Oh sure, a cocoon. That makes sense. Spiders are known throughout the world for their cocoons. Well, this issue begins with the catastrophic decision to have whoever’s work is being signed “Pat Lee” this month draw Mary Jane informing Aunt May her son is dead.
There were high school kids doodling in their notebooks drawing better than this. Look how long Jarvis is!!! After another page of ineptly rendered grieving, MJ has to go talk to the Avengers about what to do. First, Steve Rogers offers to go talk to May. Then, Tony Stark lays out that they have to decide what to do about Peter’s secret now that he’s dead. Dead! Died in part 7 of a 12 part story, you know it’s real! Why even do this? Why pretend? I mean the least they coulda done was end a storyline on his death, like a cliffhanger, try to give it some weight. Who thought he was really dead in part 7 of a 12 part story? I begin to think the impending 2006 crossover event forced this story into hurry up mode. I would hypothesize that JMS might’ve done all this himself, in a way that made more sense, in ASM, but knowing what was coming meant he didn’t have a year to mess with it. Or not, I could be totally off base. Well, anyway, Tony explains all the gruesome options for covering up Peter’s death, and MJ is overcome, runs out of the room and cries in the bathroom. Then there’s this…
JMS’s Wolverine is really baffling. MJ returns to Stark, having decided she wants to cook up a story where some dudes attacked her and Peter on the street, and he died defending her from them, so everyone will know he was a hero. Tony says they’ll set it up, and then MJ goes to see May, who is with Steve. Then we jump ahead to MJ on a balcony looking out over the city when Jessica Drew comes to talk to her truly improbably drawn self.
More than half of this issue was spent watching people mourn someone who wasn’t dead. Who no one reading this comic believed was dead. Is that worth cover price? I say thee nay. Especially not with this art. MJ is shooed out of the room, and even though what’s left of Peter is visibly just skin, even in the hands of “Pat Lee,” it takes Tony and Steve 2 pages to begin to realize that what they’re looking at isn’t someone having broken in to desecrate his body. Steve finally realizes the glass is broken outward, not inward. Tony begins to ponder what’s going on, as a voice over says “There’s a lot of things people don’t know about spiders…”
Straczynski scrambling to cover this cocoon nonsense with spider facts. “They shed their skin, see?” Yeah? Do they do that and then travel a great distance to make a cocoon? No? Then who cares? What a farce this is. And they have the nerve to be like “Who… or what… will emerge?” in the next issue teaser. Oh, I don’t know, I’m guessing Peter Parker, back to normal. Ugh. How do we go 3 more issues after this? He’ll be back next issue, the end. Morlun got turned to dust. This story is so bad…