{"id":13606,"date":"2022-06-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-29T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=13606"},"modified":"2021-04-24T18:41:45","modified_gmt":"2021-04-24T22:41:45","slug":"web-128","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2022\/06\/29\/web-128\/","title":{"rendered":"WEB 128"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Who indeed. Who indeed. It\u2019s 1995 again, and we\u2019re back to 2 Spider-Men running around. This issue\u2019s plot comes from Tom DeFalco with a script from Todd DeZago, and art by the established team of Steven Butler, Randy Emberlin & Kevin Tinsley. It opens with Black Cat on the move, with a lot of florid copy not unlike what Mantlo used to do about her \u201cgiving herself to the night\u201d and whatnot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Good angle to look at, I suppose. Harsh judgement of Peter. It\u2019s not his fault he (thinks he\u2019s) a clone. But, look, it\u2019s no one\u2019s favorite villain, Despayre! I think that\u2019s how it\u2019s spelled. I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll tell me later. Has he been on the blog? Maybe. I think I first saw him in the single issue of Cloak & Dagger I own. Anyway, while Black Cat entertains a bunch of goofy mysterious talk from a dude that looks all evil and stuff for some reason, Peter Parker & Ben Reilly are visiting Aunt May & Uncle Ben\u2019s graves. Ben is dressed like a plainclothes cop doing a terrible job of blending in for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The boys lose their tail by leaping up the side of e a building, and then they switch to their Spider-suits to follow the guy, which, you ask me, if this guy\u2019s following Peter Parker and his clone around, maybe don\u2019t show up to interrogate him as 2 Spider-Men. Just a thought!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom Jones! It\u2019s not unusual, as it turns out. But, like is this not hyper-suspicious? I dunno, it\u2019s the 90s, nothing makes sense. Elsewhere, Mary Jane finishes up a phone call with a \u201cRolfe,\u201d who I wish was the dog from The Muppet Show, before taking off, telling herself she just hit the jackpot. Back in the A plot, the Spiders have learned these are those dudes who work for Black Cat, and she\u2019s missing, and last they heard, she was gonna go check on her old friend, Peter Parker. Spider-Man declares he\u2019ll scour the city for her so aggressively that Scarlet Spider is surprised. As they swing away, Spidey explains his deal with her and then SS wants to know why he picked Tom Jones as the concert, which is kinda funny. Tom was having a real resurgence in this period! Somewhere else (Could be anywhere, there\u2019s almost zero backgrounds drawn), Despayre is brainwashing Black Cat into thinking someone is the source of all her pain and sadness. Gee, who could it be? Is it Despayre? Oh, sorry, it\u2019s \u201cD\u2019Spayre,\u201d much better. Maybe he\u2019s French. How\u2019s our C plot doing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MJ gettin\u2019 back in the game! Seems like a good move for her. Elsewhere, the Spiders swing around town looking for Felicia until she launches herself at Spider-Man, yelling \u201cI\u2019ll kill you\u201d over and over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A caption on the next page lazily tells us Ben encountered D\u2019Spayre in his years on the road, and maybe they\u2019ll tell us about it some day. Right out of the \u201cWolverine already knows every new character we introduce and sometimes Gambit does, too\u201d playbook. D\u2019Spayre is doing his thing, feeding on their, uh, despair, but Scarlet is weirdly unaffected. He\u2019s shown bouncing around D\u2019Spayre (Typing that is really killing me) to no effect (for some reason?) until he sees Felicia is about to execute Spider-Man, and yells that she doesn\u2019t want to do that, which breaks the spell for some reason. That sure was easy. This allows them to team up and whup D\u2019Spayre in one page. Really easy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The idea that MJ and Felicia are such pals is nice to me (Even if it\u2019s 99% totally off-panel). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That seems weird, right? Considering we\u2019ve already seen Ben take up the mantle just 2 months from now? And isn\u2019t this going to be a short block, then? Ha. Hahaha. If only\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The End! No more Ben Reilly, all those comics with him as Spider-Man were just a fever dream. That woulda been pretty cool. No, instead, what happened was interference from higher up, as usual. The Spider-Team wanted to get Ben into the suit as fast as possible, and editorial and marketing just kept dragging things out. Fresh off being forced to do Maximum Clonage, they have been made to spin their wheels for awhile and very shortly launch an even more overt, even more misguided attempt to create a Spider-Man version of the hit Age of Apocalypse event in X-Men. But we\u2019re not quite there yet…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who indeed. Who indeed. It\u2019s 1995 again, and we\u2019re back to 2 Spider-Men running around. This issue\u2019s plot comes from Tom DeFalco with a script from Todd DeZago, and art by the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[455,156,1140,418,21,432,599,494,2,456,452,124,265],"class_list":["post-13606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-ben-reilly","tag-black-cat","tag-dspayre","tag-kevin-tinsley","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-randy-emberlin","tag-scarlet-spider","tag-seward-trainer","tag-spider-man","tag-steven-butler","tag-todd-dezago","tag-tom-defalco","tag-web-of-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13620,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606\/revisions\/13620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}