This month, we open on a high speed chase, already in progress. Pretty traditional Spider-Man stuff. A heavily tattooed skinhead-y guy has a woman at gunpoint in the car, and is yelling at the cops that he’ll kill her if they don’t back off. They hear him, somehow.
If you play Sony’s Spider-Man game from several years ago, your Spider-Man will frequently have to stop guys fleeing in cars. He does this by webbing each guy out of the car, and then he he either jumps in front of the car and forces it to stop by webbing 2 nearby buildings and holding, finds the car rolling over due to him whipping the driver out the window and having to jump off and catch it, or webbing onto the back and planting his feet, skidding down the street until the car stops. I probably did one of these 3 things like 100 times. And every time I thought “Does Spider-Man just not know how cars work? Why doesn’t he get in and hit the brake!?” All of which is to say, I really appreciated this page. Spidey then returns to the guy, saying he’s late for work and has to keep this short, and then we see the cops finding the guy webbed in an alley. Let’s see Peter at his new job:
I think this blog stands as pretty significant evidence that I love John Romita, Jr., but I’ma keep it real with you, chief: Not so good at drawing young people. How old are these kids? This class seems to be comprised of children ranging from 8 to 15.
Kind of shades of back when Puma was helping Peter whether he liked it or not.
I’m kinda fascinated by digital color. I’m very bad at it, so I tend to study it. Why is the first of the 3 bottom panels more red than the others? Well, anyway, that didn’t work, and Ezekiel was just messing with him. But he goes on to explain that Peter “bridges the gap between spider and man.” That there have been totemic powers going back all through history, and that people have always put on masks and told stories to bring themselves closer to the great powers that once walked the Earth.
Pointing out how many of Spider-Man’s villains are animal-based as part of this totem thing was received as very clever in 2001. I mean, it was only a few months ago that Mysterio Manifesto had DD imagining fight 4 of his animal-themed enemies in a perfect work, and at the same time, fighting Owl and Copperhead in DD/SM, and he’s not animal-themed, but whatever. You can’t think about it too much.
I’m running this page mostly because, back in the day, I was getting into iron-on transfer t-shirts, and put that top Spider-Man on one. It looked pretty good! We see flashes of Ezekiel entering that temple and being part of some very bloody ritual as his narration glosses over the “how.” Not a very trustworthy character, this one.
Straczynski has no idea what someone will do with that word, “Inheritors,” much later. Well, Big E says only a few of these hunters still walk the Earth, feeding on lesser sources, but sometimes, they have to go back to the source. And one of them, Morlun, has targeted Spider-Man. When asked why, Ezekiel says it’s because he put the source of his powers right on his chest, and this wasn’t very smart. Peter demands to know what Ezekiel has done with his powers since he’s so critical of what Peter’s done with his, and as we see Ezekiel very generously overtipping his server and a taxi driver, he takes Peter to his building from last issue. A very short tour of the facilities lets us know they’re a major player in the global economy without really telling us what they do. Ezekiel says he was able to use his abilities to build this fortune, and he’s surprised Peter never did the same. One short origin flashback later, he says he tried once, but it didn’t work out. But he did learn that with great power there must also come great responsibility.
The thing about digital coloring, the tension point, is it’s not just color. Look at Peter’s face in the first panel there. It’s modeling. Kemp is adding muscle and definition Romita didn’t choose to render, presumably without his approval. I find this kind of disturbing, and it only gets more widespread, drastic, and normalized as we go forward. For all that modern color looks amazing, the line artist reality has no idea what his published page is going to look like. A lot of guys are getting out in front of this by doing everything in gray tones, deciding where the definition is themselves. It’s a very strange place to be.
Next page, Morlun tells Dex he’s ready. Then Peter Parker sees a terrible fire on TV, and Spider-Man rushes out to help. He saves a lady from a burning building just before his danger sense gives him another mega blast, and then he gets socked in the jaw.
Uh-oh! Looks like trouble’s here. As with USM, it takes awhile for the fightin’ to start, but as a result, when it does, the stakes are high. That’s the new philosophy of writing at Marvel.