Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #16 – “Kraven the Hunter”

* Part 3 of 8 of the Double Trouble storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #16 – “Kraven the Hunter”! In the previous installment, Kong tries to convince his degenerate friends that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but he gets nowhere with it. Kong boots Parker right in the butt to try to prove it too, but it doesn’t work.

Octopussy killed a woman who lives in the house he used to live in. The feds presume that he returned to look for something and had to kill a witness. Them’s the breaks, as they say in billiards, old chum.

Spider vs. the Octopus. The classic Aesop fable.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #16 [February, 2002]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Kraven the Hunter”

Doc Ock is talking to ME, THE READER. “How do you sleep at night?” he asks me. “Like a baby, I bet.” Man, he doesn’t know me at all, does he? I’m writing this at 1:30am!

“But I wonder–” Ock continues, “I wonder if in that moment just before you drift off at night – when your head hits the pillow? I wonder if you realize, just for that second, how evil you truly are. What an absolute horror of a human being you are.”

Well, geez, that’s a little harsh, isn’t it? I mean, I’m 34 years old and I still spend four hours a day burning ants with a magnifying glass, I guess. Pulling wings off of flies. I really get off on that stuff. Swinging poop socks on the train. Blowing up the only bridge out of town. Oh yeah baby. But evil?? That hurts!

“I know you tried to kill me.” Ock tells me. Well now, wait a minute! I didn’t tr– did I? Maybe I did. I can’t remember anymore. It’s hard to keep track! Was this last Thursday?

“No…I trusted you. I trusted you and now look at me. Look at what a nightmare my life is because of you.” Ock continues. Well SORRY pal, some of us just can’t handle it!

Hey, this doesn’t sound like me! Well, it sounds a little like me. It sounds a LOT like me, actually. You don’t want my money anymore?

“I guess you think you bought all that inside information about Norman Osborn that you could get from me. You ran out of uses for me. So you tried to destroy me,” Ock accuses me further! Fair enough, haha. Well played, sir, well played. I’ve been cornered again! You are a tough customer, my friend.

OH. Doc Ock is talking to a large portrait of a man hanging in a destroyed office. The man is definitely not me! Heh heh. Right…yes…yes, of course. I knew all along, certainly! … uh

So yeah, Doc Ock is mad at THIS guy. I don’t know his name yet. Am I supposed to? This guy employed Ock to be a spy at Osborn labs, but Ock can’t even remember why anymore. He keeps grabbing his face in a very frustrated fashion! He tried going back to the labs, but it’s completely obliterated! If only he could remember, but it hurts too much to think.

And now he’s mad at this old dude for not letting him die. Well, motherfucker, you’re gonna get it now! Ock’s gonna come fuck you up! “You will feel what I feel! For what you’ve done to me!!” He starts shredding the portrait with his mutant robot arms. Like a real freak.

Let’s forget this guy for now! Peter Parker is hanging out at work checking the many TV screens. One of them is advertising a hot new reality show (2002!) with some Steve Irwin (RIP) Australian crocodile hunter guy coming to New York to hunt “the wildest game of all”…but it’s a secret! This dude is Kraven the Hunter, so he’ll be important later because it’s the name of the goddamn issue! Parker is bummed that there’s no mention of Doc Ock anywhere on any of the TV stations.

A woman passes by expressing her moist-in-the-loins interest for Steve Irwin over here. Parker stays preoccupied about Ock while she mentions fucking him when he shows up in New York. “I would love to be able to sit with him and figure out what’s happened to me,” he muses about Doctor Otto Octavius while scarfing down a candy bar. Fat chance, pal. Even when he wasn’t a slimy octopus he was kind of a jerk anyway.

Now Parker gets worried that Ock might put two and two together to figure out that Spider-Man is the kid who got bit by the spider in their lab. “I mean, a kid at school almost did – and he’s dumb as a bag of hammers,” he thinks to himself, not even giving Kong the courtesy to keep him on a first-name basis with his brain.

Still equivocating like a motherfucker, Parker finally notices that Jameson popped in to give him the ol’ stink-eye.

Focus on the work at hand! You can think about putting on tights and hopping around on your own time!

Parker hoofs it back to his desk, but passes Ben Urich’s cube on the way. He hears Urich trying to get ahold of Capt. Stacy with minimal success. Frustrated, Urich asks Parker if he might know where Doc Ock is, and Parker just about jumps a mile out of his underoos. “WHAT!? NO! I’M NOT SPIDER-MAN!” is how he basically reacts. He might as well have said that! Urich tells him to go easy on the sugar and tries again over the phone.

At the station, Capt. Stacy is deliberately ignoring phone calls from the Daily Bugle. His daughter sits across from him at his office desk. He glares at her. She glares back. I think she’s wearing a flamboyant glam rock Stone Temple Pilots shirt?? That’s rad.

