Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1) Super Special #1!
Chronologically, I just finished the ”Legacy” storyline, but here’s a bonus standalone issue that dropped right before it. I should’ve done it before, but I didn’t! So I’m doing it now! You’ll never even know the difference!!
Buckle up and get comfortable, this is gonna be a long trip.
Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Super Special #1 [July, 2002]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Ultimate Spider-Man Super Special”
The art is slightly different. I don’t like it. It’s dingier. Parker looks twerpier.
“So… here’s what happened…” Parker recounts a tale of nighttime Spidery adventures, “Nothing out of the ordinary… just a guy running like a maniac through a side street of Manhattan…”
Fun story already. I’m positively yawning in suspense.
This guy running like a maniac is being chased by a gun-wielding maniac who is shooting his gun off like a maniac. Nothing new, this is New York City, baby. Even if the gunman was wearing a chicken suit with a 14-inch purple dildo attached no one would look twice.
“And, you know, I guess that’s why I put on my colorful pajamas and drag my tuchas out there to begin with,” Parker says, and I learned how to spell “tuchas” today. *checks dictionary* Nope, that’s wrong! Two u’s, motherfucker.
Spider-Man knocks the assailant to the ground and shoots him all over the place with webs. “Didn’t you hear the bell? It’s crazy person nappy time,” he says, flinging more webs and even more webs and webs webs webs.
Gunman calls him an idiot, but Spider-Man don’t care! He catches up with the chased and asks the dude if he’s ok. He’s not ok! He’s acting weird, man! He turns into a Buffy vampire and lifts the teenage superhero by his scrawny, little neck.
“OOF!!” the Spider says.
“HAAAHHHSSSSSS!!” the vampire says. I think the vampire wins this round.
Come on, man. Just a little kiss?
Before Spider-Man gets a bite taken out of him, the assailant pops in to give the vampire a giant stick through the abdomen. THUK! Then a pointy stick to the chest. “HYAAAGGHHIIIEE!” the vampire cries, saying what I can only assume is “hello”. The vampire bursts into a torrent of lovely, white skulls and bones. One skull and many bones, to be slightly more accurate.
Now it’s the assailant’s turn to vamp it up. “Kid, you ever touch me again–” he begins, staring down with his beady red eyes while Spidey AAUGHHS and AWWOOOGAHS, “You ever look at me again, and I will eat your heart for breakfast.”
“You understand?” he finishes, brandishing his pointy breakfast-eating stick while Spider-Man spits and grrks. He then walks away, leaving Spider-Man shaken and rather undignified.
Parker is freaking out just thinking about all this as he recounts the story to MJ. Peter Parker doesn’t get scared of much! OK, maybe bees and snakes and cars and elevators and airplanes and graffiti and Casper’s Haunted Christmas and shoes and boats and the dark and the light and Pokemon and radishes. But not much ELSE scares him! But the vampires scared him.
Willow and Xander are having a moment.
MJ’s like “thanks a lot, now I’m gonna be afraid of vampires” before slapping and kicking the shit out her boyfriend. Thanks for the story, you selfish loser. Shouldn’t have said anything.
The illustrations make Peter Parker look like even more of a depressed doofus than he already does during the main series. He’s moping on the bed something ferocious! MJ wishes he didn’t tell her this, but she’s also kinda glad he did, but also what the fuck was he thinking? Sad Mope has no one else he can trust or speak about all this too! Sorry, Toots, you’re all he’s got. Don’t forget, Uncle Ben fell out of a roller coaster! If memory serves…
But let’s be real: Peter Parker has no reason to be involved with any of this in the first place. Why does he even bother? He can sit at home and touch himself while watching Riverdale like a normal teenager. He’s got the heebie-jeebies now and he’s thinking about hanging up the suit for good.
Well, having Aunt May run it through the laundry and then hanging it up for good.
Hey, did Parker tell MJ yet about the OTHER thing that ALSO happened this week? No? Sit down, sister, it’s another wild one!
I like to imagine at this point that MJ huffs and checks her watch and is starting to look for objects around the room to hit him in the head with, knocking him out.
Here’s to getting #MeToo’d years before #MeToo was #MeToo’ing
Many panels ensue. An attractive, young woman leaps tall buildings with several bounds. She’s wearing assassin clothes which, in this case, means a red durag and very revealing leather clothing! This is how I like to dress too when I’m out and about doing some assassinatin’, but I usually wear jorts and those running shoes with the toes.
She gets out her sniper rifle and looks through the scope to find her target: a fuckin’ middle-aged white guy politician-lookin’ tall drink of water. She aims, finger on the trigger, and suddenly the scope is covered with stringy stuff! What in tarnation!
Spider-Man says some stuff that could be considered flagrant sexual harassment as the woman snarls and tries to stab him with her Ninja Turtle sai weapon. Looks like she was able to tear a little hole in his spandex on his upper, inner thigh. Yowza.
