At last! I like how that caption reads more like it’s the cover of a tabloid. “This issue tells all!” It’s still Gerry Conway. Sal Buscema and Bob Sharen bringing us TAC. Two out of 3 Spidey titles having pencilers who ink their own work is extremely unusual, but that’s how it is right now. It’s a rainy night in New York and we’re told after Peter Parker got an urgent phone call from Joe Robertson, Spider-Man is swinging toward Robbie’s office in The Daily Bugle when somebody shoots at him!
Spidey knocks the goon out and does the ol’ dangle ‘em off the roof for info bit, and learns this guy was “blind hired” to shoot Robbie, and is told where the deal went down. With that, he continues to Joe’s office, but finds he’s not there. He’s left a tape recorder and a note for Peter (Showing up as Spider-Man seems like a bad idea, but lucky for Peter, it worked out).
Gasp! But before he can hear anymore, JJJ and Kate Cushing are about to walk in, so Spidey takes off with the recorder before they can hear it. Kate is worried that Robbie’s been preoccupied, and JJJ says if she’s worried, then he is, too. Meanwhile, in The Kingpin’s tower, Tombstone is beating up Roland Rayburn. He was dragged into Kingpin’s clutches in 138, but that was a long time ago on the blog. Rayburn has the mutant power of persuasion, and Kingpin wants it for his own. Rayburn, though, doesn’t believe he’s a mutant, and doesn’t like being beat up.
Suddenly, Tombstone gets a phone call from Joe Robertson, asking him to meet at Battery Park in an hour. Tomby obliges, leaving The Arranger to tell Rayburn he’s going to cooperate one way or another as a nurse comes in to drug him up. Spider-Man, meanwhile, hasn’t even waited to get home to finish the tape, playing it as he swings in the rain, listening to Joe tell him about being the editor of the school paper in high school, already pulling late nights at a paper with Lonnie Lincoln, whom the kids called “Tombstone,” accosted him one night.
As we’ve seen elsewhere, Sal Buscema only knows how to draw someone throwing a punch like it’s a Hulk Vs. Thing fight, so this teenage dirtbag whupping another teenager looks like the end of the world. I’m not so sure about this one. Robbie was writing a hardhitting expose about one of his classmates making his other classmates pay protection money? I feel like just, ya know, telling the principle would’ve been a better direction. But now Robbie was beaten into submission, and spiked the article. Tombstone told him to keep up the good work, and Robbie promised himself he’d never retreat on a story again.
Naturally, Robbie’s informant was dead. Naturally, Robbie found his corpse with the hand of none other than Tombstone still wrapped around his neck. Robbie ran for his life, but when he got home, Tombstone called to tell him to keep up the good work.
But now Tombstone is in New York, working for The Kingpin, and Robbie recaps how he’s seen Tombstone twice now, and how he’s been in a panic ever since. But he’s slowly been working up his nerve, too, and he ends his recording by saying tonight it ends. Uh-oh. Spider-Man bursts into The Arranger’s office in Kingpin’s tower (as he does so often) demanding to know where Tombstone is. After asserting that Tombstone doesn’t work for The Kingpin, Arranger tells Spidey about the Battery Park meeting, which is just getting underway.
Oh, no! Come back next time to see how bad things can get.