Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #15 – “Confrontations”

* Part 2 of 8 of the Double Trouble storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #15 – “Confrontations”! In the previous installment, Peter and MJ get a little cozy during a pep rally. They meet some blonde goth chick named Gwen Stacy who just transferred schools. That shit wasn’t interesting!

The real meat of the previous story was the Doc Ock stuff. He’s been in a coma since we saw Norman Osborn’s destroyed lab in Issue #4. The explosion caused some metal arms that Ock uses for delicate experiments to be fused permanently to his torso. Not only that, but he can control them too! Far out man! He’s not happy about it, but I’m sure he’ll come around! Any minute now…

Oh yeah, and Kong puts his dick down long enough to figure out that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. And you know how Kong talks and talks and talks and talks, right? So, yeah, that’s not good for the Spidey Boy.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #15 [January, 2002]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Confrontations”

See? I bitched about it before, but these covers suck ass. Why I gotta see so much of Spider-Man’s crotch? Am I being punished?

We open with a scene at a house of a young blonde woman exercising in her bedroom while talking on the phone. I have no idea who she is or how old she’s supposed to be. With the way anyone is drawn in this comic, she could be 13 or 58. She is suddenly startled by a loud crash somewhere in the house. She heads to the stairs, where she sees the following sound effects and speech bubbles emanating from somewhere on the lower floor: “SCCRRAAPE”, “THUMP”, “FUMP”, “Gaaaggh!”, “Huggnh”. Next she sees a shadow of, oh I don’t know, a steel octopus tentacle perhaps?

Next she sees the shadows of THREE MORE! Eek! Fump! Now she’s really worried, sweating like a hooker in church? A killer in church? Anyone in church, really.

The last thing she sees is a tentacle going straight for her face!

Fump!

Exhibit A: Parker is spidery. Exhibit B: Parker is a man? OK, maybe it doesn’t check out.

Now we’re at school, and Kong didn’t waste any time at all. “Peter Parker is Spider-Man,” he tells his faithful, bowl-headed friend Flash Thompson. Now Flash, we all know Flash right? Classic Flash, he tells Kong that he’s whacked out of his mind! Flew the coop! Into the looney bin with you, my bald compadre! Kong tells him to stifle and hear him out, but Flash just gets LOUDER! That’s when Liz shows up to join the conversation, and Kong presses on.

“Remember when the dude got bit by that spider?”
“When?”
“On that field trip, last semester.”
“Oh yeah — that was funny.”
“Well…”
“Well what?”
“He’s Spider-Man.”

And it kind of goes on like this for a bit. Good thing for Parker that no one is gonna believe this bald mofo. Flash shows him a bee sting and tells him that he’s not Bee-Man. They all glance at blissfully unaware, smiling Peter Parker across the hall. He looks like a stoned worm. “That is not Spider-Man,” Flash insists with all the evidence anyone could possibly need 20 feet away from them.

Kong ain’t done! “How do you explain the desks he broke?” he asks, and Classic Flash, always the skeptic, he just chalks it up to Parker being a spaz.

Kong still ain’t done, goddamnit! “And what about all of a sudden he can play basketball so good?” This kid’s desperation is causing some grammar fluctuations. Flash says he wasn’t even that good. Kong is like “‘fraid so”. Flash is like “‘fraid not.”

Also remember that time that he flailed around and pooped on the floor in the cafeteria and then he slipped on the poop and then fell in the poop?? Classic.

Kong is NOT FUCKING DONE! “Oh! Hey — What about when he flipped me over? Right here in the hall.” He has him now, there’s no way his friend is going to be able to- “Dude, he got a lucky shot in. Did the same to me that one time,” And Kong’s like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah YEAH YEAH YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH MAN! YEAH! He broke your hand! Boom! But Flash isn’t budging. Even Liz has to side with Flash on this one.

Kong is done now.

But Liz nudges Kong, “Well, there he is. Go ask him.” Flash has a better idea than that: kick him in the nuts. “If he’s Spider-Man, you ain’t even going to put in a dent.” And Kong, as salty as he may be right now, positively salivates at the thought of punting the twerp’s nuts to Jupiter. So he makes his way over to Parker’s locker, where Parker has spent the last 45 minutes digging through for, I dunno, ear medicine?

As Kong approaches, Parker (his back turned) starts gettin’ all tingly! Spidey Sense! He makes a face that looks like Kong already kicked him in the nuts, but his nuts are still intact and Kong’s another couple of steps away. MJ is in the hallway too, glancing over. And in those moments, those precious few moments, Parker decides to let his nuts take one for the team to protect his identity.

You had it coming.

Luckily, it’s only Parker’s butt and not his nutz. But man, it hurts! He lays it on thick, starts crying in the hallway and asking why Kong did that. “Ow! Owy ow!” he was known to say. Kong is horror-struck, but Flash is cracking the fuck up. Even MJ seems to be slightly smirking!

