Ok, big finish. Big, stupid, finish. Cannot believe the point of this story was Spider-Man “evolving or dying” when that plot point didn’t come up until issue 11 of 12. Dreck! And the dreck continues for one more issue, starting with Tony talking about how he’s had to make sure Peter isn’t “an impersonator,” that it’s happened before. Is he talking about clones? Anyway, he thinks Peter is real.
His Spider-Man shirt is coming apart again already, so he remembers Leo Zelensky, the tailor to the superheroes he met… what feels like a lifetime ago, in ASM 502. And lo, there are comedy bits. But then there’s a boom, and the power goes out. Spider-Man, still out of his shirt, swings out to investigate.
That Spider-Man feels like one of Deodato’s reliable late 90s swipes, but I can’t be sure. And it’s basically impossible to tell what the rest of this page even is. The colors have turned an already poorly drawn pile of… whatever… to mud.
A bunch of people get out, but of course, someone’s daughter, who has asthma, is still trapped, so our man has to descend into the wreckage. And discovers he has night vision now. He flashes back to the spider-man he was debating with in his mind while cocooned telling him he’s got all kindza powers he doesn’t know about as he combs through the rubble. He finds a guy, but he’s looking for a young girl so he shoots a webline back where he came as a guide for the hapless dude, then feels a vibration through his web. So he makes a big spider web, gets in the middle of it, and can feel things through it, which is at least an actual spider ability, for once. This allows him to zero in on the girl screaming a rock against a wall.
Incorrect! At one point, it was canon that Spider-Man could make any part of his body stick. I think it was in one of those features in an annual when I was a kid. And that never made any sense to me, but it was printed!
Is this why he had to do this shirtless? So this useless hair power could be displayed for the first and almost certainly last time? Well, whatever, the building collapses, the mother despairs, Spider-Man appears with her daughter
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SPIDERS LADY!? Are you serious!!? She just ran off and never came back! What was the point of her!? This was genuinely some of the worst comics I’ve ever seen in my life!! Holy crap. What a disaster. The last page of this issue is an editorial page from Joe Quesada talking about how great this event was. Stop lyin, man, jeez. That stupid Tracer guy. Morlun able to feed on Spider-Man with no explanation. Morlun killed. Spider-Man dying and being reborn with new powers for a 2nd time in fifteen months. This random spiders lady showing up and running off. A trainwreck. And would you believe this unholy disaster is how Mike Deodato signs off on ASM? Can you imagine signing up for ASM to draw Sins Past and this garbage and then bounce? I can’t know what happened behind the scenes, but I woulda quit, too. Who follows Deodato on the Cadillac of superhero comics? We’ve got a few other things to look at before we find out. But first, there was one good thing to come out of this event. Really! It was Mike Weiringo’s crazy series of variant covers. All 12 issues of this dumb disaster were available in a variant cover by Mike showing Spidey in one of 12 different costumes. It’s the same image, same Spidey pose, different look each time. And they were very fun. And here they are now:
So, at least there was that. Spider-Ham! That one coming last was a great punchline. There’s actually a 13th one, too, but it was released later, and we’ll talk about it then. Meantime, we’ve suffered through this monstrosity, howzabout we look at a good comic?