BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #192

It must be said, this isn’t a great cover. The cover copy is doing all of the work of making the image seem interesting. And seeing Spidey entirely from the back, while that might work in certain circumstances, isn’t a great choice when our central figure is an old guy in a green lab outfit. Ah, well, at this point I was a regular follower of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and so I bought the issue regardless.

As the cover indicates, the issue picks up on the climax of the previous month, in which a dying Spencer Smythe had succeeded in shackling his two greatest enemies, Spider-Man and Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson, whom he blamed for his impending demise, both to one another and a bomb designed to detonate in 24 hours. This was to be his ultimate revenge on the pair, as Smyth had become poisoned by the Plutonium he used to power his assorted Spider-Slayer robots over the years. And that’s where this issue picks things up.

This is a pretty solid situation for writer Marv Wolfman to leave Spidey and Jonah in. It hampered Spidey’s ability to move around and to work out a way to release them, because Jameson was always under foot. It kept him from reaching out to his Aunt May or other loved ones because doing so would reveal his true identity to Jameson. And in fact, the publisher takes the opportunity early on to try to pull off his nemesis’ mask, but fails, and Spidey scares him enough that he doesn’t try it again. Needing help, Spidey heads to his usual one-stop scientific advisor, Curt Connors, secretly the Lizard. Connors confirms that the bomb is real, but neither he nor the newly-arrived NYPD bomb squad can figure out how to disarm and remove it.

To make matters worse, Spidey has exhausted his current supply of webbing, so he’s forces to leap and crawl his way across the city with Jameson in tow–he can’t go back to his apartment and pick up his spare web-cartridges. And it’s at this point that the pair runs across the Human Fly, a villain that Spidey had whipped up on once before, who’s in the middle of a heist. Like the Spider-Slayers, Jameson had underwritten the Fly’s creation, so the villain sees this as a prime opportunity to rid himself of two of the thorns in his side while his foes are hampered. And so a fight sequence breaks out.

The Wall-Crawler is at a tremendous disadvantage bereft of webbing and his natural agility, and so the Human Fly quickly gets the upper hand, throwing the hero and the newsman off a building. Spidey is able to arrest their fall enough so that it isn’t fatal, but the effort knocks him out. Now Jonah has a clear change to unmask Spidey and learn who he really is. But we won’t find out whether he does so for several months after this, as the scene cuts immediately away, creating tension both for Peter once he revives and for the readers. When Spidey does come to, he and Jonah are back at Curt Connors’ place–Jonah tells the wall-crawler that he carried him here himself.

With only an hour left on the clock until the bomb explodes, Spidey and Jameson race back to Smythe’s lair, intent on forcing him to remove the device. But when they arrive, they find the scientist dead, having expired from the condition that was killing him. However, he was thoughtful enough to leave the pair a taunting final video–and both Spidey and Jonah have momentary breakdowns at this point due to how unfair their situation seems to be. But Spidey figures that the equipment that’s monitoring and maintaining the bomb must be here, and he uses his spider-sense (in a manner that really shouldn’t work this way) to locate the proper computer system. But he can’t shut it down, not in the time the pair have left.

So he does the next best thing: using a nearby Liquid Oxygen feed, Spider-Man attempts to freeze the computer system solid. We’re down to the last couple of minutes, of course, and the wall-crawler’s hands are growing dumb from the extreme temperatures he’s handling. But then, all of a sudden, the shackles open and he and Jameson are free. Spidey takes a moment to ditch the bomb, which goes off with a bang–but the immediate danger is now past. However, Jameson is fuming. His foe has now seen him at his worst and most vulnerable when he cracked under pressure, and so his hatred of Spidey is now redoubled. And at this point the story ends with an exhausted Spidey taking off while Jameson muses to himself just how he’s driven to take down the web-slinger because he secretly knows that he’s not half the man that Spidey is. And that’s where we leave things off for this month.