Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #39 – “Therapy”! Wrapping up the storyline with an issue that will, I assume, be all about Peter Parker talking to a school counselor about why he sucks so damn much! In the previous installment, Venom Eddie Brock faces off against Peter Parker. Parker tries to help him the whole time, proving that he was the good guy in this whole scenario. In case you couldn’t tell. Eventually, the police get involved and they shoot Brock seventy-two times right in the dick, killing him dead.

Parker’s dad had a lot of words of wisdom in his video message. Some people are just the way they are, and you’ll never know why they are the way they are. You can go mad trying to figure it out! And then you can die in a plane crash, leaving your child orphaned and forced to live with his smelly Aunt May.

Onward to the aftermath.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #39 [June, 2003]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Therapy”

Nicholas Aloysius Silverstein Wulfric Brian Fury is having a lovely meal at a restaurant. Outdoor seating. His fancy wrist watch goes “GLEEK” and he makes a face that looks like if gleek could make a face. “One eye eagle,” radios in a S.H.I.E.L.D. soldier, “we are receiving a recurring energy flux in your immediate area.”

Cool beenus. Fury tells him that he’ll take care of it, over and out, and no questions. “Keep online, await my command.”

Fury slowly walks to a nearby alley and flashes a light out of his watch that makes a bulky mass suddenly fall with an “OOF!” into a dumpster. Temporary genetic paralysis. Sounds useful.

“Peter Parker, why are you following me?…” Fury asks with a demeanor opposite that of his surname. “…Where’s your little Spider-Man costume?”

It’s in the shop! Er… what costume?? Heh. Uh… my dog ate it.

Parker has been following Nick Fury ever since he left his S.H.I.E.L.D. House of Donuts, and he didn’t even notice! As the leader of the top espionage organization on the entire planet, he’s impressed! Enough with that, though. Parker has a request of Fury: take away his powers. “I don’t want them. I don’t want to be Spider-Man and I don’t want my powers.”

Sounds to me like Peter Parker misses some of that MJ fuckin’. He asks fury to inject him with something or spray him or immerse him in vile liquid or something. Just do it.

This Aaron Sorkin production coming soon to a comic book near you.

Fury doesn’t wanna. Parker explains the whole Eddie Brock situation, which is something S.H.I.E.L.D. has actually been keeping an eye on. Good work, lad. Fury radios Agent Carter and tells her that Parker took care of it. “Finish up and get out of there,” he tells her before GLEEKing out. “So what happened?” he goes back to Parker. “Where’s the creep now? Did you kill him?”

He thinks so? Hard to say. There’s no body. He just disappeared. “Kid. There’s not too many actual rules to this game of ours, but one of the big ones is: If there’s no corpse… the guy’s alive.”

Solid information.

“Best you could hope for is that you scared him into never trying any stupid crap like that again. (But sadly, one of the other rules is that you probably didn’t.)”

He’s like the dad he never had die in a plane crash or get bulleted in the chest by a scoundrel.

“Are you listening to me?!! I think I killed someone. I want you to do the right thing.”

With great power comes great responsibility, kiddo.

Want what? That facial expression? Because, buddy, I don’t want you to have it either.

Fury tells the sniveling whiner that he needs to ask himself if anybody’s life is better because of what he did today. Yes? Then keep at it. No? Do better tomorrow. Don’t forget, Fury has his eye on you, buckaroo. You’re prime S.H.I.E.L.D. material! There are a lot of janitorial services that need to be done around the office. Maria Hill pukes everywhere. “You’ll work alongside Tony Stark. Doctor Bruce Banner. Captain America…” and he lists other people no one would ever want to spend time with. “You don’t want to be Spider-Man anymore? Fine. What else you doing to do? Work at Burger King? I have. You don’t want to.”

lol that Fury tells the school nerd that he’ll work at Burger King if he doesn’t want to be Spider-Man. Nothing in between here, it appears. Fury does have some good advice, though: take some time off. “Just because you’re Spider-Man doesn’t mean you have to be Spider-Man every single second of every single day.”

Parker asks Fury how his parents died. Fury doesn’t know. Seriously, he doesn’t. Seriously, stop asking. Seriously. Parker frowns, not really believing him. I’m not sure what he thinks Fury might know. That their plane was shot down? That Eddie Brock murdered them? That they ate too many delicious Burger King burgers that Nick Fury prepared for them and fell asleep at the wheel? Meh.

