That’s right, it’s a new creative team, just in time to stop. Well, as the cover suggests, we’re now in the hands of Tom Peyer, Todd Nauck and Javier Tartaglia. I’ll miss you, Pat Olliffe. I won’t miss you, Bob Gale. He’s not gone forever, but he won’t do anything significant anymore, and Spider-Man will be better for it. We, of course, last saw Tom Peyer co-writing the Spidey House of M tie-in with Mark Waid.
Uuuuh, what? Feel like I missed a meeting. Also this is not a very nice portrayal of the unhoused. Well, the cops show up to toss the homeless people in the clink, so the Amazing Sackhead blocks the alley with his powers and helps them try to escape. As he helps them flee into a nearby factory, someone is pursuing them, and that someone turns out to be…
You get a feel for how short these chapters were online there. Is he unemployed? How far ahead have a I jumped, here? I felt like I had no choice.
Thing tells us he was volunteering at FEAST, which is actually very nice, when he heard about some mystery man leading a closed group of homeless people, and Aunt May asked him to looking into it, to make sure they were ok. In the present, he asks our man how this happened, and he says he answered an ad for a psychology research group, and was apparently brainwashed. And he now recalls where that happened, so they head that way. Meanwhile…
What a heartbreak for this person we don’t know. Is that President Obama? Todd Nauck!
GENERICO? Ye gods. Spidey has a flashback as they bust in, and then runs off to tell that Mary lady that all of “the tribe” were volunteers for the same experiment, except her, she was an employee. She doesn’t remember, and also doesn’t trust him anymore. She demands to see his face, and then we jump to him taking her to GENERICO, having refused. Ok! Some really disjointed storytelling in this.
Mayr thinks she was doing admin work here, and they realize there’s a list of volunteers here somewhere that they could use to help “the tribe” return to their own lives. But, naturally, Spider-Man has to fight a beekeeper army. It’s a superhero comic, after all. Then Mary finds the records.
This was an insane story, and it felt like about 1/3 of it. so choppy and rushed. Well, I guess that’s it. Looking it up, this issue collects issues 12-15 of The Amazing Spider-Man Digital. Issues 1-4 collected 1-10, and PP #1 collected ASMD #11 and maybe also 16, both Fred Hembeck material. And then #17, the last one, was a Human Torch team-up that I guess never saw print. It apparently reunited Tom DeFalco and Pat Olliffe, who originated Spider-Girl together. Oh, well. So much for that, and for this. I kinda regret hunting this series down. Utterly superfluous. And on that inauspicious note, we close this block of ASMs, and finally go to see what’s happening in Avengers world. It’s been so long since I read one of those. And the first thing we’re going to look at is pretty crazy.