So! Spider-Man has literally been shot down and is lying on the pavement in a pool of his own blood. Not your typical Spidey cliffhanger. The cops move in and cuff him, screaming his Miranda rights at him.




Whew! What a sequence! A superhero thing… an action thing of any kind wherein the hero doesn’t magically just shrug off being shot is so rare it’s somehow revolutionary even though, you know, REALITY. Spider-Man hides in a dumpster, in shock, with no idea what he’s going to do. And then we switch our scene to the bedroom of Mary Jane, who is writing in here diary that she had nightmares about “the bridge incident” every single night, and feels like she can’t go to therapy because of Peter. Being a superhero’s teenage girlfriend isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as it turns out. Then May calls, wanting to know where Peter is, and MJ does whole bit of talking to him “in the bathroom” and saying she’ll send him home. She thinks she should be an actress.



Soon, we see that MJ, smart cookie that she is, has gotten Peter into normal clothes and convinced him to walk into the hospital and pass out as a John Doe. this works, and he’s rushed into the ER as a terrified MJ claims he’s not with her and is ignored by hospital staff.


In the waiting area, MJ is sitting next to an older lady, who sees the Spider-Man suit in her bag, but then the cops and doctor come busting into the waiting area telling staff to lock everything down. The guy from the lobby remembers her, and chases her out the front door, but then she, too, disappears.

Cut to May’s house, where she’s fallen asleep waiting up for Peter. The TV wakes her, and she creeps upstairs to find him sleeping soundly. Satisfied, she goes to bed, and then Peter pops up, not sleeping soundly at all, just acting. Sometimes, the ol’ Parker luck swings the other way.

In 2002, the name “Bullit” sounded a bit odd to me, but didn’t really mean anything. Having now read all of ASM, you really know what kind of cop to expect from the name alone. Context!
