Mmmmmmaaaaan, that super clean Keith Pollard cover! So good! TAC’s weird thing of putting the credits on the last page right now is annoying. This is a fill-in by writer Len Kaminski, penciler Joe Brozowsky, inkers Keith Williams & Del Barras and colorist Nel Yomtov. It begins with a guy trying to pick the lock on an apartment, getting caught, and running for it, crashing into an alley.
Those guys keep sassing the cop guy til he pushes their leader, and then the weapons come out. Knives and pipes and stuff, but it’s 1986, so one of these goons has nunchucks, which is hilarious. As the would-be cat burglar thinks they’re gonna kill the cop, Spider-Man arrives above. The cop guy pulls a gun and Spidey gets his camera set up before dropping in.
That Spidey in panel 4 is nicked from a John Romita, Jr. panel I can’t source right now. I bet it’s on this blog. Red & blues in the original, tho. Anyway, this dumb guy really goes and robs Peter. The stuff happening in Peter’s life right now is ridiculous. Vigilante hero, apartment burned down, hostage situation at Aunt May’s, almost evicted, now robbed. He comes home just as the guy’s getting away to find the bad news.
The kid thinks his dad would die if he found out his son was out robbing people as he heads into his room to inspect his score. And finds a costume, webshooters and whatnot in it. So, naturally, he decides to use them for robberies.
A regular high school kid pulled himself up 7 floors on that web? I dunno, man! Then again, he’s inexplicably built like Captain America, so maybe. As he makes his getaway, the lady calls the cops, and as he’s shakily trying to get down, the web dissolves, making him plummet to the ground. The cops find him unmoving on the pavement. Back in Chelsea, Peter is trying to figure out what to do, until he remembers that kid stole spider tracers, so he can just go find him. As for the kid, he’s been wrapped up in a sack and delivered to…
…that very same cop from before. How convenient! So he takes the kid to fight a gang called the Barons, and that goes about as well as you’d expect. He’s taken out instantly, and then they also get the drop on Officer Dumb-dumb. And of course, they’re led by the guys from earlier. They hit the cop with a brick and take his gun, and now they have their 2 enemies from earlier right where they want them. Sort of.
He just GUESSED what the tracer is and how it works????????? Ridiculous! This thing was already rife with coincidences, but this is too much. Spider-Man suddenly gets a big zap from his danger sense, the leader of The Barons has decided to kill the cop over the objections of his own gang, yadda yadda…
My God, Magnum. That was absurd. That cover was really the main draw this time.