Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #53 – “Daughters”! In the previous installment, Spidey strokes his little pud while watching Black Cat and Elektra fight on the rooftop. Elektra fails to get the tablet back, which stokes Fisk’s fiery flames! And MJ ran away from home. Aunt May’s gonna catch Peter out of the house in the middle of the night again.
Oh yeah, Black Cat said something cryptic about not being her father. I personally don’t care who her father is, but maybe you do? We’re going to probably find out here! Yay.
Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #53 [April, 2004]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Daughters”
The most predictable thing happens! Peter is not in his bed when Aunt May bursts into his room like Kramer. She then knocks on Gwen’s door. “I think Peter and MJ have run away,” May says, eyes boggling, to a sleepy and ambivalent Gwen.
Here’s something I didn’t expect! Peter is downstairs sucking milk straight from the carton. “What are you doing? Why aren’t you in bed?” Oh, man. Time for an excuse! Peter was… uh… watching cartoons with… uh… he was studying for midterms at one in the morning. That’s the one, May. That’s what he’ll go with.
May tells Peter that MJ is missing, that she ran away, that she flew the coop, took a powder, baby. “Her mother just called in a frenzy,” May says, a little bit frenzied herself. “MJ packed a bag and took her money and she’s gone. She’s not here?” May gives her awful nephew a look. “You promise?”
May thinks Peter Parker is sticking his hard dick into MJ’s wet pussy, but Peter just makes a startled face and then books it out of the house. May screams his name. “Guy can move,” says Gwen.
Peter goes next door and raps on the Watsons’ front door. Greg Watson, who was called Craig Watson a few issues ago lmao, answers the door. He is probably drunk as a skunk and demands to know where her redheaded regular child headed off to.
So help me God I will twist your giant hand right off your wrist, good sir.
Greg/Craig grabs Peter by the shirt, which he quickly stops. “I don’t know where she is,” Peter says, squeaking out his most intimidating voice, “so, instead of attacking me… how about you go and look for her?”
*Arsenio Hall Show whoopin’*
Peter throws himself head first into a lengthy monologue while he checks MJ’s room for clues about her whereabouts (not in her room, for starters). She has a Lance Bass poster on her wall. Don’t we all? “Well, this is a nightmare. What is she thinking? Did she leave town? Did she leave me, too?”
Peter goes on and on and on and on about this stuff, wondering if he’s to blame for her behavior and actions. Being Spider-Man, visiting Black Cat, stealing a kiss from Wilson Fisk, that sort of thing.
Then he perks up. His brain got an idea! He runs out of the house smiling while everyone else stares at him like “where are you going, you little shithead?”
Peter later finds her in an abandoned warehouse, wearing a hooded coat, slumped in a fetal position on a pile of cardboard, hand on a diary. There was once an issue where Spider-Man told her to wait here until the coast is clear. Well, the coast clearly ain’t clear, clearly.
Peter creeps closer to her, but she can’t hear him. She’s sleeping. He calls her name, she doesn’t hear. He says “pssst”, she doesn’t hear. Then he grabs shoulder.
AAAHH! A HORRIBLE UGLY MONSTER!! A HIDEOUS, HIDEOUS, UGLY, SMALL-DICKED CREATURE!! RUN!
MJ doesn’t remember falling asleep nor knows what time it is. She’s embarrassed, actually.
“Did you run away from home?”
“I don’t know.”
We’re off to a great start!
“You don’t know? Your mom’s going nuts. Everybody is up and looking for you.”
“I couldn’t stand it in that house anymore! I just – I couldn’t stand it. I was – I could breathe! I had to get out of there.”
“So, where are you going?”
She doesn’t know. Things are messed up. Her dad sucks and things are messed up. She tried going to Parker’s basement, but he was out doing the Spider-Man thing. “I feel like such a loser,” she says. Because she is one, sorta. Where are her powers, huh? “I’m lucky no one came in her and murdered me or something… I’m so stupid.”
Parker tells her she has to go home, but she ain’t doing that. Her dad is being a butthead. All he did all night was threaten her. He won’t let her see Peter. Probably because his name is “Peter”. He’s miserable and pathetic (her dad this time, not Peter) and he smells.
MJ rants and raves about her awful father. He drinks, he cheats, he’s a real slut and a half. “He’s been looking for any reason to make sure I don’t have any happiness,” she rants. Aunt May? She actually gives a shit about Peter’s happiness! Greg Craig Watson? That guy is a fuck.”
There there. There there. Shut up, please.
