That cover looks like trouble. As Morlun approaches the nuclear plant, Peter is doing serious science business for his life inside.
Morlun comes smashing through a wall and finds Spider-Man crumpled on the floor. He says the energies he’ll take from him will sustain him for at least 100 years. And then he grabs him by the head and does his thing.
(Spidey calling himself “first cousin to the atom” after the X-Men have been called “Children of the Atom” all these years is really fun) Our man says he always wondered if he could take another dose of radiation, but never had occasion to try until now. And as he wails on Morlun, every hit steals energy from him instead of feeding him. Spidey asks how he likes being attacked by an implacable foe as he beats him into the ground. Morlun begins to weaken, and Spidey doesn’t let up, thinking this is justice for all the people he’s hurt and killed, including Ezekiel.
Naturally, at that very moment, people start trying to break into the room, and Spidey and Dex flee in different directions. Peter thinks he’ll never know if he would’ve gone through with killing Morlun, and it will haunt him, even as he hunts down Dex. He doesn’t say anything, and Dex just says Morlun hurt him a lot. Spider-Man tells him to leave and never come back. Spider-Man finally finds himself on a roof, adrenaline gone, just hoping against hope that nothing like this ever happens again. When he’s collected himself, he goes to Ezekiel’s building to tell them what happened, only to find it cleaned out, empty. He wonders if Ezekiel is still alive.
As he has been prone to do in situations like this over the years, battered tho he is, Spider-Man goes bouncing around the city, filled with joy at having survived his ordeal, and for Ezekiel seemingly having done the same.
I just think about all the stories where people have tried to take Spider-Man to the brink to prove how he never gives up or whatever… McFarlane’s Torment, 90% of DeMatteis’ entire Spider-Catalog, things like that… none of them worked as well as this. None of them made the threat seem so dire, none of them let Peter use his brilliant scientific mind to win, and all of them were so focused on seeming “dark” and “mature” that they forgot to be good Spider-Man comics. JMS, Romita and Co. really nailed it. But wait, there’s 2 more pages here…
It was kinda dumb to put this on the cover. But hey! That’s one heck of a last page. What’s gonna happen now? Well, weird as it may seem, I’m gonna go check in on PPSM first. I know that would seem counterintuitive to anyone who doesn’t know what ASM 36 is, but this story is getting interrupted regardless. Loathe as I now am to revisit the Buckingham Recycling Center, I might as well.