Parker’s white knight comes strolling by. “What exactly is your problem, fatboy? You ever do something like that again…and I’ll stick you like the fat pig you are!!” No, it’s not Uncle Ben, he’s dead, remember? No, it’s not Kong, idiot, Kong’s the one getting threatened. NO, it’s not Jon Snow, go fuck yourself! It’s Gwen Stacy, and she pulls a knife on the bald bastard! Right in front of everyone, right there in the hallway, right here in this post-9/11 world.

A teacher pushes his way through the crowd of kids and demands to know what the dealio is. Gwen drops the knife on the floor, presumably by accident, which lands with a clang. It’s more like a CLANG! It definitely wasn’t a fump. Everyone stares at Gwen with what I would describe as “serene, placid worry”. Even Kong doesn’t look THAT alarmed. The teacher drags her away while tut-tutting. “Great way to start at your new school. Second day here.”

Back at the house where Tentacle Man fumped around at the beginning of the issue, a detective named Captain Stacy (*snicker*) investigates the completely trashed bedroom. Gwen’s dad, yo. He gets a call from the school about his daughter’s delinquent behavior. He tells the principal to call his wife, because he’s busy trying to solve Octopus Crimes at the moment. Tough titties, sir, the principal is talking to you anyway, really giving you the business about your teenage daughter’s stabby stabby knife threats. Captain Stacy tells the principal to go screw; put her back in class and it will be dealt with at home. Go fuck a duck.

Captain Stacy steps outside the house, which is mobbed with police and news crews. Ben Urich, Daily Bugle, the guy Peter Parker sent Wilson Fisk-related snuff footage to, wants to ask Stacy some questions. Stacy tells him to go screw! Go fuck a duck! Thanks to him, Fisk is nowhere to be found and now there are hundreds of underlings running around town like it’s the Wild West. Urich is persistent, but he doesn’t get a peep about Mr. Octopus from the likes of Captain Stacy.

We cut to downtown where a big guy, who looks identical to Kong except for a stupid ponytail, is running away with a woman’s purse. Don’t worry, ma’am, Spider-Man’s on the scene! And he’s looking to take his Kong-aggression out on some Kong-lookin’ sap.

When the reaction is “gunk!”, that means we’ve officially run out of pain noises.

Spider-Man does some fancy web work and throws out some devilishly snarky quips and bing bang boom threat eliminated, purse retrieved. “Justice has been done. All is good in the world,” Spider-Man announces as he hands back the purse. The woman, and the crowd behind her on the street, gapes at him silently. She runs away without a word. “Alrighty then…” says Spider-Man, Pet Detective.

♪♪ “This is what it sounds like when doves cry.” ♫♪♫♪

He tries to speak to the rest of the crowd, but he gets no response from anyone. They all look like Spider-Man is going to explode green acid goo all over them any second. Even J. Jonah Jameson is there looking like someone took a big watery dump on his breakfast. “Hey…” Spider-Man gets right up in his doe-eyed face “Aren’t you J. Jonah Jameson, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Bugle? Aren’t you the guy printing all that totally made up garbage about me…just to sell newspapers? Well…I only have one thing to say to you…”

And Jameson, he doesn’t even blink. He continues staring at the masked teenager as if he’s about to get his mouth fucked shut.

“Love the paper! It’s hysterical.” Spider-Man beams as he does cartwheels and backflips up the side of the building. Jameson unclenches his butthole. He calmly instructs his crew to go back inside the building and- FUMP!

He conks his head tripping over the webbed purse-snatcher still stuck on the street.

Back in Jameson’s office, he tries to get the scoop from Urich about Octopussy. Urich tells him, after a cursory investigation of the background info, that the man who had rented the house before the now murdered woman had rented the house was none other than Osborn Labs’ Dr. Otto Octavius! Woop! He’s dead right? Died in that explosion? Nope! He’s very much alive and tentacled. Urich tries to tell them that he’s not dead, but everyone in the office hoots and hollers their skepticisms. Flash Thompson may as well be here too, he’d be in good company with these naysayers.

I’M LOOKING FOR THE TRADER JOE’S! SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME FIND THE TRADER JOE’S! I WANT SOME SCALLION PANCAKES!

“A few weeks ago I came in here and told you that my sources confirmed that Octavius was taken to a government hospital / medical facility somewhere in South Jersey. Code name: Octagon,” Urich claims. And those same sources called him yesterday to inform him that Octavius escaped from there after murdering some jerks. Pah! Jameson says his story is full of holes! Like a Michael Bay movie! He says this! Poor Michael Bay just tries to make movies for really, really dumb 15-year-old boys, let’s not criticize his objectively horrible filmmaking! How unfair!

Urich gets haughty and starts shoving it in Jameson’s face that HE broke the Fisk story. HIM! So eat his turds! Urich’s right about this. There’s something fishy going on here. Something smells. It stinks. It stinks really bad. Time for some journalists to dig it out of the dirt and show everyone.

Meanwhile, action shots of Octavius scuttling around town are shown as Urich and Jameson argue. Scuttling around town looking like a bowl-haired dumbass.

Urich has so many questions that are unanswered: What happened to him? If he murdered the woman, why? Is there something at the house that he needed? Did she kill him to eliminate the witness? For what reason? Where’s my coffee? Is my hair on fire? Where’s my hair? Why? Huh? And so on.