Doing something a little different this post. This is a multi-part Spider-Woman story, but Spider-Man only shows up on the last page of issue 28, so that didn’t seem like it should be its own post. Thus, we double up. At the helm, we have Michael Fleicher writing, Steve Leialoha drawing, Mike Esposito inking and Ed Hanningan coloring for issue 28, which looks like this:
That’s a weird cover, right? The big, pained dude face. Bold of them to try to get you to buy this for Spider-Man. Well, we enter mid-story, with Spider-Woman having been captured by The Enforcer, the guy on the cover, who I am not familiar with. She busted loose, as heroes do, but her good friend Scotty McDaniel is said to have shown up trying to save her, and we see The Enforcer shooting him with a poison dart on page one. In a reversal of the usual trope, this sends Spider-Woman into a rage, and she takes down everyone in the room in a single page.
“Talk’ to an avocado!” “Malignant sewer rat!” Some dialogue! Enforcer tells SW that his drug puts people in a trance, and if anyone comes close to him, “he’ll burst into flames,” which seems… complete insane… but it’s where we’re at. Enforcer says he’ll give her the antidote if she agrees to help him steal $10 million so he can retire. And she agrees, which is wild. And some guy is listening in on this conversation somehow. That guy runs a newspaper, and Enforcer stole a cane from him with a transmitter in it, so he can listen in, and he plans to use them to increase his paper’s circulation. This comic is insane. Oh, hey, this guy’s Rupert Dockery. From the bizarre resolution to the KJ Clayton subplot in ASM 210. Anywhere there’s something shady going on with a newspaper, he’s there, I guess. Anyway, we’re off to The Hollywood Bowl, where a very dubious Hundu spiritualist guy is inviting the attendees to give him all their possessions (Yike!) when our hero and villain appear to steal a giant gold statue. They’re filmed in their robbery by a TV crew, and police captain Alexander Walsh reading about it in the paper next day can’t believe Spider-Woman would go bad. He goes to see Dockery, who says he’ll tell him what “his sources” say is SW and Enforcer’s next target. Ok, sure. This is it:
A “priceless stamp collection.” Enforcer is almost caught by the cops, but Spider-Woman rescues him, and it’s all caught on camera. Walsh stops a cop from shooting SW as they make their escape. Dockery’s loving it as his sales go up, and Spider-Woman is really upset about the whole thing at Enforcer’s hideout, obviously.
And so, our hero can make a big entrance in SW 29. Behind that snazzy Romita, Jr. cover we started with, Ernie Chan, Frank Springer & Ben Sean swap in on art chores. The situation is recapped on the first couple pages, and then we find Peter Parker at JFK Airport, waiting to go get involved.
Because this comic is insane, Enforcer and Spider-Woman land that little plane on top of Peter’s plane to rob it. Apparently he’s somehow figured out the people on it have a lot of valuables? How does this line up with the mega-thefts of the previous issue? Anyway, the mythical “good guy with a gun” stand sup behind Peter’s seat (A guy with a gun on a plane!) and gets shot in the face for his efforts.
The way people talk in this series is truly bizarre. Spider-Woman zaps him with her sting, harder than she intended, and he falls to his death. Well, I mean, almost, but he makes a web parachute, don’t worry. We cut to Dockery, now rendered as a kind of chubby Nixon, being told they’ve gotten an award for excellence in journalism due to this series on Spider-Woman and the Enforcer (Why?) and a NBC news crew is waiting to get footage of how he runs such a successful paper. This is bananas. Dockery recaps his part in this, and then things get a little meta:
“This will make the cannibals stew in their own broth!” What does that even mean??? Ernie sticking himself in there is pretty funny. His Spider-Woman “satirical drawing” doesn’t look too funny, tho. Back at Enforcer’s hideout, Spider-Woman sees that she killed Spider-Man on TV and is inconsolable for just a second until Spider-Man comes crashing into the lair. Spidey quickly explains that swimming 11 miles gave him time to think about hoe Dockery could’ve had a camera crew on the plane (How did literally no one else think of that? How did that Walsh guy not think of it? I mean, duh), so he headed over to Dockery’s building and got there just in time to heard him recapping through the window about his transmitter a few pages ago! Comic book characters telling each other stuff they already know for the audience’s benefit has never been so helpful!
I may never get over the dialogue in these comics. Unreal. What a weird adventure. Scotty apparently turns into a villain or hero or something called The Hornet. I dunno. Looking around, it seems like a few issues after this, like any comic about a woman in this period, Spider-Woman gets turned over to Chris Claremont for awhile. He was pretty universally recognized as writing better female characters than basically all his male contemporaries (And predecessors), so this, Ms. Marvel, X-Men, anywhere with prominent women, you’ll find Chris. And then the final run of the book was by Ann Nocenti, an actual woman! But this book was cancelled with #50, and I do believe Spider-Woman died in it, even. For a bit. Nocenti only got 4 issues, but I’d be interested to read them. Maybe some day.