Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #16 – “The Underneath (Part 1)”! In the previous storyline, Jessica Jones was on a missing girl case in a podunk town. The missing girl in question ran away from home because she was too doggoned liberal for her shitty, racist, hick town. In the end, the girl’s dad gets stabbed and her possibly adult girlfriend picks her up to run away again. I just copied and pasted that from my Issue #15 rundown! It’s called saving precious time.

Anyway, here’s another Alias story.

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #16 [February, 2003]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“The Underneath (Part 1)”

Jessica Jones looks at a women’s magazine at a store and loudly swears at advice like “show more cleavage” and “swallow that cum”. Luckily she’s there, because someone tries to rob the cashier at gunpoint. “Oh shit!! Shit shit shit!” is all she can say about it at the moment. “Oh man! This is like that movie with Harrison Ford. Fuck – what do I do? What did Harrison Ford do?”

Jones wonders if she should just go ahead and be a superhero for two seconds while the perpetrator screams at the cashier with words like “gimme all your money” and “swallow that cum”. Jones wants to intervene, but she also promised herself that she wasn’t going to do this stuff anymore. She picks up a soup can. “I’ll just clock him on the head and that will be that.”

Well, that won’t be that, as it turns out. Jones misses and almost hits the cashier. She admonishes herself quietly. “Wow, I suck. He’s ten feet away.”

The robber turns around and starts firing multiple rounds in Jones’ direction. If this weren’t a comic book, she would be riddled with bullets! This is a comic book, though, unfortunately, and Jones is able to run right up to him and tackle him to the ground. Success! Now the easy part: getting the cashier to pick up the gun, aim it at the guy, and hold it there until the cops come. However…

“You bastard! You pig!! You dog!! I will kill you and then find your family – and kill them…” the cashier shrieks while Jones is like “whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, calm down dude, oh my god, just call the police.” Everyone lives happily ever after.

Too rich for my blood! I’ll just smoke a rolled up newspaper with some dried leaves in it.

Jones returns home to her dark, but relatively clean and well-organized apartment. She reflects on her occasional desire to do the superhero thing, but fuck that. Armed robberies suck and nobody acted right and it’s just a big pain in the ass in the end. “It’s the same thing with dancing,” she says. “Once a year I end up at a dance club – and all it does is remind me why I never go dancing.”

Then she outwardly calls the cashier a dick for having the audacity to charge her for cigarettes after saving his store. It’s like, come on dude, at least give her free cigarettes for, like, a year, or something.

Jones is about ready to settle down for a nice episode of Trailer Park Boys when she notices her curtain fluttering by her open window. Then she sees the light on in the closed bathroom. Not afraid of a probable rape, she approaches the door. A figure steps out of the bathroom… and it’s… it’s…

A woman dressed as Spider-Man. She has short cropped hair and some dang ol’ titties. “Jessica? Is that you?” she says. Then “You’re not Jessica…” Then “They — they lied to me! Those fuckers lied to me!”

Jones has no idea who this woman is or why she’s parading around her apartment in Spider-Man jammies. Before Jones really has a chance to get information out of the woman, she leaps out of the window (breaking all sorts of glass) and swings away (slamming into the side of a building ungracefully, of course). Jones was able to snag her mask before she took off. A mystery is on our hands! Time for some detective work!

*pulls out the ol’ magnifying glass*

Ant-Man aka Scott Something Who Cares, a man whom Jones went out on a date with, arrives at her apartment to help flesh out this mystery!

“And what did she look like?” he asks.

“Like Spider-Man with little tits,” she responds. “It was creepy, Scott.”

“I hate those female versions of already established male–”

“Ugh — I know. Like She-Hulk.”

“Jennifer’s cool.”

“Whatever.”

Basically, subconsciously, I’m dtf, and if you too are dtf then we should both probably just f.

Scott asks Jones if she called the police. She goes “nnnn…” Calling the police is for dipfucks. Besides, they don’t do shit. Cops are bastards. No, no, here’s what’s going to happen: Jones is going to apologize for dragging Scott’s ass over here at 3am and here’s some coffee and yes I’m on the pill.

Scott thinks nothing of it! It was cool that she thought to call him, and it was cool for him to come over. Both parties are incredibly cool!

“You got something we can board up this window with?”

“I dunno.”

“You feel safe sleeping here tonight?”

“Not really.”

“You want to sleep over?”

Oooooooooooooooo!!

Here’s what sleeping over looks like: Scott splayed out on the full bed, and Jones smoking in her underwear at the dinner table searching for Spider-Ladies on her garbage early-2000s laptop. She wants to call an Agent Quartermain, who answers the phone a) knowing who she is, and b) knowing she’s at Scott Lang’s apartment. “ARE YOU SHTUPPING ANT-MAN?” Quartermain asks. “DID YOU CALL ME AT FOUR IN THE MORNING TO TELL ME YOU’RE SHTUPPING–”

Jones tells Quartermain to cork the fuck up and listen to what she has to say. Some teenager girl in a Spider-Man costume broke into her house and then broke out of her house. Quartermain looks something up for fifteen nanoseconds and tells Jones that the girl is named Mattie Franklin. “She did a short run as Spider-Woman,” Quartermain says. Cool info. So what the fuck was she doing in Jessica Jones’ house? Quartermain sends her an email with all the info he has, disparages Ant-Man one more time, and hangs up. Fuckin’ S.H.I.E.L.D.

We end with J. Jonah Jameson walking out to his car after a long day of putting boots up everyone’s asses in the office. Jessica Jones lurks in the shadows, tells Jameson that he’s not returning any of her calls. “I thought you’d take the hint,” he tells her.

“We need to talk. Mattie…”

Jameson looks shifty as he chomps on his disgusting cigar, looking like a pile of shit. “Get in the car,” he says.

Final Thoughts

INTRIGUING! I wonder how far J. Jonah Jameson’s hate-boner stretches out in his pants for Spider-Woman. If it’s anything like my hate-boner for Jason Schwartzman, then it’s a pretty big hate-boner.