3-D Live Action Scarlet Spider Holodisk! The 90s!! What a silly gimmick. If you hold the book at the right angle and rotate it, you see The Scarlet Spider stand up out of a crouch. Worth the extra money! This is an extra-size anniversary issue because it’s 125, and that means TAC will do the same thing this month for 225. Anything to get more money out of you, gentle reader. It’s funny, all this predatory marketing almost killed the whole comics industry and left Marvel bankrupt, and yet they’ve ramped back up to the same stuff in recent years. Oversized, over priced comics with shiny covers and incentives as often as possible. They published a single issue of Amazing Spider-Man that cost $10 a couple years ago. No one ever learns anything, I swear. Anyway, this cover doesn’t bode well, but you know it’s a fake out, also, so who really cares? We begin with Peter, still in the Scarlet Spider suit, in The Daily Bugle morgue trying to research Miles Warren. Why he thinks he could possibly learn anything of value about Warren’s 5-year plan to turn himself into a monster here, I couldn’t say.
Love that gibberish text. A shadowy figure enters the room looking for his uncle, but Peter’s already gone. Meanwhile, in prison, Ben Reilly does his usual self-hate thing, thinking about how he’s “right back where he belongs, on the outside looking in.” Blah. Back to Peter, who’s made it to a New Jersey suburb to investigate a “Professor Warren Miles” who looked jus like Miles Warren in that article. The seemingly innocuous house quickly reveals an improbably complex security system, but the inside looks like old people live there. And then someone sets off his Spider Sense.
Now, as we know, Gerry Conway worked super hard to reveal there were never any actual clones. Instead, there was something even sillier, a “genetic virus” that could turn people into other people. How that is somehow more acceptable that clones is beyond me. We saw Gwen Stacy’s clone restored to the regular lady the virus hijacked, and that was that. And now here’s Gwen again. They stare each other down, and Peter pulls his mask off, but Gwen swings her broom at him and then a zap from behind takes him down. It’s Miles Warren, the old version, not the 3rd rate Joker version, who tells Gwen to pack the car because they have to leave. She says Peter’s the man from her nightmares, but we cut away before she can expand on that.
So the premise in our previous post was that Trainer initially forgot to check for radiation while testing MJ for side effects from the radiation in her husband’s blood, which is why she wanted to be tested in the first place. Check, Crystal clear.
Weird to see these 2 on such good terms again. But, also weird that they were on such bad terms when they got along ok prior to Michelinie’s run. That’s comics for ya. Back in the suburbs, Peter wakes up to find himself alone in the house, and starts thinking about how Gwen died in his arms and that can’t be her. Sheesh, what a dumby. Warren & Gwen are in a very badly drawn station wagon fleeing the scene, Warren saying she knows how dangerous Parker is. Warren flashes back to the real Miles Warren’s backstory, having a wife and kids who died in an accident, which allowed him to be the creepy old weirdo who fixated on Gwen.
WHY is there a tracer on the car???? HOW??? That’s insane. Peter approached the house from the roof, then went in a window, and they were gone before he woke up. Terrible! And so is this retcon of the retcon. Even the telling of it is terrible, Gwen jumping from a warped version of the late 60s comics to the late 80s with no mention of the gap. Peter finds that clone Gwen doesn’t know she’s a clone because clone Warren never told her, and “Warren” was working on a cure for clone degeneration, but it stalled out. He follows their car, but someone else follows him.
How was he there!? This comic is awful. So is this version of The Green Goblin. We’ll be seeing a lot of him in the immediate future. Spidey is catching up with the car when Warren sees him and start driving crazy, causing a car accident Peter has to stop to help. As Peter stops to help the other cars, The Green Goblin whooshes by over head to continue the chase. Guess where they’re going. Just guess. It’s the George Washington Bridge, of course! Where else would they go? But Warren’s insane driving finally catches up to the and the crazy, and then not-Gwen is yoinked out of the car.
SSssssiiiiiggghhhhhh.
For the 2nd time in 8 issues, someone in The Scarlet Spider suit saves a woman from falling off the GWB like Gwen did without killing her. Friggin’… great. He swings her to safety, but meanwhile, Warren’s car falls off the bridge with him standing on the hood.
A brief appearance in a previous block already had me talk about who this Green Goblin is, but the next issue of TAC will tell us all about it, as I recall. The rest of the issue is a flashback to “Gwen and “Miles”’s domestic bliss, from a plot by Kavanagh, script by Mike Lackey, pencils by Tod Smith & colors by Nel Yomtov. Not-Gwen had gone to some old Stacy family home and seen Peter’s Webs book, and it made her freak out and faint. Not-Miles came and found her, burned the book and took care of her.
So we’re to believe The Jackal made a bunch of people to facilitate this wedding, all from his pod he never came out of for 5 years. Sure, man! Why not? Terrible comic. And it cost more than twice the price of a regular issue. Teenage me was fleeced. But it was my fault for being stupid enough to buy this stuff, I guess.