The she pokes him on the arm with her fancy touch-of-death maneuver and then kicks him in the face! Then throws him to the ground! Then almost impales him through the brain with her very long and pokey sai weapon! He attempts to stop it, but man is she persistent. His hand starts bleeding as he desperately tries to hold on to it so she doesn’t stab through the part of his brain that stores all the sexy Riverdale scenes.
She decides to stop and jumps off the roof. Spidey looks over the edge and sees nothing.
“What was that?” he asks himself, alone, clutching his hurt touch-of-death arm.
I realize now that we have a new artist again! Parker and MJ look even shittier! MJ looks like Pippi Longstocking and they both have faces that are 45” long. They’re in Parker’s basement where he has AOL 3.0 booted up on his Windows 2000. He’s browsing GeoCities websites he searched for on HotBot with his IE6 web browser.
“What is this? That’s her? What websites is this?” MJ asks.
“It’s one of those cheesy websites about serial killers and assassins,” Parker responds, hiding his jerkin’-it tissue box.
“And this is her?”
“Pretty sure. It’s not a face you forget.”
It’s a woman named Elektra Natchios. An assassin-for-hire. She knows karate and has weapons!
I don’t know what’s going on either. Who the hell are these two ugly motherfuckers all of a sudden?
MJ posits that it doesn’t matter that Parker doesn’t know what was going on. The important thing is that he stopped an assassin from assassinating an *squints* awful craggy-faced politician. I guess that’s a win?
Hell no, politicians are the worst. Every last one of them. Here, look: Parker pulls up another website, something like http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4827/big-butts-political-scoop, and shows MJ that this particular politician is trying a GENOCIDE on a neighboring country! Eek! So maybe he should’ve just let this lady kill him?
Thought-provoking.
“I’ve done this before– I’ve jumped the gun. I’ve thrown myself into the mix without knowing what the deal was– and– and– and–” Parker starts twitching and spitting, working himself into a real frenzy of biblical proportions! Much like Abraham and the, uh, Squid.
Well, look, killing is wrong no matter how you slice it, right? MJ’s got her head on straight. Killing = bad. Stopping killing = good. Now you can work on stopping the genocide next! By killing this politician!
Anyway, so is he saying that if he knew who this guy was at the time, would he have let her do it? He doesn’t know. Being 15 years old is hard.
MJ is like “no you wouldn’t you complete moron. You boneheaded idiot with a tiny penis.” She suggests he go to someone with more experience in this matter. Someone who has been doing this a long time. Someone who has seen it all and has faced every morally ambiguous circumstance that one could think of.
Someone who blindly fights the good fight blind-style. Just blind to everything except the greater good. Just blind to everything really. Blind.
Like a super sexy pendulum.
In the offices of Nelson and Murdock, Matt “Daredevil” “Blind Leading the Blind” “Blind” Murdock’s assistant, Karen, sees something Matt can’t see: everything! Ha! But also Spider-Man outside the window. Just hanging out… directly outside the window… as if he’s trying to get a blind guy’s attention with very visual acrobatics.
Three hours later (and, presumably, Spider-Man never stopped swinging around), Murdock pops up on the rooftop as Daredevil and kindly asks the kid what the fuck-hell he’s doing.
“Oh, finally,” Spider-Man says, spidering around the roof, “I– I was looking for you.”
“For me?”
“Yeah– yeah. I read all about you. You don’t leave Hell’s Kitchen. So I wanted to talk to you for a minute and I figured – you know – if I swung around enough you’d come out.”
A likely story! But, I suppose it was corroborated by the following evidence: Spider-Man swung around enough that Daredevil came out. And what a coming out it was! Daredevil doesn’t really look pleased with this. After asking Spidey what he wants, the kid gibbers and jabbers nervously about being a little bit overwhelmed by superheroing and he wants a buddy to talk to. A similar buddy who, you know, does similar superheroing things. Heh.
“How old are you?” Daredevil asks.
“Twenty-six.”
“How old are you really?”
“Sixteen.”
The jig was up right away! There will be many more jigs in the future, assuredly. Well, it’s no fucking surprise, is it? Teenagers can’t handle this stuff. You boys can’t even talk to girls! Still trying to locate your pubes.
“You have no business doing any of this,” Daredevil states rather bluntly.
“But–”
“You have no concept of the responsibilities you have now. When you stick your nose into other people’s lives? No wonder the press has a field day with you– they can sense the– the– the immaturity.”
“Hey, this isn’t what I–”
Wait, what, hold on. Huh? I just…uhm, well, I’d rather bone a loved one than a total stranger! Well, sometimes…
Ha, Murdock tears this sprat a new one. He tells him to run home to his mommy and see him again in ten years. Of course, Murdock won’t see him back, but you know what he means.
“You’re lucky I don’t rip that stupid mask off of you and give you over to the police right now.”
Spider-Man just boggles at this guy now. You can tell he’s fuming under that ultra-hot shiny unbreathable suit he’s wearing. Just sweating profusely. Smelling terrible. Then he pouts and leaves.
God, all these illustrations are awful. It makes me appreciate the art from the main series so much more. Everyone looks like they’re leaning unnaturally or in one of those X-TREME ‘90s cartoony commercials that sell purple Heinz ketchup.
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