The thing about Richard Isanove that has driven me insane for 20+ years now is, you go up to him, you say, “Hey, Richard, what’s the most normal color a sky could be?” and he goes “MAGENTA. OBVIOUSLY.” This cover is completely on-brand for his body of work. He never met a sky he wouldn’t paint pink. I don’t understand. I’m amazed the run of USM covers from the previous block didn’t include a pink sky. But you know what he did do? UXM 34. FF 513. Here’s a small gallery of Isanove jobs with pink skies after 10 seconds with an image search:
Look at this. They gave him this classic Mike Zeck cover of Spider-Man digging out of his own grave… at night… and what did Richard think it was missing?
It’s insane. Has he ever been outside? Does he live on another planet? Where does the pink sky come from? Is this tangent to keep me from having to read this comic a little longer? Maybe. Well, at any rate, ol’ shiny dumb guy is still threatening to kill people if Peter doesn’t help him.
You can see most of one of Spider-Man’s buttcheeks up on that top leg, and some of the other on the bottom one. Spider-Man hasn’t had a caboose this gigantic since Todd McFarlane. If he were to suffer a classic “Spider-Man falling to his death” cliffhanger right now, he could just get into a sitting position and be fine when he hit the ground. I am really not engaged with this story at all. JSM and Jenkins have both spent all their goodwill and I am treating them as hostile, at this point. Also, while not traced directly or anything, I swear Deodato jacked every Spider-Man on this page except that weird face in panel 2 from 90s John Romita, Jr. Even the little ones. The next page…
…is an obvious reference to Spider-Man 2, complete with a Bruce Campbell cameo. That’s super weird. I did not remember that! Straczynski saw that movie and was like, “I love this scene, I wish I wrote it… maybe I can!” I guess?
Can MJ not have a little dignity? Like, ever? Sigh. Peter tells MJ that once she gets out of here, she should get May and go check into a hotel, because Charlie knows where they live. As he does so, Charlie is seen breaking into… somewhere. I don’t know. He puts a TV on (TVs are always there to help further the plot in these books!) just in time to see one of his bullies, all growed up, handsome, and married to a beautiful woman, natch, talking about how lame he was in school. He talks about how he tried to help Charlie, but some people don’t appreciate that, and then we flashback to said bully (Finally named, “Rich,” 3 issues into this) and said wife and the whole cheerleading squad teaming up to humiliate Charlie one time. This is some very unsubtle material. In the present, Charlie hallucinates (I guess?) them making fun of him through the TV as their high school selves, and notes they still live in Rich’s dad’s old house. Soooooo…
I’m pretty sure there’s already a villain called the Vibranium Man… Maybe I’m just thinking of Titanium Man. What’s this guy gonna be called? Maybe nothing, I guess. Well, he goes to the meet, where Spider-Man is waiting. He webs Charlie’s hat off (Charlie thinks it’s the wind) as an excuse to go down there. He’s intentionally causing a panic among a bunch of regular people?
I guess he is. What a hero!
Yeah, this canonically takes place after the Sins Past follow-up. The only time JMS has ever referenced the secondary Spider-Title during his run is when it’s his pet project. Typical. Deodato has no style. Every drawing of Spider-Man looks different, the mask eyes, the build, even the pattern of the webbing.
Charlie throws a car at our hero, and escapes while he’s preventing it from hurting anyone. Then they spend most of a page on a comedy bit of a woman coming to said car and it crumbling to bits when she unlocks it. But the rest of that page is Charlie rolling up to Aunt May’s house. How’d he get there so fast??
Hang on, hang on. Is… Is Deodato’s Peter Parker Jason Priestly? That top picture makes me think he might be. That’s nuts. Maybe I can decide next issue, as this dumb crap comes to its particularly dumb conclusion. I don’t remember much about this story, but I remember that much.