Kind of a weird cover this month. That gentleman with the questionable fashion choices is The Foolkiller, but there will be more on that in a bit. The surer hand of Bob Wiacek swaps in on inks for this one, which opens with a couple of FBI guys lying in wait for the aforementioned Foolkiller. One of them thinks this is a bad idea, while the other is really gung ho…
Well, that was fast. The surviving g-man runs for it, lamenting that they weren’t even supposed to be working this case, when he, too, gets zapped, losing a hand and falling to the ground.
Grim stuff for such a silly looking baddie. Later that day, we catch up with Peter Parker as he’s working as a student teacher at Empire State University. As his lecture comes to an end, he’s approached by Greg Salinger, a guy he started running into in Roger Stern’s run on Spectacular Spider-Man.
Administrative intrigue in the Mighty Marvel Manner! Hours later, Peter’s headed home for the night, referencing how busy he’s been in issues of Spectacular and Marvel Team-Up I don’t have, when he sees a figure scaling one of the campus buildings. He starts changing into his Spidey suit as Foolkiller makes it into a window.
Most supervillains don’t have a gimmick that forces them to reply on the post office for their big moments. Spidey and FK tangle for a bit, until Foolkiller zaps the ceiling as Spidey was trying to jump onto it…
Well, you can see where this is going, right? It was becoming apparent in TAC that something weird was up with our man Greg, and now… there you go. Spidey goes after him, and finds him just running down the street, so he’s able to set up his camera before engaging. But when he swings down after him, FK just zaps the ground and falls in… right onto a passing subway train, having seemingly memorized the train schedule. A frustrated Spidey can’t do much else but leave. As for Foolkiller, he escapes to a semi-truck he’s been using as a hideout, and begins thinking about his background, so we can see it. He says he owes is mission to Rory Richardson, the original Foolkiller Ross Everbest, and The Man-Thing.
He goes on to say he escaped out of an ambulance and decided to study up on the great poets to learn the true nature of man, and that now he will just wait for fools to come to him and take care of them. Sure, ok. Kinda wonder what Stern was up to here. I looked up those previous appearances of Foolkiller, and they’re all by different writers, and all a few years prior to this. Then Stern started seeding Greg Salinger in TAC for several months, and now that he’s moved to ASM, here’s the payoff. But this doesn’t feel like the climax to a long-gestating storyline so much as just grabbing a few loose ends and tying them together. On the other hand, comics had pretty closely watched continuity in this era, and all these writers almost certainly knew each other, so maybe this is an idea that was thrown around behind-the-scenes and Roger just ran with it. I’ll probably never know. At any rate, Peter Parker drops by The Daily Bugle to drop off his photos of Spider-Man messing up last night. These days, JJJ is only buying pictures that make Spider-Man look bad from Pete’s rival, Lance Bannon.
Robbie cautions him not to stoop to JJJ’s level, but Spidey did mess up and Peter’s gotta eat, so Robbie buys the pictures. Spider-Man spends the rest of the afternoon looking for Foolkiller, but turns up nothing, so Peter Parker heads to work at ESU. But as he’s finishing up his quick change, his Spider Sense goes off…
Come on, Pete, you just put a death sentence on the mail room! But, lucky for them, Peter’s next stop is the long-suffering Deb Whitman, who is furious because Greg just called her a fool. And, suddenly, Peter puts it all together. He runs out, leaving poor Deb in the lurch as usual, to catch up with his most dangerous student. Sure enough, Foolkiller arrives at the campus mailroom to get revenge for his late letter, but…
Once again, having to fight in close quarters puts Spidey at a disadvantage, and FK endangers the mail staff with a collapsing bookshelf to escape while Spidey saves them. Retreating to his hideout, he decides he’ll have to kill Spider-Man now, but he’s got no time to think about it, as Spidey comes tearing through the wall of the truck.
Spidey webs up Foolkiller before he can kill himself, and as he regretfully unmasks his friend, he realizes the reason his Spider Sense only went off around Greg sometimes is because Greg really liked him, and being around someone he trusted made his murderous hate go away. Kind of an interesting twist on the Spider Sense, actually. Spidey carts Greg off to try to get him some help. Will he succeed? No. While he’s done being a threat in these pages, Greg Salinger would appear in other books, first in a psychiatric hospital serving as a mentor to a new Foolkiller, and much later as Foolkiller again himself in the pages of Deadpool.