This issue picks up the second the last one left off, with Peter understandably asking Eddie what the goo is. He says it’s what their fathers were working on, what would have been their life’s work. He says it’s the cure for cancer.
Doc Connors must be doing better since UMTU 10.
Trask, as in Bolivar Trask, who built the sentinels in the Marvel U and maybe in the Ultimate U, too? I don’t recall.
Peter asks the obvious question, how does Eddie have this? Their dads were apparently trying to prove they owned “the suit” by making their own. This was in a freezer in his grandpa’s house, and he only had it moved to ESu a few weeks ago. Connors says their dads were onto something, but they’re not sure if it really works. Peter wants to know whose DNa this version of “the suit” is made with. Guess what, it’s Richard’s. “A cure for cancer goes horribly wrong” is pretty standard mad science, but it being a goop that covers your body and makes you superstrong while doing it is… a stretch! Like why would the cure for cancer be an external layer of anything? Maybe if it was especially for skin cancer or something. It’s certainly more “grounded,” that most-dreaded word in 21st Century superhero media, than an alien, but is it really much more realistic?
Peak teen drama. Soon, at the mall, we see our trio hanging out near a table with Flash & Kong, with Eddie telling them frats are like being surrounded by 30 versions of Flash all day long. The he gets a call from Doc Connors, wanting to know why he was in the lab last night, and finding out it was with Richard Parker’s son. Gwen announces she’s not going to college, and Eddie says that’s too bad, because a reggae band is playing Friday night in the quad, which is, like, the most generic college sentence of all time. Gwen really wants to know, Peter doesn’t know what reggae is, and also, he has to work. So Eddie says he & Gwen can go, if she wants, which is totally not creepy. Then Peter asks if Eddie thinks their parents were murdered, derailing that conversation.
That night, Peter is going through his dad’s stuff, which still calls it “Venom Project” even as he watches a video Richard & Ed made for potential funding partners. Then he finds a video diary by his dad, lamenting how their work has been taken from them, how he just wanted to help people and it’s all over, and saying Uncle Ben was right, “Never trust anyone wearing a tie.” And after that, we find a furious Spider-Man swinging through the night, thinking he’s tired of evil rich people screwing over people who want to help, and that he’ll finish his dad’s work himself. He swings over the reggae concert Eddie & Gwen are at on his way. He easily breaks into the lab, disables the security cameras, and fines the key to the freezer.
I don’t even know if it’s intentional, but Peter with the goop going down his arm in panel 5 echoing Peter with the spider on his hand in USM 1 is cool.
And, we’re off. One thing I know now that I didn’t know when this was new is, no matter how this “black costume” story goes, it literally can’t be the continuity nightmare the 80s version was, and I am grateful.