Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #36 – “Today”! In the previous installment, Parker swings around town with rejuvenated energy! That black liquid suit has really transformed him into something harder, better, faster, stronger! But, just like every daft punk before him, he gets a big wake-up call by hubris. Ooohhhhh, the hubris! It’ll get you every time.

He finds the man who killed Uncle Ben and decides to go into Monster Mode with his slick new suit, scaring the fuck out of the guy AND Parker at the same time! I’d say the guy deserved it, but instead Parker scrambles to cut loose from the suit’s control over him and he lands unconscious in a graveyard after falling through some power lines. That happened to me once, and I hated it!

This is the aftermath of the suit hangover. Aunt May probably made cookies.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #36 [April, 2003]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Today”

Eddie Brock is chilling with verified minor Gwen Stacy in his dorm room. He gives her the same spiel, verbatim, he gave Parker back in Issue #33, To paraphrase: get over it! So you keep getting dumped by rude boys, big deal! High school is stupid! Does that help?

And it does. She calls him out on repeating this information. “What is tha, Eddie? Your schtick?” she smiles. “Maybe…” he smiles back.

JAILBAIT, BABY. He leans in for a kiss! She stops him immediately.

“I’m only fifteen, first of all.”

“I thought you wouldn’t care about that – girl like you.”

Ha! Typical. This is the part where he gets all pissy and butthurt because she’s not going to give it up. He even makes scowly faces and starts calling her a tease and making her feel bad. All she wanted to do was hang out. See a little reggae. Chill, ya know. Take it easy. Relax. Take a load off. Eat some pizza. Shoot up a HELL of a lot of heroin. You ruined it big time, Brock ol’ Boy. You fucking idiot. Rape someone your own age. OR, like, don’t! Sorry. Don’t do that at all.

She leaves, slamming the door. “They’re all the same…” he mumbles. “Never changes.” He clicks on his TV and catches coverage of Dark Spidey, dubbed “yet another Spider-Man copycat”, as he saved the day in Manhattan. “Or, as many believe, the original is back… with a new look and a bold, new attitude!”

Hey man… got any of that HELL of a lot of heroin left over?

Brock watches the footage of Dark Spidey hopping around and recognizes the protoplasm suit. “Oh my God!!” he yells, bolting from his dorm and toward the science research facility. “Can’t be… can’t be…”

IT COULD. He catches Peter Parker in the act! The kid is addicted to the black stuff. He needs a fix. He’s getting twitchy. He’s stealing more from the vault. Eddie Brock just stares at him, dumbfounded. That goes on for about two pages.

“What – what have you done?!!” Brock yells, putting on his INTIMIDATION face. Parker looks nervous and tries to explain himself, which would be hard to do since the first time around involved sneaky thievery. How about we just forget this whole thing ever–

“What are you doing here, Peter? How did you–?” Brock looks furious. Parker tries to tell him that this substance is dangerous. It’s uncontrollable. If it can be controlled, these two sniveling wimps aren’t capable of controlling it themselves. Brock doesn’t care about any of that; Peter Parker broke his trust, man! His trust. That is hard to mend! Have you ever tried to mend trust? It’s slippery, like Jell-O.

Parker wants to destroy the flask. Brock tries to grab it from Parker’s grubby little hands, but Parker does this little thing where he grabs Brock by the jacket and effortlessly lifts him in the air with one hand. Eddie Brock looks scared. Peter Parker looks scared. I look scared, too. I’m scared.

Brock puts the pieces together. “You – you’re Spider-Man, aren’t you?”

EEK! OOK! BZZZRTT!! “Eddie, we have to destroy this,” Parker responds, ignoring the question, holding up the flask with the disgusting black liquid. “I am going to take this and destroy it so we can…”

“YOU TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON OR I GO RIGHT TO THE $#%!@ POLICE!” he shrieks, likely in an uncanny Eric Cartman voice.

No, you absolutely cannot have any of my heroin.

So Parker tells the whole story, right up to the end where he had to steal clothes out of the dumpster to shield everyone’s eyes from his abhorrent nakedness. Brock looks like he’s sadly pooping out a toaster, but then Parker legitimately apologizes for 1) breaking the gelatin-like trust, 2) stealing this stuff twice, and 3) did he mention breaking the trust yet? Sorry about that too.

Peter Parker then spends an entire page – an ENTIRE PAGE – talking about how he’s seen stuff like this ruin lives and families first-hand. How the horrible crap he’s come up against as Spider-Man has really fucked him up. How arrogant he was to think that he could handle and control this unknown substance. It has to be destroyed. Okay? Pretty please?

Eddie Brock’s expression softens. “Peter – this is all I have left of my father. It’s all I have left.”

Parker talks a lot more! “Look at me – I had the thing for an hour and look what happened. I almost killed a man with my bare hands. It’s a cancer. It’s a virus.” There’s a lot more then just that, but he’s getting repetitive. Another good point was that there are some men, some bad men, some very very bad men, who will do ANYTHING to get their hands on something like this. Pokers under the fingernails. Dick and ball torture. Reruns of That ‘80s Show. Remember that? Horrible!

Brock still doesn’t agree to any of this, but he has conceded to the reality that he won’t be able to stop Parker from destroying it. Man, is he scowling. First the 15-year-old girl wouldn’t fuck him and now this? What a day.

Since Parker still isn’t assured that Brock is at all okay – why should he be? – he tells him that this Spider-Man thing is a secret to everyone he knows. Aunt May. Gwen. The Mayor. Everyone but MJ, but she doesn’t count. Brock’s eyes light up at this revelation. “That’s right,” Parker says. “That’s how much it means to me that you believe me.”

This is what did it. Brock lightens up. He’s impressed with the kid in many ways. He even smiles a tad, but then immediately slaps his forehead. He walks away growling. “I gotta – I gotta ingest this.”

Sounds good. You do that. You ingest. You digest. Any sort of -gest you need to do.

I can’t believe that worked! All for me! All for me!

Brock walks away, and Parker immediately flies over to an industrial plant and drops the flask down a smokestack. Good riddance! Now for some Funyuns!

He flies home and doesn’t even take a shower after changing out of his garbage clothes, which he should have done because he bumps into Gwen in the living room. Aunt May is at a parent-teacher conference, which means the two of them are alone and some good ol’-fashioned hanky panky might be in the cards soon!

“Where were you?” she asks him.

“At the Bugle.”

“Sure you weren’t stalking your ex-girlfriend?”

“Come on…”

“You talk to your buddy Eddie?”

“Did he call?”

“Don’t know. Did you talk to him?”

“No.”

“No?”

“What?”

“Between me and you – your little boyhood pal’s a dirtbag.”

“What’d he do?”

So Gwen recounts the “what’d he do” part of what he did, and “he got like a guy” when she wouldn’t let him touch her fun bits. Parker tries to defend him, just a little bit, probably in a feeble attempt of “NOT ALL MEN”, but Gwen insists that this guy ain’t no good. A real rotten egg. A real piece of shit rapist murderer anime-loving asshole.

Flashback to 43 minutes ago, where Brock wants to ingest. He walks through the halls bug-eyed, like when Eminem tries to look tough. He looks like that. He scowls AGAIN, does an about-face and checks on his locker. “He did it,” he mutters, staring into the empty compartment. “Little jerk took it.”

He walks over to another locker to grab a jar of putrid black potion, a separate sample. Smiling, he opens up the jar and sticks his hand in…

Final Thoughts

Whoa mama! This is the part where Eric Foreman turns into a Bad Boy! Look out, Spidey, you’re gonna get entangled within the venomous wrath of Venom Brock! He’s going to give you the atomic wedgie of your life.