Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #51 – “Shadow Puppets”! In the previous installment, a mysterious, villainous woman dressed as a black cat skulks a Chrysler building in order to (successfully) steal… something that looks like the Rosetta stone? Spider-Man fails to thwart her. He’s bummed.

Peter Parker considers hanging up the ol’ Spider-Man jockstrap, which MJ approves. They both profess their love with one another, but then MJ’s alcoholic dad shows up to go “you little ssshitss can’t, uh, aren’t gonna… you little sshhittsss can’t see eashotehr anymrt zzzzzzzz”, which is a real buzzkill.

A news report shows Spider-Man as an “accomplice” to the thieving black cat lady. More bad news for America’s Frowniest Teenager.

Let’s rejoin the action!

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #51 [February, 2004]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Shadow Puppets”

Spider-Man looks like he’s sticking his package right into Black Cat’s face. This one is certainly not for the kids.

In the office where the Rosetta Stone-type tablet was stolen, a goateed man named Mr. Moore gets slightly berated by a slick, smooth Mr. Dini, Fisk’s righthand man. They finish watching the news clip of Spider-Man and Black Cat cavorting around the rooftops. Moore is asked where the tablet went, and his answer is “uh, sir, as you can see from the video, uhh…”

“You understand our disappointment,” Dini says to a boggling Moore. “A promise has been broken.”

“Uh, you see, you’re putting me in an awkward position here, Mr. Dini.”

“Awkward for whom?”

“See–”

“The tablet means nothing to us unless all the pieces are–”

“See, that’s what puts me in an awkward position. I mean, I came to you. I said I could get this tablet piece you’re missing. You put out the word that you’re looking for this—this ancient text thing—And I said I know people who could not only locate this rare antiquity, but they could get it here, to the city–”

Sounds to me like Mr. Moore is doing a little too much jibber-jabbering and not enough tablet-having! What Moore was hoping for was to develop a relationship with the Kingpin by making this tablet offer, you know?

Well, Mr. Wilson “Kingpin Was a Funny Movie” Fisk is very very very disappointed that the promise was broken, as was already said, you old chatterbox broad you. Moore stands by his point that HE FOUND IT AND HAD IT AND NOW IT’S MISSING. He FOUND it and HAD it, goddamnit! And some kid in his jammies steals it? Not his fucking problem, hoss.

There’s a lot of this kind of back-and-forth. Moore insinuates that Kingpin’s people stole it. I mean, no one knows about it except him, Fisk and Dini. What else could have happened? Huh? Hmm? Eh? Wuh?

But why would Fisk steal something they were going to get for free anyway? Hmm? Eh? Buh?

Cork it, Colonel Sanders.

Dini doesn’t want to hear any more of it. Get the tablet tonight or you’ll be slurping soup through your butthole in intensive care.

“Call this number,” Dini says, handing him a piece of paper. “No one will answer. Leave a message. Someone will call you back and name a place and time and tell you how much to bring. When you meet this person, don’t give names. Don’t speak about anything other than the task at hand. Loose lips and all that…”

Moore stares sadly at the piece of paper. He doesn’t understand what the hell is happening right now. He wants out. He wants out and he’s pooping his pants and why can’t things return to normal and oh god the poop…

“You came to Mr. Fisk with a promise.” Mr. Dini stares at Moore like he’s about to hate-kiss him. “I think you best follow through with that promise. As I’m sure you have heard, he doesn’t take well to disappointment.”

Eep! Arp! Ook! Moore pushes back again now, demands to know what’s so dang special about this tablet. He is met with a scowl for an answer. And then when asked if he knows anything about Spider-Man, Dini says he’s the most dangerous man on the face of the earth.

“Danger” is his middle name! One of his middle names, at least. The other one is “Agnes”.

In school, as you can see, Parker is behaving rather dangerously. His teacher gets right up in his sleeping face and startles him so badly he falls backwards in his chair. Detention! Cancel your Saturday plans of (EVERYONE SAY IT WITH ME, NOW) jeeeerrking offffff!!

After class, Parker moans about not being able to sleep well the previous night. Too much anxiety. Too bad MJ’s not a shoulder to cry bitter tears upon anymore, because her dad put the kibosh on that, boy, did he ever. He’s getting ready to put her into private school where they wear plaid skirts and get hit with rulers by sexually repressed nuns. Parker gets salty, then they fight a little in front of everyone in the hallway. MJ starts crying and runs off. Gwen is in the background soaking all of it in…

After school, Parker frowns at his work computer. Robbie “Robbie” Robinson approaches with a fat stack of papers — personal ads — for him to log into the server, which sounds like a lot of work to me. Sounds like a lot of busy work. Sounds like—hey, what’s this? This one envelope has more money than he’s ever seen in his life! Who’s sending this in? The pope?

