Alright, then. Time to actually gather that pesky 5. This 4-issue stunt is the actual end of the era. You want something like this to really go for it, to really come with meaning and pathos and excitement. But this seems to have been tossed together pretty hastily to my totally uninformed eye. 3 parts are written by Howard Mackie and 2 are drawn by John Romita, Jr., so one assumes you’re in mostly good hands. We start with the same team as the previous issue of ASM. Byrne also provides all 4 covers. After a splash page of Norman’s building (Norman seems to have suddenly developed a skyscraper like Kingpin’s over the last month), we got us a 5.
Who’s this, then? This story will not be the last we see of her. That’s Robbie and Alison pulling up in the taxi down there. They recap why they’re here for a page, but then yellow steam stats coming out of a nearby sewer grate, and then Molten Man explodes out of the ground in a splash page. Obviously. Downtown, Spider-Man is swinging for home, looking forward to a quiet night. Whoops. And in the house, MJ is on the phone with Jill about her return to modeling when she hears a commotion outside.
This leads to a several page flashback wherein Norman implanted a thingie in Mark’s head, forcing him to hunt a tracker planted on (in?) Alison with an all-consuming urge to kill her. He tried to attack Norman, but Norman displayed his Goblin strength, stopping him and flinging him out of the room to go do his thing. Don’t feel like that needed so many pages, but we’re clearly trying to fill time here.
Baby May!? The baby we were never to speak of again!? How could that be?? Elsewhere, Norman has caught “Matt” reading a magazine about Spider-Man, who she says is cool. She says someone like him couldn’t understand, that no one over 21 could understand what’s so cool about him. Which is a weird thing to say, but whatever, it’s ffffffinally time for Norman’s dopey ritual. So they go in the other room, still in their dopey robes, and they hold their pieces of the McGuffin in the air and energy crackles around them, making them feel every kind of emotion at once, allegedly.
Norman got so excited he forgot Greg’s supername. Or maybe Byrne is so new here he just forgot. Either way.
“My brain! My brain!” Hilarious.
Well, there you go. Seems like Greg’s gonna be disappointed. But did everyone really get what the old codger thought? It’s not like he’s an expert, or anyone else is. Back in Queens, Robbie is leaving with some cops. Is Alison dead? I dunno. Spider-Man’s waiting on the roof for the street to clear before he can go inside, and when he does, MJ is understandably freaking out. But then we jump past her telling Peter what’s up…?
That last page Spidey is cool but also kind of makes no sense. Comics! Is baby May alive? Is MJ right? Of course MJ is right! But what does that mean for Spider-Man? In the letter page, because this is comics, they’re too busy hyping you for what comes next to try to maintain any suspense for this story…
That hype couldn’t be more wrong! But, yes, it reveals that Byrne is now, suddenly, a major player in the Spider-Verse. Wait til you see what Chapter One is, it sucks!