You’d think Spider-Man would be higher on the titular list. I, of course, was not buying ASM in this period, or Spider-Man in general outside of USM, but if you were gonna try to get me to buy a Spider-Man product, Dan Slott and Adam Kubert were not gonna do it. Rounding out the team are the ubiquitous Mark Morales and Dean White. We open on a 2-page spread of Spider-Man explaining that Norman Osborn is in charge and this is bad, in case you haven’t seen a Marvel comic in a while, and inevitably blaming himself for same, and then he goes to work.
Six months not doing this was a great way to not have to think about Norah Winters.
Is this entire comic going to be 2-page spreads? This is annoying. so that download percentage was Spider-Man stealing Osborn’s files or whatever, finishing just as Osborn and Hand enter the room. Spider-Man goes smashing out a window, and Osborn somehow goes smashing after him, despite the window already being broken. They battle through the skies above the busy streets, Spider-Man stopping to save people endangered by Osborn’s reckless blasting, and being yelled at for it by big Osborn fans. Then Osborn zaps Spidey with Iron Man’s uni-beam.
Kubert gets Spider-Man getting shot a 2-page splash, which is pretty self-indulgent. Obsorn soon has our man by the neck, helpfully expositing that he’s set his uni-beam to a magnetic frequency to both kill Spider-Man and wipe his flash drive. But, as Spidey has inexplicably intuited, the uni-beam being a star shape instead of all the shapes Iron Man made it over the years has weakened the housing, and it backfires into Norman’s suit. Uh… ok. Spidey then flees, taking off his suit and leaving it in an alley (???) to blend in with the crowd. What, in his underwear?? Obsorn ponders this a moment, then notices a nearby Cyber Cafe (Were we ever so young?), and reasons Spider-Man has gone in there to upload the contents of his thumb drive. Which, if he has, would make him the dumbest guy in the world, and this is a Dan Slott comic, sooooooooooooooo
So he took off his union suit, and Osborn no longer knows what he looks like, and he’s still Spider-Man, he can skulk and sneak around with the best of them, getting clear of the scene and using the data he stole at his leisure, but he instead decided… to do this. How very 1970s Spider-Man. And despite knowing Spider-Man took the drive and Spider-Man brought it in here, Osborn doesn’t even consider that Peter could be Spider-Man upon finding him here. What a dope.
Another dumb adventure that ends with more or less the status quo, that’s Dark Reign! The rest of this issue, perplexingly, is The Pulse #5. I guess they wanted to give you more context on the history between Spider-Man, Ben Urich and Norman? Odd. At least it wasn’t 17 pages of ads, though. Well, this was the last page of “The List,” and everyone’s still standing except the Punisher. Mission accomplished? That’s Dark Reign! But not for much longer. We got a couple of annuals and a one-shot to get through, and then this nonsense hits the beginning of the end.