Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #5 – “Alias Investigations (Part 5)”! Time to wrap this puppy up. In the previous installment, Jones travels to Washington D.C. to try to get more info about the Keaton campaign. She finds the blonde woman who hired her to find “her sister” at the campaign office, who hurries the fuck out of there when she spots and recognizes Jones. Jones catches her in the back alley and learns that she was hired by the Lawson, Daviano & Silver law firm. THERE, after having some fun trying to scare Lawson, she learns that the law firm was hired by someone else! Mystery upon mystery.

As she stakes out Lawson in the parking garage, Matthew Murdock calls her to let her know that she’s no longer a suspect in the murder because the strangulation marks on the victim showed that the perpetrator had very large man hands. As she thinks about this more deeply, a man with very large man-hands pulls her out of her vehicle and tries to put strangulation marks on her neck.

And that’s it, no time to waste! Let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s motherfucking go!

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #5 [March, 2002]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Alias Investigations (Part 5)”

Isn’t it bittersweet to already be ending this storyline? Dawwwww?

We start where we left off: Jessica Jones is getting choked out in the parking garage. The creep is telling her that “the best part about this is that I can take your lifeless body out somewhere remote and I can do whatever I want with you”, so this guy seems like a cool-ass dude. “Man Mountain Marko” he fancies himself. Jones ain’t taking this shit anymore, so she breaks free and slams her palms against his ears. She then slams her fist in his dick and balls and knocks him to the ground. “They didn’t tell you that they were siccing you on a super hero type, did they?” she gloats at him, and then asks who sent him.

When he refuses to answer, she punches him in the face. They go back and forth like this for quite a while, actually, until he finally realizes that he’s the one getting beat to shit and she’s not! So she finally gets what she needs from this hired goon and sets off.

“Fuck You”, huh? Interesting name. Very exotic.

We see some Hollywood director bigshot named Zoumas playing golf while surrounded by corporate lackeys. After he is told that FOX is picking up a script for a movie similar to Zoumas’ project, he pulls out on the spot! And jizzes all over his golf ball, whoops, haha. He says, “fuck it, I’m not married to this project anyway, we’ll just wait for something better to come along”, essentially, moments before Jessica Jones tosses Man Mountain Marko’s unconscious bulk right in front of him. Zoumas and his team aim guns at Jones as she approaches them on the course. She bluffs her bulletproofedness as she approaches like a real badass lady about town. Zoumas takes a pause and then asks his team to give him and Jones a moment alone.

There’s the Jessica Jones I know from the TV show! A little bullet in the butthole never hurt nobody.

Zoumas starts talking. “It seems you aren’t nearly the angry, drunk, down-on-her-luck, loser ex-superhero, looking out for herself bitch I was led to believe.” She looks surprised, and if I were here I would’ve retorted with “I’m still pretty drunk” but she doesn’t, oh well. Zoumas then tells her to sell the Captain America tape for the fortune that it’s worth. She indignantly asks him why she was tricked into making the tape in the first place. He counters by telling her he could either sell it or give it to the cops to clear her name from the murder charges. Jones, if she’s understanding correctly, infers that this woman was murdered so that Jones had a reason to get rid of the tape. Zoumas can see she’s still confused, so he asks her straight up what she wants from him. “The truth,” Jones says, “You’ve done something terrible and I want you to confess.” OR ELSE WHAT?! Oh yeah, the super strength power thing, I guess she could squeeze his nuts until they popped like a little bag of Cheetos.

Zoumas, though, has nothing to confess. He didn’t murder anyone. He didn’t hire her for anything. And tricking her into making the tape? Well, she’d have to show the tape to someone as evidence, now, wouldn’t she? He’s slurping up this delicious irony like so much irony honey! From the irony bees. So it’s a stalemate.

Then, he launches into his reasons for doing everything that he did: the president owes Zoumas for getting to where he is today with his help. And, according to Zoumas, he forgot this along the way. And he hates that. Wah wah wah. He calls Captain America a douchebag who is essentially just government property, and he wanted to use the reveal of his identity to bring down the president. Zoumas goes on to explain that all this shit with the politicians, the scandals and the dirt, it all gets brought to the public’s attention by people with money. And these people with money spend a lot of their money to make sure the scandals and the dirt get revealed to the public “by accident”, even if that means getting people like Jessica Jones involved fourth- or fifth-hand. You dig?

Zoumas tells her again, kindly, to just sell the tape and take the money. Jones says she would never do that. So Zoumas tells her again, kindly, to sell the tape because if he finds out she either destroyed it or she dropped his name about this to anyone, he’ll ruin her and then kill her. You dig?

So that’s a NO to the bullet in the butthole, then?

Jones starts freaking out just a tad as Zoumas walks away to play through on the course. She gets a phone call by a guy named Clay Quartermain who tells her to turn around and walk away immediately, which, I’d say, isn’t much help at the moment. He informs her that S.H.I.E.L.D. has had a bug on her since she showed up at the crime scene, and they just got the whole conversation between her and Zoumas. A swarm of helicopters emerges, and Zoumas’ crew tries to shoot their guns at them while Quartermain insists that Jones gets far away. He tells her “If you had taken the job with us at S.H.I.E.L.D. none of this would have ever happened to you. But you never listened to me, not once.” Jessica Jones is such a woman, never listening to the man! How dare she, ugh, gross, awful. This Quartermain guy sounds like a real winner.

Crunch Crunch, Little Bug

Back at her apartment, Jones is watching a Keaton concession speech as she’s rooting through her clothes looking for the bug. “Clay, if you’re listening, thank you and fuck you” she says after finding it and before crushing it between her fingers. Soon, there’s a knock at the door.

“HI, I’M CHRIS EVANS!” says the man at the door “I PLAY STEVE ROGERS, AKA CAPTAIN AMERICA! YOU KNOW, FROM THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE MOVIES? CAN I COME IN?!” He asks her for the tape, which she proffers to him without hesitation. Captain Chris Steve Evans Rogers America is surprised that she didn’t hand it in to the authorities, and Jones tells him that it never even occurred to her to do so in the first place.

He finally sort of recognizes her as an old member of the Avengers, but apologizes for his time-travel-related memory lapses. They share an awkward pause. Jones apologizes that the woman died. Chris Evans says “haha, uh, yeah, uh, that sucks doesn’t it? Heh? Man…” He then asks her why she quit superheroing, and she gets annoyed, and he gets pushy about it, so she finally answers the question. “Because it became very clear that I could never be you” she says earnestly without a hint of Krysten Ritter sarcasm. And she didn’t mean Chris Evans Rogers Mr. America specifically, no, she meant the whole dang gang. She says she didn’t have what it took. She didn’t have the drive to be a good person all the time. Roger Evans ‘Merica tells her that, out of the millions of people he has met, he can think of three people, TOPS, that would have handled this situation the way she had.

Nothing like a rousing compliment from Captain America himself. Let’s see here…*squints*…”that’s the stuff”. Wow. Yeah.

He thanks her, and tells her to call Carol Danvers if she ever reconsiders joining the team again.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed this immensely as a story with a beginning, a middle, an end, with excellent pacing, suspenseful moments, real emotional tension, high-stakes situations, and sorta realistic dialogue. I enjoyed this immensely as a character study of an extremely flawed, extremely human individual with extremely human motivations, hesitations, insecurities, and hangups.

But all this drama over Captain America’s secret identity? Give me a break, he can go fuck himself!

Done with Alias for now! Gonna circle back to it eventually, but the Matt Murdock stuff intrigued me so I’m going to give Daredevil a shot next on the Marvel side of things. I hear that he can’t SEE! LOL!