{"id":22901,"date":"2024-09-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-27T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=22901"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:42:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:42:09","slug":"usm-013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/09\/27\/usm-013\/","title":{"rendered":"USM 013"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Now there\u2019s a cover that\u2019ll get your attention. Is it real? Let\u2019s see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It dawns on me now that this is going to be a tough issue to summarize\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2026because it\u2019s essentially a single scene. MJ\u2019s first instinct is to laugh at this joke. Peter is freaked out by all the noise she\u2019s making because he\u2019s trying to tell her his most dangerous secret here and she is not being discreet. As she continues to call him out on this obviously terrible joke, he says he knew he\u2019d have to do this, and hops up to stick to the wall. MJ is stunned into silence. She\u2019s looking around for some kind of explanation as he transfers to the ceiling, then asks if she\u2019s ok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MJ immediately asks him to take her swinging, but he says no. She says show her the costume, he says it\u2019s down in the lab. She makes him swear one more time this isn\u2019t some kind of gag. Then she starts laughing and jumping on the bed, talking about how cool this is, which, you know, is not helping with the whole secrecy thing. I don\u2019t know why Peter did this at home, but hey, they\u2019re kids. MJ asks why he doesn\u2019t tell everyone. He points out that Spider-Man\u2019s enemies can\u2019t know, that Aunt May can\u2019t believe he might never come home every time he leaves the house, and how the media paints him as a villain. No dummy, she comes down to Earth about it very quickly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You gotta love it. And then Aunt May knocks on the door to say MJ\u2019s mom is on the phone. Because she called her. And after a brief but intense conversation, MJ says she has to go home to empty the cat\u2019s litter box. And, hilariously, Aunt May says, \u201cI just pray you two were being safe,\u201d which makes it all way more awkward. MJ goes to leave and the 2 promise to talk later as Aunt May continues to accuse them of the aforementioned hanky panky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once again, a comic with no Spider-Man in it. This time a one-act play, basically. And it was one of the most beloved issues of this series\u2019 entire run. Like, obviously. So well executed by all parties. Secret identities are tough. All the secrecy and lies. And that\u2019s not even getting into the particular person trying to keep this particular secret being a typically impetuous teenager who feels bad about letting his only friend down. It just makes sense. It\u2019s a very realistic choice. Kids\u2019ll hide almost anything from a parent, but from your best pal, now apparently girlfriend? Totally different story. And Bags just crushes here. The expressions and the body language. The fact that they actually look like teens, and in fact have rarely looked more like real teens. AND it makes for a very interesting difference between the 2 Spider-Men, too. And what happens when the whole Spider-Man thing inevitably stops being the coolest thing MJ\u2019s ever heard and becomes the scariest thing MJ\u2019s ever seen? It gives you a whole new world to explore with a 40-year old property. The real MJ being retconned into knowing the entire time means she\u2019d already largely made her choices about how to handle this long before we knew she\u2019d made them, but this is different. As with so much of Ultimate Spider-Man, it can go anywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now there\u2019s a cover that\u2019ll get your attention. Is it real? Let\u2019s see. It dawns on me now that this is going to be a tough issue to summarize\u2026 \u2026because it\u2019s essentially…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[498,35,1922,12,1927,1925,339,21,2,1923],"class_list":["post-22901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-art-thibert","tag-aunt-may","tag-brian-michael-bendis","tag-flash-thompson","tag-jung-choi","tag-kong","tag-mark-bagley","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-spider-man","tag-ultimate-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22901","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=22901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22916,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22901\/revisions\/22916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}