She continues crying about how things have really sucked and Peter was the only thing that made her happy lately. And she can’t even have that. It fully bites, dude! She can’t wait until she turns 18 so she can get this sweet tattoo of a mountain lion mauling a deer on her back, and she can finally move out and elope and live in a trailer park with Peter until he starts beating her up and locking her in the closet like an abusive redneck.
Parker soaks this all in and comes up with this response: “You have to go home.”
WEREN’T YOU LISTENING?! HOME IS THE PROBLEM! I OUGHTA BOX YOUR EARS!
“Can’t we run away together?” MJ cries.
“I wish.”
“Let’s get married and run away. Please…”
He smiles at her devilishly. “Not yet.”
They hug. I run off to get some of those really good twisty BBQ Fritos. Those things rule.
The next day at work, Parker falls asleep at his desk. He dreams about Black Cat screeching at Elektra about not being her father. “Tell your master!” she yells bewilderingly. Parker gets an image of Fisk in his head and wakes up.
“Cat burglars. Cat burglars. Robbers. Thieves. Burglars.” He looks up a list of “known cat burglars” in the Daily Bugle database and actually gets a list of names! Abner Jenkins! Cletus Kasady! He finds the name he’s looking for: Jack Hardy. He looks up an article with the headline “Black Cat Jack”, which is about the start of his trial. The photo shows a grumpy man with his hand on the shoulder on a grumpy girl – his daughter. The caption names her as Felicia. A Google search gives away Felicia Hardy’s employer: Wilson Fisk.
“Oh. Oh man…”
If you are also a victim of employer abuse, please don’t hesitate to call our hotline at 1-800-VICTIMS-OF-EMPLOYER-ABUSE.COM
Fisk is onto Black Cat! Felicia Hardy, daughter of Jack Hardy! ‘Twas her that done did the robbery! IS THIS ABOUT AVENGING YOUR DELINQUENT FATHER?! Good luck, pal. “Your father was a loser,” he says as he continues killing her, probably. “And the reason your father died in jail, is that he was just bad luck.” So return the weird tablet forthwith!
Enter Spider-Man, who says a quick quip and distracts Fisk and Elektra just enough for Hardy to punch her and then kick him. Fisk crashes through a coffee table while Spidey strongholds the scantily clad bad guy woman. When she tries stabbing him with her sai, he thwaps her in the face.
Fisk gets up and tells Spidey to scram. “STOP IT! Stop interfering in my life!! This is too important for you to–” he lunges at Spidey with the intention to wring his pencil neck, but then Spidey thwaps him in the face.
I guess the threat has been neutralized? Spidey goes to find Felicia on the roof, who looks much better with a dark pixie cut by the way. Hubba hubba. He starts telling her that she needs to get out of here, but she starts spewing out some rants and raves about Fisk letter her father rot in jail. “I am going to destroy him. Everything he says he wants… I will take away from him.”
She pulls out the stone tablet from her purse. “This is just the first.”
Spidey wants to know what it is, and Felicia merely says that it’s something Fisk wants. Oh, his ears must have been burning! Fisk comes onto the roof gracefully.
The Hulk ain’t got nothing on this enormous hunk of man.
Felicia smiles wryly at Fisk and throws the tablet off the roof. It lands with a KERPLUNK into the river… like, really close to the docks… like, easy to recover, actually. Dumb.
Then Elektra shows up, launches a sai through Felicia’s chest, and they all watch her topple off of the roof. Bing bang boom win. Spidey immediately swings his way down to the docks, but he can’t find Felicia’s body anywhere. The cops show up. Spidey looks despondant, then he swings away.
A monologue occurs from an unknown person. “I didn’t believe in the tablet. I’m sorry. It’s the way I am. I cannot find the logic to it. Or maybe, like you said about me, I don’t have the spirituality to believe in things like this. But the tablet meant something to you. You believed. So I made it mean something to me. And that’s–”
The speaker is revealed to be Wilson Poopypants Fisk, speaking to a woman in a coma in some sort of space station.
“That why I would have spent every dollar we had to get it here for you.”
Fisk is desperate for this woman – his wife – to wake up. The tablet could have been the key, and now it’s two feet in the bottom of a river about four inches from a dock.
“Please… please wake up… please…”
Final Thoughts
Oh no you don’t! Humanizing Wilson Fisk and J. Jonah Jameson in the same storyline? What’s next? Lex Luthor’s redemption arc? Joffrey Barantheon returning from the dead to apologize to everyone? Hitler enjoying tea and scones with the Jews?
All this and more in the next storyline!
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