He asks her what the FUCK she was thinking bringing a knife to school! In these post-Columbine times! 9/11 just happened, maybe, in another universe! He doesn’t let her talk much, he just rants and raves about locking her up for the night or that she’s lucky he’s a police captain, stuff like that. She gets up to leave, “I thought we were going to have a talk, this isn’t a talk – this is you freaking out. So freak out by yourself.”

♫♫ I know a girl named Stacey/With a brain that’s kinda spacey! ♫♫

After he tells her to back her butt down into that chair again, she asks him if he ever stopped to think to ask her why she brought the knife to school. Maybe there was a good reason! Maybe someone tried to attack her! Attack her with rapes! Maybe daddy sent her to Rape High School and she needed to be able to defend herself! Ever think of that, sir?

She tells him about Kong’s encounter with “this cute little Peter Parker boy” and how no one, no other students, not even the teachers, did a damn thing to stop it. So she did a damn thing to stop it! And Capt. Stacy tells her that brandishing a knife wasn’t the way to go, but by now Gwen is crying and insisting that she’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Capt. Stacy gets interrupted by a call from his mother, which he takes. SURPRISE! Ben Urich from the Daily Bugle! So what’s up with that Doc Ock guy, huh? Urich has a super secret source that tells him Doc Ock was sighted at the area where the murder happened! You remember, that one murder in that one house? It has eight greasy, tentacled arms all over it! Thanks for listening!

This diversion was enough for Gwen to slip out of the police station, much to Capt. Stacy’s chagrin. As he pushes people out of the way to find her, he gets stopped by two FBI-lookin’ mofos in sunglasses. They ask for his info on the case. When Stacy asks if this might have anything to do with Dr. Octavius, the feds glance at each other.

Urich is left holding a dead phone, not that he was done talking about Doc Ock or anything. Geez. An editor asks the room if anyone wants to scope out the break-in at Hammer Towers, something about a guy crawling up the side of the building with mechanical arms! Sound fun to anyone else? Parker overhears and makes the connection, somehow, I don’t know, between this and Dr. Octavius. I don’t know how he could possibly know this yet, but whatever man!

So that night, under yet another full moon (maybe the moon is constantly full on Earth-1610?), Spidey heads over to Hammer Towers to scope things out. Perhaps we’ll get another story where Spidey gets caught on camera and he needs to steal security footage again. Ho hum.

Also stand on your head and flap like a chicken.

In the tower, the sunglasses feds are still wearing their sunglasses in the dark. Mr. Hammer is there, and he speaks like this: “I always tell people the only difference between me and mah Daddy is that I would nevah evah hang a giant portrait of myself in my corporate office.” Blech! I hate this cocksucker already.

One of the sunglasses feds is Agent Sharon Carter of S.H.I.E.L.D., who I met briefly during the first 1998 Captain America storyline. She has been sent by Nick Fury and the president to personally look into this office vandalization. Sounds like there’s nothing better that S.H.I.E.L.D. can do with their time right now? IT’S THE OCTOPUS! Come on, this is an easy one! Even Hammer Man is suspicious of all this fuss!

Hammer is annoyed, but says that he was nowhere near the office at the time. He was in his Atlantic City casino, likely shaking down fat middle-aged housewives in muumuus. After asking again why S.H.I.E.L.D. gives a shit, and receiving only silence as an answer, and then motioning for Hammer’s secretary to get the fuck out of the room, both agents ask Hammer to swear on a stack of Gary Busey Bibles that what they’re about to say doesn’t leave this room. Pretty please with a cherry on top. No foolin’.

Carter asks if Hammer knows Dr. Octavius, and he responds with “No,” and then “I have met him,” both in between shocked stares that actually say “hell yeah I know that knucklehead, we used to do shots out of each other’s bellybuttons back in 1982!”

Spider-Man listens outside the window as the agents tell Hammer the whole story of how Osborn’s lab blew up, and how he was in a coma, how he escaped from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s facility recently, and how he’s now a big, gross, squelchy octopus! Plus, he has amnesia. And the shits. And he’s angry, to boot! And he’s already killed, like, 6 billion people! So watch your back, pops, because you’re next! That’s all.

Before a shocked Hammer can press for further questions, Spidey pokes his twerpy oval head down in the window in plain sight of the conversers. Immediately, the agents start opening fire with their semi-automatic rifles (and scaring the be-fucking-jesus out of Old Man Hammer in the process). Spider-Man leaps away unharmed. AS USUAL.

AND FINALLY, THE MOMENT IS HERE!!!! Kraven the Hunter arrives in New York City to a throng of drooling fans, camera crews, and reporters! What’s he here for? What’s he gonna do? Get stung by a stingray on live TV?!

Oh man, and who was prepared for this? Dog the Bounty Hunter over here is going to pull up his sleeves and “hunt Spider-Man”. The press is bewildered. “And…uh…what are you going to do with him when you find him?”

“Oh, I’m going to kill him – with me bare hands.”

If you think this sounds nuts, at this time in 2002 he was going up against Joe Rogan telling people to eat deer testicles and eggnog on Fear Factor.