“Spider Spider. I was intrigued by our last meeting. Were you? Life is too short. We should explore this. Meet me one roof over from last. ‘The Cat.’”

Parker stares like someone gingerly placed a honeydew melon into his anus.

Elsewhere, a trenchcoated Mr. Moore enters an empty bar. Deep in the shadows, in the back of the bar, is his contact. It’s a woman. She holds out a hand. “I already know what the job is. Did you bring the money?”

Hey, you’re not Jennifer Garner!

A-BUH-BUH-BUH-BUHH. “Well, uh, how are you going to find them? This Spider-Man and this other girl?”

Shut it, nerd. Not for you to care about. You already done fucked up, so you’re out of the picture right now. “We’re done for today,” she says, sliding the bulging envelope of money toward herself. Moore is bold enough to tell this woman that she’s very attractive and asks for her name.

She actually answers him for some reason and tells him to get out before she pepper sprays his eyes into the eighth circle of Hell. He obliges and probably gets killed somewhere, idk. Hopefully. He looks like he deserves to get his brains splattered all over the sidewalk.

Peter Parker lays forlornly on his bed. It’s about 10:30pm, and he decides to give MJ a ring on her LANDLINE. Idiot. Her father picks up and Parker hangs up. Get a cellphone. Hey, you guys live next door, get some string and a couple of cups.

Parker now has visions of Black Cat looking all buxom and sultry in her leather suit. He gets this odd gleam in his eye. Time to meet up with this sexy piece and see if he can get his dick a little wet, youknowwhatimsayin? “What I should do is meet her and tell her that stealing is wrong,” he says to himself, smiling like some kind of smitten nine-year-old. “Meeting her just to talk is ok.”

Next thing you know, Spider-Man is swinging all around the city looking for pussy. He wonders if this is just a trap. Some kind of sick joke. And…

He finds her sitting on the edge of a building on top of a blanket with wine and cheese. “Oh hey…” she looks up, smiling. “You came.”

Oh, he came all right.

Came suspiciously. He wants to know what’s going on and what she wants. She wants to just talk. “I don’t meet that many interesting guys,” she claims.

“You robbed a guy’s office.”

“Not a nice guy’s office.”

“And then beat the snot out of me…”

“Knee jerk reaction.”

“And now you want to go on like what. A date with me? Up here?”

“I brought wine. Which was actually really hard to get all the way up here.”

Cat’s gettin’ his tongue!

She removes her mask and flashes her a winning smile. “Hi.”

…

“Well, I guess I can stay for a minute,” Spider-Man says finally. He takes off his own mask… from his chin to his nose. They clink glasses, but shit is already cut short by his tingly Spidey Sense. Through the air, toward them, flies a sai. You know a sai, right? Raphael uses them! You know Raphael, right? You had fucking better.

Spidey pulls Black Cat down on top of him just in time. They’re basically scissoring each other now.

Elektra shows up to ruin the party.

Final Thoughts

Why anyone may have any interest, romantic or otherwise, in stinky Peter Parker is beyond my understanding. I hope Elektra pounds Black Cat into a kitty coma and then flicks Spider-Man into the middle of a lake.

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #50 – “Black Cat”! We made it to #50, boys and girls, now there’s still like 100 to go! HA HA HA. In the previous installment, J. Jonah Jameson almost gets killed so he has a change of heart about firing the poor Peter Parker lad. Apparently, Jameson’s son blew up on a space shuttle! Fancy that. And he says his son was a hero. Spider-Man ain’t no hero, and he’s tired of people saying that Spider-Man is a hero.

Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk is fat.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1), Issue #50 [February, 2004]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Black Cat”

A superhero-garbed woman stands atop a tall, tall, tall building. Her leather suit is so tight you can see her full buttcrack. She spies on a man in an office with a scantily-clad woman. They walk away from the window and the lights go off. The costumed crusader checks her watch. 7:30pm. She smiles WRYLY.

A crossbow to the building across the street creates a tight-ass tightrope for her to traverse. Building security’s rooftop alarm goes off. Is it the wind? A bird? A place? Superdouche?

One of the guards demands it’s the wind. Call it in and the cops will be like “ha ha ha ha, idiots”. So let’s not do that. “Think they’re all better than us,” says the white guy. The black guy is like “yeah, yeah, they do, don’t they??” And then the white guy suggests that the black guy goes up to the roof to check it out himself. What could go wrong? A nice disemboweling never hurt nobody.

