Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Spider-Gwen (Vol. 1), Issue #2 – “Most Wanted (Part 2)”! In the previous installment… I’m not sure exactly. I feel like I jumped into the middle of something I don’t fully understand, and I barely got her origin story which amounts to nothing but a complete, brazen Spider-Man rip-off. Here’s what I gathered:

-A flying ugly man named Adrian Toomes, aka the Vulture, is old and washed-up and I guess his weakness is bruising his fragile ego.

-Spider-Woman is bad, but she might not be bad, and people think she’s associated with the Bodega Bandit, who is definitely bad.

-MJ Watson fronts a band that Gwen quit because MJ is a complete micromanaging perfectionist.

-Captain Stacy knows that her daughter is Spider-Gwen, probably because a name like “Spider-Gwen” gives it away completely.

-A man named Frank Castle is beating people up for information about Spider-Woman and finds out the fatass Kingpin is involved.

In short, this series is already awful and I don’t expect it to get better. Time to get today’s issue over with tout suite.

Spider-Gwen (Vol. 1), Issue #2 [May, 2015]
Written by: Jason Latour

In an anticlimactic turn of events, Spider-Gwen has landed on a barge full of garbage bags. She sings to herself in a daze until a Spider-Pig – yes, a Spider-Pig – yes, a pig dressed up as Spider-Man – wakes her up. “Upsy-Daisy, Lazy Swayze. The vulture’s gettin’ awayze.”

He calls himself the “Sporktacular Spider-Ham” and I’m driving a nail into my brain with a hammer right now. Google a picture of Jason Latour and you’ll find a guy way too old to think this dumb shit is funny. Gwen pulls off her hood and green drunk bubbles are floating above her head. Spider-Ham tells her “oink oink”. Just kidding! See, I can be funny, too!!! No, he tells her that seeing him doesn’t make her sadder than the Smiths (with editor’s notes that say that the office doesn’t like the Smiths). Nail in the brain.

“Puking in the Hudson River from a garbage boat…” says the “Sporktacular” “Spider” “Ham”. “That’s a powerful New York move, Gwenzelle.”

Gwen wonders how he could fucking lose to the Vulture of all birdlike entities! Spider-Ham details how it happened. You see, he dropped her on purpose. Then she webbed up a pair of impromptu wings, which slowed her fall by approximately two nanometers per gigasecond, sending her bouncing on the ground until she landed “gracefully” on the barge.

“Right. Face first into the trash,” Gwen says, slumping. “Just like my career.”

Spider-Ham tells her to chin-up. Vulture’s long gone, so go home and regroup, buckaroo. She can’t go home, though. She can barely stand to talk to her dad on the phone. Speaking of which, where did that phone go??

Her 160gb porn collection. But seriously though, you’re talking to a pig. This issue is hilarious!

The phone has been picked up by the police. Evidence. The cop reports to Captain Stacy, who is like “that’s evidence you nitwit”. He knows it’s Gwen’s phone and despises the position this puts him in, so he announces that this must be Spider-Woman’s phone and that he’ll handle it swiftly.

A Detective Jean DeWolff is like “what are you going to handle” while she rightfully snoops around. Captain Stacy goes “humina humina humina” and says that it’s just her daughter’s schoolbag that he found and that he’ll return it at once and post-haste! DeWolff buys it.

Anyway, DeWolff reminds Stacy that the Spider-Woman case isn’t his anymore anyway. Frank Castle over there *points to a mountain of a man* has a lead on the Kingpin and he’s going to try to crush his fat fingers with a corked bat. “Thinks there’s a link to Spidey,” she says.

“Doubtful,” replies Stacy. “The Kingpin’s been in prison for years, Jean. Right where we put him.”

Who’s this “we”, shithead? You did this. And you’re coming with DeWolff and Castle to interrogate this 500-pound sack of elephant turds even though he hates your guts and will take the first opportunity to crush your stupid peanut head.

Meanwhile, Gwen sleeps off her adventures on her couch with her cat in an apartment that she presumably shares with MJ and Glory, who are both like “look at you, queen. You look like you ate a homeless woman and stole her clothes”.

Like the Great Gazoo, Spider-Ham sits there on the couch next to Gwen and only she can see him. She asks why he — “Peter” — is still there with her, and Glory asks if she’s feeling all right. “We haven’t seen you in weeks,” she says. “Randy Robertson found you passed out in a bar – a bar in… God… Gwen, have you really been hanging out in… Manhattan?”

Manhattan? Mother of Jesus! How crass and crude! Gwen can’t believe she passed out in motherfucking Manhattan.

