Man I hope this doesn’t take as long as that last USM block did. And we begin with something that will be highly unusual for a long time: A paper copy! For this one-off issue, they lured none other than Roger Stern back to ASM, and that, despite all my frustration with the book, made me take notice. Not that I bought it or anything. But I wanted to read it, and I didn’t forget about it. And when The Great eBay Hysteria of 2018 took hold, I wound up buying every Spider-Man book Roger worked on during the time I stopped buying, and here we are. The Return of the King is aided and abetted by the great Lee Weeks on lines and the great Dean White on colors. It’s as fine a personnel list as you could ask for, but man, don’t you wish John Romita, Jr. could’ve drawn Roger Stern’s return to the fold? Ah, well. Ya can’t have everything.
Coming in hot!
Definitely hitting that old school vibe. “The Blank” here’s powers seem largely like Slyde’s. Blank gives Spidey the slip, and even a helpful cabbie doing the ol’ “he went that-a-way” doesn’t help him catch the guy. So he heads back to the bank to check on Aunt May.
Ray Donovan! Of course we know Ray Donovan! Do we know Ray Donovan? The ever-reliable internet informs me that way back in TAC 47, early in Roger’s tenure on the title, Sargeant Snider was joined by a partner called “Donovan.” I didn’t even show them in my post. As the issue was drawn by Mirthful Marie Severin, she decided to have some fun and draw Roger Stern himself as this Donovan character. He did not appear in a comic again until this one. And the newly named Ray Donovan (No relation to the TV show of the same name) is still being drawn to look like Roger, which is pretty fun. And of course, that one old appearance was during the time Peter worked at the Globe, so there’s that. Seems like they coulda dug up TAC 47 for the footnote, but whatever.
Do we know this guy, by some other name, perhaps? Later, Peter gets a phone call from Robbie, who heard May was in the bank robbery and wants to check on her. Peter says she’s taking it better than he is, and wonders if Robbie knows anything else about the Blank. Robbie tells him there’s going to be an FBI briefing about him this afternoon.
Not that banks are ever, like, super trustworthy, but this folk hero detail really places this issue in 2008. Over the course of the next few pages, cutting between the briefing on TV and the Blank watching said briefing and reacting to it, we learn he stole some cutting edge technology off “some science geek” once upon a time and became the Blank, appearing in West Coast Avengers 2 & 3 back in the 80s, and not seen since. That caper apparently ended with the far more powerful villain Graviton double crossing Blank and tossing him out to sea, and somehow Graviton’s powers merged the blank device to the guy’s nervous system, a la Doc Ock’s tentacles. We further learn he’s robbing banks to pay a doctor who says he can fix this, but he needs a lot of money. The way this is going, I fully expect that doctor to be Jonas Harrow. It’s all deep pulls this issue. After the briefing, Peter demands to know how the FBI plans to find the Blank, and is unusually angry when told he’s not allowed to know.
Shortly, the Blank robs an armored car, and Spider-Man, eavesdropping on top of an FBI monitoring van, gets the news and swings off as fast as he can.
Now there’s some classic Stern Spider-Man dialogue!
Well, that’s neat and tidy!
Peter, of course, quotes May from ASM 18. Roger sure loves continuity. His is becoming a dying breed. Well, not the most consequential or important issue, but a fun romp by some of the best to ever do it. I’ll take it! As alluded to at the top, this isn’t Stern’s last contribution to Spider-Man in the period I quit buying ASM. In fact, it’s not his last one in this block!