And since the white guy has seniority over the black guy, the black guy has to go to the roof to get killed. “Condescend to me?” he grumbles as he approaches the roof. “You’re the one condescening to everyone, man…”

He opens the door to the roof and waves at the security camera. The superVILLIAN, perhaps, garbed woman is perched right above his head… ready to pounce… and then the guy’s security guard hat gets taken in the wind. He chases it, and the woman runs through the door. It closes behind her, locking the security guard on the roof.

Come up and get me while the woman fucks up the whole building. Runs around it like she owns the place. Pulls fire alarms and moons the streets through the windows.

I’m just going to call her “Black Cat” since that’s the name of the issue. A janitor moves through the hallways, blissfully closing her eyes and listening on her earbuds. Black Cat stares at the woman, and suddenly the bucket of soapy water dumps all over her! Take that, you minimum wage-making harpy!

When the woman walks away, hands rubbing her eyes, Black Cat sprays paint on the security cameras. Then she tries to hack into a electronically-locked room to no avail. She frowns. Then she stares at the lock. The lock approves the systems override. She smiles.

In the office where the man left with the floozy, there’s a Jackson Pollock-looking painting behind the desk. She sprays the air, revealing a criss-cross of security lasers. I can’t tell what she does – maybe uses a mirror? — but the lasers disappear and she grabs the painting. There’s a vault behind it, which surprises her! Maybe she just wanted the painting, but this now looks promising!

She rummages through the desk and pulls out a file with a secret latch attached for some reason! She pulls up the file, the latch catches, and the vault opens.

An ancient pizza menu!

Black Cat pulls out a Rosetta Stone of sorts. She looks bewildered at first, then sees the word in the middle that vaguely resembles “PIZZA” and then she smiles. Black cats love extra anchovies!

The security guards are back and they AIN’T HAVIN’ IT. They sound scared, like “oh shit, there’s a door open, we actually have to do our jobs and we don’t really know how”.

Black Cat grips onto the wall above the doorway, unseen. The white guy trips on a rug and his gun goes off. The bullet ricochets off the window, sets off a fire sprinkler, and sprays the room with gushes of water. Black Cat slips away while the two dudes blub and glub.

Up on the roof again, Black Cat almost starts traversing the tightrope when A SPIDER-LIKE BOY IN RED PAJAMAS EMERGES FROM THE SHADOWS. “Hey, uh… what exactly are you doing?” he asks. She turns around and stares at him silently, brandishing hella cleavage and causing Spidey to put some semen into his pants. He calls her a step up from the usual riff-raff he deals with, and she responds with a WRY smile. Then she leaps off of the roof!

Of course, she’s clinging to the side. Spidey leaps off the roof himself and plummets to the streets below like an idiot doofus. He webs the roof and climbs back up. He says some witty Spider-Man things while she continues running. “You know, if I didn’t know any better I would think you’re trying to avoid me,” he says. She kicks him in the chest with a FUMP. He blocks the next kick with a FUNK. “Lady!!” he yells while she continues doing her Judo moves. She grabs Spidey and flips him to the floor. She steps on his head and pushes his face into the cement. “Crossed a black cat…” she says. “Seven years bad luck.”

WHAT AN EXCITING ISSUE! I LOVE WRITING ABOUT 25 PAGES OF ACTION SEQUENCES!

He chases her and falls on his face. She looks back and grins.

Then she’s gone.

Whew, that was fun. Let’s move onto some good ol’ boyfriend/girlfriend dialogue. Parker and MJ are hanging out in Parker’s room studying for midterms. He’s preoccupied by the Black Cat events. MJ knows he’s thinking ‘bout bein’ Spider-Man. She’s playing with a can of web jism and sends a squirt in Parker’s direction. It splats behind his head.

Money shot!

“Honestly, I was thinking… Maybe… I should put the costume away for awhile and just be a normal guy.”

“Really?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Really?”

“You’d be cool with that?”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t understand. Would that make you happy?”

Do we not remember MJ’s anxiety over Peter Parker’s Spider-Man adventures? Do we have the memory of a goldfish? OF COURSE she’d be happy, dingus. It’s what she has always wanted.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” he says. What a moron.

“Listen… I’m not saying I want you to stop being Spider-Man. You do whatever you have to do,” she says with melancholy in her gravelly smoker’s voice. Wouldn’t that be funny?

Parker is just tired of fighting idiots and getting hurt and failing to catch the bad guy. Wilson Fisk is still out there gorging on donuts. This Black Cat lady gave him the slip gracefully. “Thing is… I’m not that big on fighting. I don’t like it. Punching someone, even someone with metal octopus arms… it’s not a fun thing to do.”

