Very strange cover. Takes a second to make sense. Our tale begins 4 days ago in New Jersey, where a hapless motorist is attacked by that lizard (Not The Lizard) from last issue. Then we jump to today…
Good grief, look at those background people. Why’s everyone so mad? Why is there a Dark Iron Dwarf in the airport? Is that Aunt May? Goodness.
Curt doesn’t seem to be in a very good place these days. Alone in his house, he flashes back to his origins. How he lost his arm in the war. How he’d been a surgeon before, but had to become a scientist (Ah, ok, that gives some explanation for why he was the one helping Peter). How he turned himself into The Lizard. And then, some very special guests…
Sal draws and inks this one page solo, featuring obvious cameos by Sal and his family. That’s fun. Back in the present, it’s 10:30pm and Billy’s not home yet. Curt is brooding about how the world is scary while watching news of the sentinels invading New York. He thinks about how he wants the best for his son, but the future seems uncertain.
“I saw a great deal of myself in his unnervingly small face”
Aldo injected their serum into a discarded piece of The Lizard’s tail (Where’d they get that?) and it grew into this new lizard creature. An even more monstrous Lizard with no trace of Connors in it. So, that was a smart idea. Great show, Aldo. We flashback to earlier today, and the aftermath of a lizard incident in Georgia, and then Ben Reilly finally appears in this book, guessing the lizard creature’s destination and rushing off to fly to Florida to help The Connors.
Not a good evening in the Connors house. Curt & Billy run for a shed in the yard, locking themselves in. Luckily, the one page of Ben we saw earlier must’ve happened during the Georgia flashback, because…
Aaaalrighty. Apparently, this lizard was created under duress by editorial mandate in comics I don’t have, and now that that editor is gone, the chance was taken to retcon it away and bring back the original. No arguments here.
This issue is the dubious farewell to Spider-Man for Sal Buscema. I’m not the biggest fan, but Sal put in so many years on this character. Yeah, his style had really been out of fashion for like a decade already, at this point, and yeah, he was obviously losing some steps, but to shuffle him out of the way in this odd issue without so much as a “thank you” in the letter column is crazy. He only missed 1 issue of TAC between 134 and 238 and the 2 issues of “Spectacular Scarlet Spider” that took its place for 2 months. 105 issues with one fill-in! That’s pretty incredible. And that’s not even taking into account all his other Spidey work. 18 of the first 20 issues of TAC, plus a few strays before his 2nd run. Inking 2 issues of Romita when ASM was still in the 90s. Over 40 of MTU’s 150 issues, random issues of ASM and WEB throughout the years. Once he got going, he was never away from Spider-Man for long. And this is how he goes out. Doing breakdowns for a finisher who’s not ready on a weird and inconsequential issue in the middle of a storyline. A guy like Sal would be given a proper send off with a big marketing push behind it when he left today. I believe this is his last comic as a penciler. He’s continued to get inking work at both Marvel & DC all the way into the 2010s (Including a stint inking noted Sal Buscema impersonator Ron Frenz on Spider-Girl, which must have been a bit strange). But this is it for his pencils. The end of an era. And his replacement? Well, you see up there. It ain’t good news.