This month we get rolling at the Tokyo Club, where management is getting ready to meet with Hammerhead, and then Elektra kicks in the door.
Looking pretty Elektra-y. Elsewhere, in Marc Spector’s mind, he, Steven Grant, and a little girl argue about what to do in their mission against the mob, and then Moon Knight shows up and says “it’s time,” which Marc Spector then says out loud in the real world…
Even more elsewhere, Jean De Wolfe and her trigger happy partner are putting the screws to Ox, who is about to turn over on Hammerhead. Ande ven more elsewhere, Peter Parker is eating lunch, daydreaming about Black Cat, when Mary Jane walks up to his table.
Next page is a pinup of Spider-Man. I’ve noticed Bags gets a nearly full page or full page splash of Spidey every issue this arc. I wonder if he asked for that for the collector’s market. Or if he just wanted a page to take a breather every issue, with this being the 4th issue released in 2 months. I don’t know. But, anyway, still a very rough time for Peter & MJ, and also, who on Earth thinks a teenager is wearing a Rolling Stones shirt in 2005? Anyway, because this is such a densely populated story, we’re off to check in on still more characters, as Shang-Chi and Iron Fist are smashing their way through Russian mobsters in Little Russia looking for a way to get to…
This book is almost an ensemble this arc, and it really works. Despite so many people running around, everything is focused on Kingpin and Hammerhead except the Peter/MJ plot, which is as it should be, and to a lesser extent, the Spider-Man/Black Cat plot. Like, Spider-Man’s giving up a whole lot of pages of his title to guest stars, but it doesn’t feel bad at all. That’s not always so easy to do, as we’ve seen in a whole lot of other books on this blog. To that point, Spider-Man has just arrived at the address Fist just scared out of that mobster, which is what Kingpin gave him, and he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t want to do Kingpin’s bidding, but he doesn’t want Hammerhead shooting up the city, either. He watches Hammerhead arrive home as he broods, and then some familiar hands cover his eyes from behind.
Crazy… crazy how on-brand this read of Felicia is. Having come in during McFarlane and watched her do the whole “dating Flash as revenge” to “dating Flash for real” to “staunch ally of Spider-Man and even friend of Mary Jane” character arc, finding out how insane and terrible a character she was in the 80s was a real shock, and this is a pretty perfect distillation of that character. Anyway:
Hammy protesting that they never did this to Fisk is legit funny. Well! The gang’s all here. Spider-Man, Black Cat, ⅔ of the Enforcers, Hammerhead, Moon Knight, Iron Fist and Shang-Chi, all ready to throw down for the fate of the Kingpin. It’s like an alternate reality where the Gang War arc of ASM was really great and not… how it was… That’d be ASM 284-288, of course. Not to be confused with the more recent Gang War event in ASM and various tie-ins of 2023-2024. Although it sure seems like it would be easy to confuse 2 arcs of Amazing Spider-Man named Gang War…