*** (three of five stars)
Favorite Quote: "'Grandma'?! I am no relation to you!" -- Aunt May to the Blank
Summary
Aunt May is at a bank while it's being robbed. (Shocker.) Spidey gets there post-haste and fights the robber, a villain called the Blank. Peter runs into Ray Donovan, a former NYPD officer now working for the FBI and following the Blank's case. It's revealed the Blank is robbing banks to raise enough money to have his belt, to which he's now physically bonded, removed. Peter tracks down the Blank (by slipping a Tracer on Donovan, who he knows is following him) and defeats him.
The Review
Since the end of "New Ways to Die!" we've had a series of stand-alone issues and arcs, the Spidey Brain Trust's way obviously of getting the most mileage on the mysteries still haunting us post-"One More Day." At this point, the three most pressing are what the hell Harry's been doing (you know, instead of being dead), who Menace is, and who the "Tracer Killer" is. (I'll leave the whole "What happened with MJ and Peter?" issue alone for the time being.) I'm more or less ambivalent about the identity of Menace and the "revelations" in "New Ways to Die!" annoyed me so thoroughly for their inconsistencies that I'm not looking forward to seeing Harry's story further muddled before it's eventually resolved. I'm intrigued by the "Tracer Killer," however, so thankfully it's not a total wash. But, all of those storylines are irrelevant, because we don't touch them here. Like the Flash Thompson and Punisher issues, we've got a stand-alone story here and everything else is still sitting on the back burner.
The Good
1) The story is tight. Motives are explained, everyone stays in character, Spidey saves the day while cracking-wise. All good stuff.
2) I was initially annoyed when Peter roughed up Donovan outside the press conference. It seemed so...un-Peter. But the revelation that Peter did it to put a Tracer on Donovan so that he could track Donovan tracking the Blank made total sense. Nice save, Stern.
3) Bringing back an old minor villain like the Blank, whose most notable appearance is from the red-headed step-child of the Avengers line, "West Coast Avengers," can be risky. (Interestingly, completing my run of the re-titled-"Avengers West Coast" was part of my back-issue buying spree, so we could be seeing the Blank return to this blog...after I get through the remaining 70 or so issues of "Amazing Spider-Man.") Since the character was last seen 20 years ago, readers aren't familiar with him and they haven't watched him upgrade/update like other villains who appear more frequently. (Doc Ock and company are all 40 or so years old, but we see them frequently enough to get around this problem.) If not done well, it can seem kind of hokey, having some guy whose powers were cool in the 80s suddenly appear and compete with a "villain" like Screwball, what with her hip parkouring and snarky repartee. I'm thinking someone like the Ringer might seem a little ridiculous today. But, Stern really did it well here. He gives the Blank a believable motive for robbing banks that makes him more -- if not sympathetic, then -- identifiable. I'm not sure who in the Spidey Brain Trust thought, "Hey, what about the Blank?" But, I'm glad he did.
The Bad
1) This issue had a lot of exposition that seemed weird to me. Peter explains how Aunt May raised him, how his parents left the country, how Uncle Ben died. It was a little distracting, because it didn't really fit in the narrative flow.
2) Oh, look. Aunt May's in trouble. (Again.) Oh, no. Help. Help.
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