Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #71 – “Strange (Part 2)”! In the previous installment, Parker and MJ have their expensive dinner out on the town, and Parker regales her with a tale of how he encountered Doctor Strange.

Or did he? Memories are surprisingly hazy…

…because he’s actually currently in a living nightmare and MJ is some sort of vampire beast thing and the dead figures of Uncle Ben and Gwen have come to haunt him! Aaaahhh!

…and so forth.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #71 [March, 2005]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Strange (Part 2)”

Doctor Stephen Aloysius Strange is passed out on the floor, as we had seen him in the previous issue. A gust of wind stirs him awake, and he notices that the glass is shattered on his large, round foyer window. He palms his face nervously.

Spider-Man is passed out on his floor.

And Strange’s bald assistant, Wong, is tied up on the floor with sticky webbing over his mouth. “By the hoary hosts of whatchacallit, what happened?” Strange says, channelling his inner Ron Burgundy. “What is going on? What is this?”

Strange casts a spell that dissolves the webbing off of Wong’s mouth. It also dissolves Wong’s shirt right off his body, exposing his tender, pierced nipples! Strange gawks at him, and I think he might even have just licked his lips?

“What happened?” asks Strange.

“Thank the Ancient One, he’s still alive,” replies Wong.

“Is that really Spider-Man?”

“I believe so, yes. He came in through the window–”

“What? He crashed into here? He just crashed in?”

Spider-Man’s breathing is shallow. Wong removes the mask, exposing Parker’s secret face! “He’s probably going to be mad you did that,” warns Strange, but Wong doesn’t give a fuckshit. The kid needs the kind of a help only a pierced-nippled man can provide.

The last thing Strange remembers is meditating on the floor with Wong. But, uh oh, he forgot to create some astral defense spells before the meditation. Without doing that, you can accidentally open astral plane dimensional doorways! Shit! Shit! Possible possession by unearthly, magical, possibly nefarious energies! Fuck!

Wong tried to wake Strange with no success. Especially since he was, you know, attacked by Spider-Man before he had a chance to really try. But the real question here, my bald sir, is why Strange was in a weird sleepy dream state in the first place? Who had put him there?

I don’t know, sir! Your subconscious is delicious to interdimensional beings? At any rate, it seems that the energies have left Strange and latched onto snotnose over there *points to the lousy unconscious teenager*. Strange smacks the kid a bit to try to wake him, and when that doesn’t work he gets up to go look for some spellbooks. “Hang in there, kid,” he says.

Meanwhile, Parker is having some nasty-ass nightmares. Every creature he has ever fought – Green Goblin, Doc Ock, Wilson Fisk, Venom – are attacking him all at once, and they’re all 50 times their usual size!

And now Parker lands in the middle of a picnic, the kind of picnic where people’s Uncle Bens are still alive! But then, suddenly, almost everyone turns gray and drops dead right in front of him.

This is what you get for masturbating, kiddo. You made God angry.

Parker runs away from the scene and suddenly finds himself stumbling upon a kid facedown in the pond. “Hello?” he says to the prone, unmoving body.

“Gwen can’t hear you Parker,” Harry Osborn says behind him. “She’s dead.” Parker asks him how he can talk to her, and Harry responds by kicking him off a cliff! Ha!

Yeah, so this whole issue’s going to be the damn dream, isn’t it? BO-O-O-ORING!

While Parker blubs and flubs in the water below, Strange and Wong (outside of Nightmareland) pore through books to find the good ol’ abracadabra that will wake Parker up again. After what seems like dozens of hours of wasted time, Strange stumbles upon some information about the Dream Dimension. Some powerful, strong, burly men have succumbed to the horrors of the Dream Dimension and died after unsuccessful recovery. The entity within the Dream Dimension feeds off of nightmares, sapping energy to nothing and working toward phasing into the corporeal world. Oh no!

Strange demands that Wong get him some candles, incense, crystals of Agamotto, and a liverwurst sandwich. This kid’s going to wake the fuck up on his watch.

GGGAAAHHH!! I forgot to pay the Hulu bill!

