I wonder if Bags just cranked out a bunch of these generic covers on weekends for awhile. “Draw a cool Spider-Man” is light work for him, at this point in his career. That hand on the right is a little weird in this one. We get rolling not long after last issue ended.
Sick burn, Robbie! Soon, Spider-Man is swinging away, doing his usual neurotic internal ranting. Swinging past Fisk Tower and an anti-Spider-Man Sam Bullit billboard only make him angrier. And that is usually how this Spider-Man gets in trouble. He decides to go pay Fisk a visit.
Not how that usually goes!
Kingpin, hilariously, makes a “call me” hand gesture, and Spider-Man rages against his unbreakable windows for a while before leaving in disgust. He can’t even make mistakes right these days. Then Peter goes to school, where his temper makes his teacher asking if the class wants to discuss current events a mistake. Soon he’s yelling at her as she tries to make excuses for the legal system and gets thrown out of her class. Guy’s batting .1000. But it’s a nice mix of the classic Peter Parker temper and a realistic teenage tantrum.
Ultimate Aunt May, ladies & gents! She’s the best. We switch our scene from the Parkers to Ben Urich, gone to interview Sam Bullit, where he gets a pretty standard “Spider-Man is a symbol of everything wrong in this city” speech, and then justifies the Ultimates because they work for Uncle Sam, and equivocates on the mutant issue. Then Ben comments on a photo behind Bullit.
Ya know, I hadn’t read the original Bullit story when this came out, so this is fun for me on a different level. Well, now Ben’s back at the Bugle, telling Jonah what happened. And revealing he had a 2nd recorder hidden in his jacket (I guess it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you).
May calling JJJ in that moment is pretty awesome. We’ll have to wait til next issue to see how it influenced the scene at the Bugle. But just what does Ultimate JJJ have against Spider-Man, anyway? The OG Jonah’s rationale for hating Spider-Man was pretty thin, and changed sometimes, but what’s the line here?