I almost skipped this. I skimmed it. It seemed pretty dreadful. But it ends up having more than a little Spider-Man in it, so here we are. Marc Guggenheim may not be doing anymore regular ASM, but he’s doing this. He is joined by the very not-ready-for-prime-time Adriana Melo, who we saw swiping McFarlanes in Ms. Marvel 34, and doing better in ASM 607. This looks way worse than the ASM issue. She’s inked by Mariah Benes and colored by Andrew Dalhouse, an extremely fake sounding name.
Next there’s a long flashback to Spider-Man guilting her back into the hero biz in ASM 551, interspersed with other, different flashbacks to her training in The Initiative, and how she met the 2nd Jackpot and decided to give her the suit. We get to where Spider-Man said, “People like us? We don’t get a choice” and Sara was left pondering, and then see what happened to her next.
And that’s the end of that scene. Not totally sure we couldn’t have met her family in a “the present” scene, but what do I know? Speaking of:
Skel! Who says “skel” anymore?
Dear lord, making Boomerang’s classic suit look good is no mean feat! A very confusing fight sequence ensues, in which it seems Boomerang slits Jackpot’s throat, but in some kind of non-lethal way, while making very gross threats of a sexual nature. I would say that seems out of character, but it’s not like anyone cares at this point. Jackpot shoots her grappling hook into Boomy’s chest point blank, then whips him around awhile before grabbing a sample of the drugs the people were selling and fleeing.
They seem to have a pretty good relationship. Next day, we see what Sara does for a living.
We flash back to how Sara got her powers. She was working with “Lot 777,” (“We thought we’d hit the jackpot”), a potential cure for Parkinson’s. Then she accidentally scraped a needle of same across three of her fingers in a way that does not make sense to me, whilst pregnant with her daughter, even, and passed out. We’re told she spent the last 4 months of her pregnancy in a coma, but woke up fine, and her child was also fine.
That’s so specific that it seems like it has to be from an actual comic, but there’s not enough detail on the bad guy to jog my memory. I could probably figure it out, but I guess I don’t care. We’re told Jackpot spends the next nights looking for answers as to why the baddies were selling bottled sweat glands, but comes up empty.
Who’s this dork, now? Did we need a new The Rose? One with less style than the original? Well, things sound bad for our heroine. Let’s see how bad they get.