All MJ cares about is that the band can be reunited! Glory tells her to stuff it. “Right, I should totally save it –” she yells. “– for the next time she bails on the biggest night of our lives!”

MJ and Glory fight while Gwen sits next to, what wasn’t it again? Spider-Ham? Ugh. She clandestinely whispers to her couch neighbor.

A talking pig??? Absurd!!

Gwen gets up in the middle of the other ladies’ pissy fight and declares that she’ll be leaving for no other reason other than, well, she gotta. And the ladies stop dead in their argument tracks and tell her not to go! The Mary Janes need her! Drums! Hello?!

But she walks out anyway.

And, elsewhere, and by “elsewhere” I mean “fatass prison”, Frank Castle interrogates the Kingpin about his various ne’er-do-well proclivities and his connection to the dreaded spidery female crusader. “Spider-Woman? Pfft,” the Kingpin scoffs. “An attention-starved fake looking to get her photo taken? I’d never condone such nonsense.”

He wouldn’t condone skipping cake time either. The Kingpin tells Castle to fuck off because he’s in solitary confinement and can’t do nothing about anything anyway. Idiot.

“You think I care if you’re not behind it this time, Fisk?” growls Castle. “You know who is. Where to look. At least you’d better hope you do. ‘Cause if not – I see no reason why I shouldn’t just do the world a favor and close your file right here and–”

Captain Stacy shuts him up and tells him that’s enough. Enough. Over the line, pal. You can pump his butt full of saltwater enema juice, but you can’t threaten to kill him.

Matt Murdock, Fisk’s attorney, gets looped in via speakerphone. The Kingpin, you see, is a model inmate who is serving his time nicely. “Any further contact without concrete evidence linking him to the criminal underworld or Spider-Woman constitutes targeted and malicious harassment. And will be treated as an act of war.

Fisk smiles with that shit-eating smile that obese people in prison tend to smile.

Yeah, you’re special all right. Special like a fox!

Castle is like fine, you’ll get your war then. And he hangs up the phone. Murdock laughs to himself with that shit-eating cackle that blind red-headed lawyers tend to cackle.

You see, Murdock is playing superhero right now and whacking the fuck out of the Vulture with his cane. He’s being held down by Murdock’s goons, and I didn’t even know he had goons!

Murdock tells the Vulture that Spider-Woman’s life was the Kingpin’s to take, so if he robbed him of that privilege, then he’s in deep doo-doo. The Vulture mumbles and gibbers and apologizes profusely like a sniveling little weasel-face. And that’s hard to do when you have a bird-face.

And this point, I’ve decided that Spider-Woman and Spider-Gwen are one and the same, right? How can that be when Spider-Woman is Jessica Drew? I’m so goddamned confused about this.

The Vulture doesn’t think Spider-Woman’s dead. He dropped her from the sky, sure, but… *cane*

Murdock believes him, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Spider-Woman’s alive, now does it? “You owe me proof,” he says. “Find her. Bring her to me. Show me what you’re worth.” Yeah, right. He’s not even worth a 1-cent pony ride outside of Target. And those are fun.

Meanwhile, Gwen is still talking to that fucking pig. She even asks why he’s still hanging around anyway. “Good question,” he responds. “Maybe you have permanent brain damage.”

Spider-Gwen spiders around town. She ain’t got time for Mary Jane-related drama while the Vulture lurks in their midst. “You’re doing this for the wrong reasons, Gwen,” says the pig. “None of this will change the past. So long as you’re out here alone running from the truth.”

Listen. Trouble has been chasing me my whole life. You just have to drink heavily until you die! Problem solved.

Captain Stacy is at a bar with Frank Castle thinking about how much he’s afraid of him. Standing up to the Kingpin like that? That takes cahone balls. “DeWolff said you were a family man, Frank,” says Castle conversationally. “A father?”

Stacy thinks that maybe Castle is right to stand up to these mooks. That maybe Fisk and Murdock deserve to die. “It’s been a long day. You should go home, Frank.”

Stacy wonders what will happen if Frank Castle gets to Spider-Woman before he does. “You want to go home, Captain? Go home. I’m going back to work.”

“Gwen’s going to get hurt if I don’t stop her,” Stacy thinks and he slinks home alone through the dingy alleys of Queens.” A shadow creeps over him. Stacy holds up a phone. “I take it you’re looking for this?”

“No, Dad… I’m looking for you.”

TO BE CONTINUED?!?!?!?!

Final Thoughts

It’s a little bit better, but I’m still unimpressed. This Spider-Ham nonsense needs to cease before I make BACON out of his ASS. That’s right. Don’t mess with me. I’m cuh-raaazzy.