Molten Man. Granted, “Molten Man” being a shiny metal guy never made a lot of sense… We’ll recall Gerry Conway trying to make him a little more molten in the 70s… But there’s already a Spider-Man villain with shiny metal skin. Well, we open on the aftermath of Charlie’s supervillain origin, as fire crews rush to put out his lab. Peter narrates, saying he wasn’t there, but he put together what happened later…
Well, it’s the next morning and there’s some gratuitous MJ getting dressed as Peter eats cereal (JMS has a thing) and the TV mentions an explosion last night. Once hears some details, Spider-Man is quickly out the window, calling in sick to work and on his way to see what happened. And then the flashbacks continue. I guess they’ll thread through all 4 issues.
You know, I went to high school in the 90s, so maybe I don’t know about the 60s, but like, these depictions of, like, the entire football team being single-mindedly focused on brutalizing a nerd seem pretty outlandish. This kinda thing didn’t happen at my school, at least. Well, anyway, they tortured him and all, and then one day he told Peter it wasn’t going to stop until something made it stop. Then one day, Charlie brought a pocket knife to school with the intention of slicing up his foes, but Peter bumped into him and made him drop it, then took the blame for it when faculty showed up, saying it was his uncle’s favorite knife and he brought it to sharpen in shop class. Uncle Ben was called to come get Peter, who got off with a warning due to being such a straight arrow, and when he explained the truth to Ben, he was proud.
The cops say it’s a manslaughter charge, and one of them is Nicholas Cage, for some reason. Spidey then takes off for home. He intuits that Charlie probably did this because he said he wouldn’t cover for him, and then there’s a knock at the door.
A flasher! In this day & age! This leads to a flashback of Charlie on the Parkers’ doorstep yelling the same thing, when the bullies were after him for slashing their tires. This includes the bullies being so determined to get Charlie they attacked Uncle Ben, AND Uncle Ben soundly thrashing them thanks to “Army basic training.” Very silly. Charlie said he didn’t slash the tires, and Ben asked him point blank.
More of a Moron Man than a Molten Man. This story’s not really doing anything for me. I mostly just keep thinking about how it’s only 4 issues. Disassembled was 4 issues, and so was the TAC tie-in, technically, since the first 2 issues were called a prologue. What’s up with this. 5 or 6 has been the generally agreed upon length of a story to better fit in a trade for awhile, at this point.