"Spider-Man
The Other: Suck or Blow"
2/28/06
by:
Protoclown
...CONTINUED
The cops remove Peter's
mask and talk about how gross his overly pummeled face is; then he's
rushed off to the hospital where he's in critical condition.
Jeez—is that a superhero or a bean bag chair?
Morlun shows up at the
hospital in an attempt to feed on Peter, but he manages to wake up,
looking all freakishly mutated and attacks Morlun in a frenzy,
presumably killing him with a new wrist-spike that pops out of his arm a
la Wolverine.
"Hey Morlun, my parents aren't home! Wanna make out?"
"I'm the best there is at what I do, bub, and—OH GOD THE UNBEARABLE
PAIN!"
Then he keels over and
dies. Spider-Man is dead, and with all the epic battles he's had with
real villains like Venom and the Green Goblin, it took a crappy
third-rate Morbius wannabe to do it. Not to mention that the entire
first HALF of the storyline is completely POINTLESS, since they built up
this big thing about how Peter was dying and then they killed him off in
a battle anyway.
Iron Man and Captain America try to remember what happened
to Peter's corpse after a wild night of drunken fun.
While his friends and
family are grieving over Spider-Man, it's discovered that his body (held
for safe keeping at Stark Tower) has gone missing, leaving a
hollowed-out husk of skin where his corpse used to be.
I think I saw a movie about this once—when Spidey comes out of the
cocoon
he'll be young again! Or a horrible monster. It could go that way too.
Shortly thereafter, some
kids who are on a field trip and learning about spiders (oh! the
delicious irony!), particularly a certain kind of spider that can shed
its skin once in a lifetime in times of extreme duress, pass under a
bridge that is home to a mysterious man-sized cocoon. You don't
suppose—the empty husk…the cocoon…my god! Could these events be
connected??
"Hey, maybe you'll look like me when you come out of the cocoon!
I'll bet your wife would love that, wouldn't she?"
While Peter is in the
cocoon he has a bizarre dream where a crazy spider-dude tells him that
he is part-man and part-spider and that he has a whole new batch of
powers that he can access if he would only "embrace the spider". So he
does. Literally.
"Hug me, ya big dumb silly bastard! HUG ME!"
"I love ya, big guy!"
He gives a giant spider a
hug. And voila! He emerges from the cocoon and shows back up at Stark
Tower, where everybody is happy to see him but not all that surprised.
When Spider-Man emerges from the cocoon, he "comes out" in more ways
than one.
Over dinner, Captain
America and Iron Man even say they "suspected as much all along". But
Peter still doesn't really know anything about these mysterious new
powers the freaky spider-dude told him about.
Iron Man wants to run a bunch of new tests on Peter after coming back
from the dead, and Peter wants nothing more than to spend some quality
time with Mary Jane after being dead for a day.
There's a new sex fetish just waiting to be born from this.
Meanwhile, a bunch of
spiders come into Stark Tower and eat the shriveled husk of Peter's old
body, at which point they form together into a creepy woman made
entirely of spiders. Spidey discovers this and confronts her,
discovering once again his newfound wrist spikes. He tried to talk to
the spider-lady, but she flees the tower.
"I'm the best there is a what I—oh, I did that one already?
How about SNIKT? Have I done SNIKT yet?"
Spider-Man gives chase to
the spider-lady for a while, and eventually she stops long enough to say
that she is "the other" and as long as the spider lives, "the other"
must live as well, indicating that she is some dark and twisted mirror
to Spider-Man. He tries to get more information from her but she
disperses into many spiders and disappears into a sewer grate.
"Hey no, seriously—do you wanna make out?"
And in the final EPIC
chapter of this EPIC storyline, Mary Jane tries to patch up Spider-Man's
costume, only she does a crappy job, so Spider-Man visits a local tailor
who is known for working on hero and villain costumes.
"Hey man, I'm kinda new at this, but let's get right down to it, eh?"
While he's waiting to get
his shirt fixed, he hears an explosion—turns out a nearby building has
collapsed, so he goes rushing in to help. He discovers a few "new"
completely unexciting spider-powers during this rescue mission, namely
he can sense vibrations through his webbing just like a real spider can,
and he can stick little girls on his back and carry them around, just
like a real spider can.
"Sweet! This is the best backpack ever!!!"
Then at the end of the
story we see Tony Stark working at his high tech sewing machine forging
Spider-Man his new crappy "Iron Spider" armor, a "gift" he had
cryptically referred to a few times earlier in the series. That's a gift
he should return to the store if ever I've seen one. It apparently comes
with all kinds of exciting and unnecessary gadgets that will be revealed
in upcoming issues, and that Spider-Man has somehow gotten along just
fine without for over 40 years.
"Ha, ha! I'm sewing! I'm really sewing!! Whee!
Ha, ha! I'll show you I can take care of myself, mom!"
Joe Quesada, Editor in
Chief of Marvel, apparently came up with the new design. He said in a
recent interview that he was sitting in a meeting "involuntarily
sketching on a pad" and the costume just "came to him".
Hey! Who the hell is that asshole and what's he doing on the
cover of Spider-Man!?
That sounds to me like an
admission that he was possessed while designing the new costume.
Doubtless that he was possessed by none other than SATAN at the time! So
I say to you, take a good look at this terrible, ugly, crappy,
god-awful, pathetic, metal arms coming out of places where metal arms
should not be, hideous eyesore of a costume and you tell me for one
minute that you think anyone OTHER than Satan could have designed
something so horrible.
What I want to know is, where did those big clawed metal arms go?
Do they deploy out of…some hole somewhere, or what?
The good news is that
there's no WAY something as crappy as this can last for very long. In
fact, I hear it's only supposed to last for this year for the upcoming
"Civil War" storyline. The bad news is that it'll probably pull a
"Venom" and become some kind of sentient new villain after he finally
gets rid of it.
He can apparently now glide on those tiny little web wings of his.
I know people who have more arm flab than that, and no, they don't
glide.
And there you have it.
"The Other". In the end, I'm not quite sure if it sucked or if it blew,
but it definitely made me want to die a little bit. But at the very
least I hope that with this plot synopsis I can discourage some of you
from spending your hard-earned clams on it. There are much better comics
out there to spend your money on. But hey, if you like train
wrecks—knock yourself out!
