Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #44 – “Tampered”! In the previous installment, Jean Grey, Kitty Pryde, and Storm ambush Spider-Man and Geldoff in order to try to have a little chat with the latter. When confronted by mutants about being a mutant, Geldoff faints.

Spider-Man gets a chance to mingle with these ladies! Spider-Man’s a big name in the X-Men world, that’s for sure. Superpowery without the mutant stuff. Exciting. They invite Spidey to meet Professor Xavier at the mutant school, but then Geldoff wakes up and blasts their jet to smithereens!

Storm has to choose between saving Spider-Man, who plummets one way, and the jet full of the others, which is plummeting the other way.

She’ll save both, of course. But let Spidey eat the dirt, if you ask me.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #44 [October, 2003]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Tampered”

That’s right, Spidey. Hump that X!

Aunt May gets a call later in the evening. She’s baking cookies with Gwen Stacy, which is something they apparently do every three hours. The call is from Peter Parker’s geometry teacher, who tells May that her delinquent nephew is getting his circles and his trapezoids mixed up again. Also, he didn’t show up for class today, even before the… ahem… emergency. The teacher pretty much tells May to figure it the fuck out before he gets flunked back to 1889. Then he hangs up.

May is tired, oh so tired, of this stuff. Gwen swears to her that she doesn’t know where Peter is right now. Honest to Satan! “We walked to school and that was the last time I saw him,” she tells May, mouth full of cookie. “I didn’t even notice he was gone until the teacher started yelling.”

Maybe the little panty-sniffer is downstairs in his secret teenage lab (of masturbation). After yelling through the door doesn’t work, May picks up a fire extinguisher and starts ramming at the doorknob. “PETER!” KANG! PETER!” KANG! PETER!” KANG! and so forth.

Gwen watches petrified that this 900-year-old woman is destroying her doors in pursuit of some rotten apple she calls kin. May descends the staircase…

Peter Parker, meanwhile, is having a dream sequence. I hate dream sequences! I’m rolling my eyeballs already! He’s sitting in a very comfortable lounge chair in a very cozy library reading about the Kingpin’s downfall and eating a bag of Twizzlers. A guy that looks like Professor X without the busted legs stands before Parker like a hologram. “Well, I hate to do this to you, Peter, but we really need you to wake up now.”

Peter Parker wakes up now, surrounded by X-Men.

Oh dear, my impossibly-ripped teenage body is exposed to all these very attractive people! Say it ain’t so!

The X-Men all look better-drawn than I’ve ever seen them before. All good-looking and shit. Even Beast! I wanna fuck that Beast. Professor Xavier introduces himself and his posse. Parker is beside himself with confusion. One minute he was falling to his death hilariously, the next minute he’s waking up naked in Professor Xavier’s bed. “Wait, what happened?”

Storm tells the story! It’s all very exciting, but you’ll need to get the comic book yourself to see the action, because I ain’t relaying it here. In short, the X-Women save the plane and save Spider-Man. Whew, now that we got that out of the way we can move on!

“Aaaand, you’re welcome,” Storm smiles.

Parker is livid, at any rate. “You took off my mask?!!”

Beast smiles. He’s got a stupid Uncle Ben ponytail. “We wanted to make sure you were still breathing.

Parker is still livid. “Man! I am trying to keep a secret identity here!! No one respects my secret identity!! No one!!”

Whine, whine, whine. Aunt May shuffles around the basement looking for clues. She makes suspicious faces while poking around some nonsense like tools and equipment. The computer has an early-2000s screen saver bouncing around. Making another legendary face, she tries the computer but it’s password protected. Defeated, May walks away. The comic makes a point to show the glass lens of the Spider-Man costume sitting right next to the keyboard.

At least Geldoff is having a good time.

Geldoff is in the room and he has been thoroughly sedated. Xavier put a happy thought into his brain (probably of him eating Hormel chili). Parker, now donned as half a Spider-Man, asks if this guy is a mutant or not please. This information better be worth falling out of an airplane for.

