Pulse. Pulse, Pulse, Pulse. Where did we go wrong? The first arc was such a nice setup. We’d have Jessica and Ben Urich exploring the Marvel Universe. That was a good idea. And then… we didn’t. Issues 6-9 were a Secret War tie-in, issue 10 was a House of M tie-in, then there was 1 more arc, and then it was over. That arc even reunited the Alias team, bringing Jessica Jones and her cast back to their true, familiar faces. But when the smoke cleared, it was 14 issues, and only 9 of them were really about The Pulse. At any rate, in #11, Stuff Was Happening, and Janet Van Dyne was trying to get Luke Cage to choose a new superhero suit, when Jessica Jones’ water broke. After being pregnant for like 2 years’ worth of comics, the big moment was coming. And that’s where we pick things up here, in part 2 of “FEAR.” Terrible cover. Mike Mayhew has made a long career out of these too clean, too stiff photoreal paintings. Art that looks real and incredibly fake at the same time. But inside, like I said, it’s Bendis, Michael Gaydos and Matt Hollinsworth back together.
One thing I’ve found weird over the years is, Alias & the Pulse created a close, special friendship between Jessica and Carol. Of course Carol was with her, and of course she’s flying Jess to the hospital, they’re besties. But over the years, as Jessica Jones faded from the public eye and Carol Danvers toplined a lot of comics written by people who weren’t Bendis, that special friendship got transferred from Jessica Jones to Jessica DREW. Now everyone knows Carol Danvers and Jessica Drew are the best of friends, and Jessica Jones doesn’t come up too often. Just very strange. Anyway, Jessica is very premature, so that seems bad. Meanwhile:
This story’s B-plot is Ben Urich doing a story on D-Man, the joke of a character who was once Captain America’s partner.
Ben explains that D-Man has been seen around town stopping 3 robberies this week, but every time, it turns out some stuff is missing, like D-Man robbed the places where he stopped the robbers. JJJ is way into this and wants Jessica Jones on this immediately. But…
There is a comical page where Luke is literally running to the hospital since traffic is all messed up, but he runs by an alley with a drug deal going down and stops to beat up the participants. Then we see Ben Urich going to call in a favor with a cop, where he learns D-Man is homeless, with an arrest for vagrancy a month ago. D-Man has been homeless a long time, as I recall. This cop thinks D-Man is a joke and Ben could be doing more important things, and Ben says every story is important. And back at the hospital, no one can find Jessica’s doctor, and things are getting more and more hectic.
The Avengers are here to save Jessica’s baby! Who is Spider-Man about to web, exactly? Luke manages to leap onto the Quinjet, get let inside, and they’re off. Off to, where else, Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. Elsewhere, Ben is talking to a pawn shop owner who was saved/robbed by D-Man, and he says the guy comes out of a manhole in the street every other day, and if Ben can get back the bracelets he took, Ben gets a discount at the store. So Ben lower himself down into the sewer, where the ominous hand of D-Man reaches out behind him, but we’re back to…
Great stuff by our boy.
Will Jessica have a healthy baby? Will Ben get beat up by D-Man?
It’s the press at the door, of course. They’re demanding news. Cap says he’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, D-Man has encountered Ben in the sewer. D-Man, being a huge Daredevil fan, is a huge Ben Urich fan, and when he finds out Ben is there to talk to him, he takes his glove off and touches Ben’s shoulder, just to make sure he’s real.
I’ve read all the Captain America stuff with D-Man, but it was decades after I read this. Now I kinda feel like Dennis got a bad rap over the years, but that’s comics for you. Back at Dr. Strange’s house…
Cap goes inside, where Jessica is having a rough time, and relay’s Kat’s message.
That’s pretty great. How convenient that we saw the first issue of this for context, and now we get to see this right after New Avengers 15, which was released… 2 months after this. So close, guys, so close. Publishing comics must be hard, considering how often these things get jumbled. Back in the sewer, Ben’s narration waxes poetic about how D-Man stopped doing big superhero things to focus on helping the homeless, how he chose to live with homeless people to better protect them, but now he’s all alone, living in heartbreaking conditions, and maybe not all there. Ben asks what D-Man does with the stuff he takes, and a cagey D-Man asks who told him that. Then, back to the A-plot, where Carol Danvers is gonna tell us what she was referencing back in Avengers Finale when she said worse things had happened to many of the Avengers than what happened to Wanda:
Yeah, they really did that to Carol, except even more preposterously, in the original story, she happily went with this guy, in love, off into the sunset. An abhorrent abuse of Carol, as a character. Chris Claremont had to fix it later, being the only guy in comics who knew how to write women, like, at all between the birth of the medium and this time period. Comics are insane. Back in the sewer:
The Ben/D-Man story in this is pretty wild. But it’s not why we’re here.
I think I mentioned before that Jessica Jones, the real Jessica Jones, was Michael Gaydos’ then-wife. They are not together anymore, and that kept Gaydos from returning to the character for a long time, for obvious reasons. He did finally join Bendis on a new Jessica series when she became a Netflix show, though. It was a fun reunion for readers, I hope it wasn’t too weird for Michael. But it allowed for him to do amazing pages like that in his photoreal style.
We see JJJ looking at today’s Bugle, which is just “Spider-Man: Menace,” as he was too proud to cover Jessica’s child, and arguing with Robbie about it. As for D-Man…
That’s nice. That’s nice of Matt, with how his life is falling apart at the time. And as for Jessica & Luke…
Issue 14 is a sweet final issue wherein Jessica relates to her newborn the story of how she and Luke first met before deciding to marry him, but the tenuous connection to Spider-Man in issues 12 and 13 is not there, so we’re not looking at it. But we will see them get married… But not right now. Right now… sigh… Now it’s time for The Other.