Meanwhile, Parker likely bolts up from a dream-within-a-dream, panting and sweating, saying “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” A shadowy figure in the bedroom with green pants, and a green brassiere, and holding a couple of sai walks closer to the bed. “What’s the matter, sweetie? Nightmare?”

Parker doesn’t find this entirely unusual, so he starts spilling about the dreams he had. The thus-far unseen woman asks him if he has heard the old legend that if one dies in their dream, they die in real life? The figure of Mary Jane enters the light and throws the sai right at Parker’s chest, but it bounces off harmlessly. Equally scantily-clad figures of Liz and Gwen hold Parker down on the bed.

“I’m going to have to kill you, Peter, because if I don’t… you’ll kill me,” she tells him. “You do know you’re going to kill me, Peter. Of course you will!! I will die just because I know you!!”

Parker is horrified by the very truth of this matter! In fact, MJ says she’ll die before that saucy cougar Aunt May!

Figures of J. Jonah Jameson, Robbie Robertson, and Ben Urich appear in front of the bed to take bets on who will die first, Aunt May or MJ. Jameson bets on Aunt May because, and I quote because it sounds like something I’d write, “That woman will drop dead the minute she finds out the nerd wears a costume.”

But Parker will die way before any of them. In ten years, no one will remember there even was a… whatchucallit… Spideyman.

A giant robot bursts through the window and starts choking Parker out while everyone around him cheers. “KILL HIM!! KILL HIM BEFORE HE KILLS ALL OF US!!” smiles and shrieks the figure of MJ. Things are really getting chaotic! Wouldn’t it be really, really funny if Parker never woke up from this? lmao

Too bad. Doctor Strange enters the dream and tells the robot to let Parker go. The robot turns into Aunt May and she’s all like “RAAWWRR! NO!” Strange does some boogity-boogity, which causes Aunt May to yell and whine. She keeps switching between robot and beast and MJ and robot and goddamnit.

Klaatu Barata Nikto, motherbitches!

Strange, as you can see, continues speaking in his wacky language to banish the monster from Parker’s tender neurons. After a spell, so to speak, the demon grows to about 25 stories tall and shapes itself into the visage of Doctor Strange’s father! “GO TO YOUR ROOM!” he says, basically, then zaps Strange with purple laser eyeballs. “This is my domain! The arrogance of you! This is your doing, sorcerer.

Doctor Strange does some magic finger waggling and the demon seems to disappear into a lesser dimension. One of them dimensions that’s fewer than three. I’m gonna say two. “You shouldn’t have used the image of my father like that,” Strange grimaces. “All you did there was make me angry.”

Parker, in an unmasked Spidey suit, hovers unconscious in midair. Strange swims over to him and asks the kid if he’s ok after he slaps him about the face a few dozen times.

“Well done, sir, that was quick.” Wong holds a visibly exhausted Strange while Parker woozily lifts his head up from the floor. “Whatthefuzzaga!!??” he blubs. Strange assures the kid, who smells like poop now, that everything’s going to be ok. The threat is gone. All those bad dreams about the people you live dying and/or killing you? Poof! Heh. So, uhm, wanna go bowling?

Parker stammers that he has seen Strange before, somewhere, maybe. And after Strange admits that he used a memory spell on Parker, which obviously didn’t work very well, Parker leaps through the glass of a fucking window and bolts away from the house.

Doctor Strange admits to Wong that he completely faked his way through saving the day! He should really catch up on his reading, because next time something that is actually prepared might attack! I like this Strange cat, he seems like a lovable fuckup.

Speaking of lovable fuckups, the kid no one loves cavorts back to his house and rolls up into a scared little ball in his basement. The visions are still there haunting him a bit, but MJ starts knocking on the outside basement door to give him kissies and snap him out of it.

He ignores the knocking. All he can think about is MJ yelling about how he’s going to get her killed someday.

“But tonight was our fancy date…” MJ grovels.

Final Thoughts

HAHAHAHAHA!! What a hilarious ending! What other antics is this Peter Parker dickwad going to get into next, I ask ya! Penis caught in a mousetrap?? Cucumber up the butt?? Exciting potential awaits!