banter. Bendis has such a gift for it. Jessica starts beating the hell out of Doc Ock as Spider-Man wraps up Hulk Lite. He stops her from killing him and says they need to get out of there.
Yikes! Back at the Triskelion, Sue has Fury bring up his secret copies of Reed’s files that Carol didn’t even know about, and confirms her fear that he’s discovered all kinds of alternate dimensions. Jonny can’t believe Reed has gone bad, while Sue says they should’ve seen it sooner. Then she yells that she needs Captain Marvel’s blood & urine. Doc Ock wanted some of Jessica’s blood & urine earlier, man, what’s with these science people?
The stakes are getting pretty high as we hit the middle of the 3rd act of this story. Things are really out of control. Who knows what’ll happen next? I mean, I do, but you know. The rest of this issue is an extended ad for one of Marvel’s more ridiculous gimmicks, the “.1” era. Starting around this time, they decided the best way to let people know when to start reading a title is to stick a “.1” on the number. So you get Iron Man 500, Iron Man 500.1, and Iron Man 501. They even had the nerve to say this would help new readers know where to start. If I was new to comics, I would certainly think Iron Man 500.1 was where to go! And the promise was that these issues would be the big, important kick off of the next year of story for each character, but almost immediately, .1s started coming out that were inconsequential, some not even touched by the series’ regular creative team, or even just the writer. This started with a Thor issue that was obviously just a fill-in, a one-off story by no one related to the title interrupting a cliffhanger between the last 2 parts of an arc by the regular team of Matt Fraction and Pasqual Ferry. The perfect starting point for new readers! Imagine if you were one of those hypothetical new readers, and you bought that comic, and were somehow convinced to buy the next one. No clue what’s happening. Good stuff. It would only get worse as the “.1” thing got applied in sillier and sillier ways, and then the most confusing thing is… well, something we’ll cover here one day, I suppose. You know, that’s not it, it gets worse than what I was thinking of, and that is also something we’ll see here one day if I get that far. Lucky me! Thankfully, this silly practice seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur as I wtire this. For now!