They shake hands and Fury sends him off on his merry little way. “It’s all right. But next time you want to talk to me – make an appointment. Or I’ll shoot you.”

The best advice yet! Parker leaps around town unsatisfied. He needs to know what happened to Eddie Brock. He can’t leave it open-ended like this, even though he should. He should just go home and play Mario Kart and jerk off to Princess Peach like a normal 15-year-old. But no, he wants to clean up his own mess this time. Not the police or S.H.I.E.L.D. or Nick Fury or the Jonas Brothers or anybody like that.

Yuck. Face the responsibility of looking like dogshit first.

Parker travels to Empire State University to see if Brock is in his dorm room. He ain’t. “You missed him,” Brock’s roommate tells him while cleaning up the trash heap that comprises 96% of the living space. “But if you see him, tell him he still owes me $750 for that thing that time.”

Brock must have returned because all his stuff is gone. “Left his garbage for me to clean up, which is so entirely like him.” So Brock is gone. Without a trace… except for the garbage, I suppose. When Parker asks the roommate why he hates Brock so much, he responds that Eddie was so full of shit all the fucking time that you knew he was lying almost all the time. He also constantly went psycho when every girl turned him down. It was getting old.

Next, Parker travels to the science lab and finds a man drinking at a table. “My name is Doctor Curt Connors… Who might you be?” He looks like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine drinking as much as Wolverine and snarling like Wolverine if he found out he was to be played by Hugh Jackman. “Are you Peter Parker?”

GULP! GLEEK! “It was you, wasn’t it?” he continues, pouring another glass. “I saw you on TV, wearing the suit your father invented. The suit in phase two. Form-fitting. Strength-enhancing. You seemed to really be enjoying yourself.”

This guy is a huge windbag. He says about 80 more sentences that amounts to this: “I finally put two and two together that Ray Parker’s son is Spider-Man. Cool.”

Once upon a time, Spider-Man saved Connors’ life. He saved his family. I don’t remember this at all! Did this happen? I don’t fucking remember that shit. But Parker never told anyone, and CUNT Connors seems satisfied with that.

“Your father’s project is gone. Gone, gone. And with it another year of my life wasted.” Connors takes another swig. He looks healthy.

Parker thinks he might finally get the answers he wants, like “what happened” and “why’d it do dat?” and “where’s muh underpants?” But Connors doesn’t know much more than he does about any of this stuff, not really. Everything in the lab is gone, and he was hoping Parker could be the one to shed light on this for him. Alas, the kid doesn’t even know where his underpants are.

Connors has a lot of drunk ramblings that don’t seem that important. Something about mutants and God punishing everyone, I guess. “We seem dead set on turning ourselves into little monsters, don’t we? Wonder why that is. It’s all the rage. All of a sudden.”

My life is full of tulips, asshole.

“And all of us, everyone one of us, is sooo busy running around, trying to beat each other to the finish line – that no one notices the big sign from God that says: Stop messing with my stuff.”

OK, sir, you’ve had enough to drink I reckon. Give me the glass. Just give me the glass. Give me the– give me the glass! Give it! Give it to me! No, stop it! Stop it! Give it to me!

Connors apologizes to Parker for his dad accidentally being “the architect, the pioneer, of this horrible decade of genetic nightmares”, which really ticks him off. But, hey, Einstein wasn’t trying to invent the atomic bomb, but things beget other things in this stupid-ass world we live in.

Then Connors falls asleep in a drunken torpor and leaves Parker with nothing but angst. So angsty that he leaps through a glass window on his way out! Dumb laboratory full of drunk scientists and evil goo! Science is dumb. No more science for a while.

On the rooftop, Parker’s Spidey-Sense starts vibrating up a storm. Thinking it might be Eddie Brock, he starts yelling on and on like a lunatic. He still feels responsible for what happened, he still wants to help, oh god can you please let him help you? For the love of “God”.

And no. It’s not Eddie. Eddie’s not around. Parker is all alone.

Final Thoughts

WITH

GREAT

POWER

COMES

GREAT

SANDWICHES