Silk (Vol. 1), Issue #2

* Part 2 of 7 of the Life and Times of Cindy Moon storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Silk (Vol. 1), Issue #2! In the previous installment, we learn a little about Cindy Moon (or at least I do). She spent 10 years isolated in a bunker shortly after turning 18. She has all the same powers that Spider-Man has. She’s looking for her long-lost family. She’s getting used to normalcy, whatever that is.

Cindy returns to her bunker, having spent a third of her life there she finds it more comfortable than sharing an apartment. There’s not much going on yet. Some shitty villain named Dragonclaw is going to be turned into an actual dragon courtesy of Black Cat. We’ll get to see how that pans out!

Silk (Vol. 1), Issue #2 [May, 2015]
Written by: Robbie Thompson

Silk is moving through the sewers like she thinks she’s the coprophiliac Batman, ruminating upon her mission as the good guy (stop the bad guys, bing bong so simple). THEN SUDDENLY A SKULL-HEADED OCTOPUS WRAPS IT’S MANY TENTACLES AROUND HER.

She dies, the end.

Two hours and twenty minutes ago at the Fact Channel building, Cindy Moon is delivering mail around the office as an intern, then she goes out to be Silk. She talks about how she was bitten by a spider, which she already mentioned about twenty times in the previous issue. Then she talks about how she was locked in a bunker for ten years to keep everyone around her safe, which she already mentioned about forty times in the previous issue. But now her family is gone, and she’s gonna go look for them bah gawd.

An old woman told her that the Moon family moved about nine years ago. Moving to a new home was a cash transaction; no forwarding address. They didn’t move any of their stuff. They paid all their bills in cash. Their bank accounts have been closed for years. “Clearly they had help, and there’s only one person we knew who had that much money and influence. Ezekiel. My savior. And my bunker-slash-prison warden.”

He’s dead now, though. OR IS HE?

And everything about his many, many businesses have been closed up. Shell companies. Fronts for “extracurricular” interests. All gone. No records to be found.

So, in short, she ain’t know nuthin’.

Interracial coupling??? FOR SHAME!!!

She returns to her old neighborhood to see how things have changed. She buys a can of iced tea and sits glumly on a park bench. Nobody in town has been around long enough to know the Moons, and everyone who SHOULD remember the Moons don’t for some reason. Maybe the Moons went to the moon! Now there’s a lead you can take to the bank.

Shit, even her favorite pizza place is gone. They had the best pineapple-papaya-pistachio pizza. Nertz.

She had some good times in the pizza place. For example, she broke up with her boyfriend Hector Cervantez there! It’s for bunker-related reasons, but he wouldn’t understand. “You never once mentioned anything about Oxford. Oxford?! They don’t even play hockey over there!” he cries indignantly.

Hector begs to come with her, but she tells him to go to Boston College like he had planned. Oxford is on the other side of the pond, bro, and she’ll write to him “every day”. Hector is sad. She touches his hand and tells him that she loves him (boo) and that she has to go (yay). And she doesn’t want to waste her last night with him fighting (double yay). So they probably bone (triple yay). And then he prematurely ejaculates (quadruple boo).

We’re almost to the point where we began! Cindy hears cries for help as a young fella gets chased down the street by a dang octopus with a skull for a head!

These new-fangled electric cars are looking weirder and weirder every year.

Cindy immediately gets Silky and attempts to fight Skulltopus. It steals an ATM machine and crawls down a manhole into a sewer. Fine, then! Into the sewer we all go!

And here we are now.

“Thick walls. Water rushing. Sound echoing. And my Silk-Sense is still off. Well played, tentacle-monster-robot-thingie. Well played.”

THEN SUDDENLY THE SKULL-HEADED OCTOPUS WRAPS IT’S MANY TENTACLES AROUND HER.

She dies, the end.

But she doesn’t, of course. Silk wriggles herself free and punches the skull in the… well, the face. One eye pops out. “HAIL HYDRA!” it belts out pathetically. Then Silk whips one of the robot tentacles right at the skull and breaks everything into smithereens. And I’m not talking about just ANY smithereens. We’re talking hella smithereens!

Silk emerges from the sewer covered in rank feces. “Good news,” she thinks. “No one can recognize my Silk suit–”

“Cindy?” calls a voice from behind. She whips around and stares Hector right in his sad-ass face. She gibbers about working on a story for the Fact Channel, that’s why she just climbed out of a dang sewer! Heh heh.

Hector is a master of the People’s Eyebrow. “…Cindy… Where have you been?”

“…Oxford, mostly.”

Uh-huh. You never even applied to Oxford. Hector checked. Cindy sweats and looks like a nervous, smiling anime character for panel and tells him that she transferred. But she’s back now!

Look, let’s just agree that there are two liars in the conversation and move on, shall we?

Suddenly, a blonde woman pops up next to Hector. He introduces them to each other. “Cindy, this is Audrey. My fiancée.”

Cindy beams a big, wan smile and congratulates them and excuses herself and walks away embarrassed and stinky. Hector looks on slightly melancholy and puzzled.

Later, in the bunker, Cindy is on the horn with a woman named Natalie from work who confirms S.H.I.E.L.D.’s assessment that the robot octopus was leftover from a failed mission and it became active and, luckily, Silk the Superhero was there to make short work of it! See you tomorrow!

She sad-sacks around about Hector, her first love, being engaged to another woman.

Unknown voices are watching Cindy under surveillance.

“She’s good.”

“Indeed. Faster than I thought. She’s magnificent.”

“The bot was sloppy. I should have updated its software. My apologies.”

“On the contrary. It served its purpose.” The two shadowed figures look at the remnants of the robot’s bloody scrap. “Take Cindy’s blood sample to the lab. Run every test.”

EPILOGUE! Silk thinks she might be getting the hang of this superhero stuff.

And then a big dragon-type beast emerges from the sky behind her. Her Silky-Sense goes haywire.