Pussy.

Do you know what Peter Parker would love to do right now (besides eat Pizza Rolls and stroke his schlong)? He would love to go walk in the park with his redheaded girlfriend. “I would love to go, like, on a normal date. Just me and you. That’s what I really want.”

She shoots him in the face with a gun! Never mind, that was Alec Baldwin. My mistake.

Vegas, baby!

He suddenly shifts the topic to MJ’s dad like a complete waste of space. What was a nice conversation suddenly turns hostile and weird. HE CHEATED ON HER MOTHER! SHE HATES HIM! WAH!

Parker says that he’d never cheat on her. She knows. Then they both say “I love you” to each other. “Do you think we’ll get married?” she asks him, and he stammers like “I-I-I-I-I–” and then says “yeah uh I think so”.

Then they kiss and smile at each other and look lovingly in each other’s eyes, and then Aunt May shows up at the top of the stairs checking on any hanky-panky. “Peter? Both of you come up to the kitchen.” She looks sad as the dickens. Is Uncle Ben dead? Say it ain’t so!

Surprise! MJ’s father showed up to the house! He looks mean and gruff, like a J. Jonah Jameson that could kick J. Jonah Jameson’s ass. He has MJ’s diary. Aunt May roughly suggests that, whatever is going to happen right now, it should happen back at the Watson household.

“I would, May, but this involves both Mary and Peter.”

“Fine, but you should do this–”

“May, please.” He waves her off. MJ is beside herself that her dad was reading her diary and runs away screaming “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! WAH!”

Craig Watson, as he likes to be called, reads a passage from MJ’s flowery, pink thoughts. “I almost died tonight. Oh my God, I almost died. If Peter hadn’t been at the bridge I don’t know what I would have done. What if no one found my body? I have never been so scared in my whole life.”

Mr. Cheating Bastard shuts the book and demands to know what all that means! Was she prepared to jump because she hates her father so much?? “What were you doing on a bridge and what are you doing putting my daughter’s life in danger? I’m waiting for an answer.”

Peter just scowls at him like a rough and tough 15-year-old little boy. Then Craig shakes a finger at the lad and tells him that he and MJ are through! KAPUTT! FINITO! THESE SHENANIGANS AND MONKEYSHINES WILL CEASE! NO MORE COMING AROUND THE WATSON HOUSE! NO MORE SNEAKING AROUND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! AND IF YOU SO MUCH AS GLANCE IN A DIRECTION THAT MJ IS VAGUELY IN, SHE WILL BE YANKED OUT OF SCHOOL AND THROWN INTO A NUNNERY! AND FURTHERMORE, W–

Burt Reynolds, you’re fired!

May kicks him out of the house. Once Craig T. Nelson Watson storms off, May asks calmly what happened on the bridge. Parker tells May to shove it.

“We were at the park and she slipped on– on– on a thing and she almost fell in. I– I caught her by the wrist.”

“That’s it?” May looks at her with her trademark suspicion.

“That’s it.”

“Why didn’t you just tell him that was it?”

“’Cause he’s a jerk. Can’t believe what a jerk that guy is.”

“He really is. I’m sorry, Peter.”

Well, that settles that. Hormel Chili dinners all around!

“Just stay away from their house for a couple of days. I’ll talk to her mom and see what happens.”

“He’s not going to hurt her, is he?”

“No.” May smiles at him lyingly. Then she has that glint in her eye. The one that says “I’m going to stick a knife in Craig’s eyeball.”

May swings by and grabs Gwen to be a witness. They’re going to go next door and snoop around. If there’s any FUNNY BUSINESS, they’re calling the cops.

Once they leave, Parker thinks about the diary. Eek, is there anything in there about him bein’ Spider-Man? Oh God, that would suck dongs! “Ugh! I wish someone would throw that idiot father of hers off a bridge!”

After musing about marrying MJ just to stick it to him, a breaking news report comes onto the TV. It seems that there is amateur video footage of Spider-Man on the roof robbing an office building with a partner wearing a cat costume! What a horrible plague on the city, this guy!

Should’ve stayed home and played Super Mario Sunshine, kiddo.

Final Thoughts

Pretty boring stuff, actually. I was expecting Issue #50 to knock my dick in the dirt, and instead I get silent action panels and some teenage lovey-dovey shit. I want to see Aunt May literally uppercut a punk. I want to see Aunt May make Craig Watson bite the curb. Now THERE’S an Issue #50.