Xavier deflects the question and starts talking about why Geldoff interests him in the first place. You see, h– *snoooore*

You see, Xavier’s mutant-tracking system couldn’t detect Geldoff. In fact, it couldn’t detect if he was a mutant or a human! It’s very curious indeed. It’s never happened before. And even after upgrading the equipment to Windows 98, the X-Men still can’t get a good read on him.

Xavier has a guess, though. “…our young friend here has been the unwitting and undeserving guinea pig in a truly disgusting, mutant-related, genetic experiment.”

*snoooore*

What does this mean, Prof.? It means that someone messed with Geldoff’s mother’s placenta! Didn’t see that one coming, did you? “Placenta tampering is illegal in most countries,” Xavier says, dropping some of that placenta knowledge he’s been sitting on for a while now. “Including Latveria, where our young friend is originally from.”

Geldoff smiles placidly.

Someone somewhere injected Geldoff’s mom’s placenta with mutant juice back in the day, and if Professor Xavier ever finds out who he’s going to box their ears!

While Beast and Xavier talk over each other with words like “antigens” and “cytokines”, Spidey interrupts by asking what the fuck this kid is doing in Queens blowing up cars? And Xavier has a perfectly good response to this: the kid was abandoned in New York or something and his powers are finally coming out in puberty! Puberty is a hard time for anybody.

Anyway, the X-Men want to send Geldoff’s ass to a few labs that will then send their findings to the U.N. You thought he was a guinea pig before? Buddy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

“What if this guy here doesn’t want any part of your agenda?” Spidey asks the Ex-Men. Xavier insists that it’s not a personal agenda, but a necessity of moral and ethical *snoooore*. “I bet, seriously,” Spidey continues, “I bet he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with any of this.”

Professor Xavier says that this is bigger than what Geldoff wants. Spidey says that his life is more important than whatever experiments they all want to perform on him. It’s really getting heavy-handed with the morals, but hey, I’m here for it.

“Isn’t this guy going to get a shot at a normal life?” asks Spidey.

“Define normal,” Beast responds.

“Exactly,” Xavier adds.

Jury’s still out on that decision, but whatever you say.

“Define this, fuzzball!!” Spidey cracks Beast right in the face, sending him flying. I laughed at that! Then Spidey grabs Geldoff and drags him away, unhooking him from the many nipple-suctions and wires. Xavier begs Spidey to be reasonable here! Spidey tells him to stuff it.

Not so fast, fucker! Scott “Pee-Pants” Summers blasts in Spidey’s direction with his plasma-vision. Spidey kicks him right across the face! I laughed at that, too! The X-Men can suck it.

Then he and Geldoff crash out the window! Escape successful!…

…except it was all just a thought that Xavier put in Spidey’s head. “Peter…what good would that do?” Xavier asks, smirking. Spidey looks sheepish.

“Peter, you’ve read my work. You know what my X-Men stand for… I promise that this young man will be treated with respect and that good, true good, will come from this. And as far as Geldoff’s rather ignorant point of view on the mutant experience… he and I, we’ll have to talk.”

Spidey looks like he’s been put in his place rather famously. Geldoff holds Spidey’s arm and tells him he wasn’t ever going to hurt him. He was just showing off! That makes it all better!

Kitty Pryde offers Spidey a ride back to Queens, but Spidey just about loses his shit. “Oh, my God!! What time is it??”

I’ll tell you what time it is. It’s time for a spanking! May waits for him in his basement. Busted again for the 40th time in this comic series.

Final Thoughts

One of these days May’s going to have to bring out the old whipping stick and cane that motherfucker until his butt implodes.

I’m not too heavily invested in this storyline because the Geldoff stuff seems secondary to the Peter’s-in-trouble stuff. This is why the storyline is called ”Irresponsible”. Little Peter’s a no-good ingrate and he needs to learn his place.