Spider-Man 2099 #21: "Parlor Games"

* (one of five stars)

Summary
[I disliked this issue, so we're going to keep this one brief.]

Spidey is hiding from three leather-clad girls searching for him.  He has previously fought with them and one of them has managed to hurt him pretty significantly.  He reflects that he's in this situation because he had been unable to sleep and, patrolling the city to work through his insomnia, had overheard a Public Eye officer getting a report of a disturbance in a "no-cred slum."  When it turns out the neighborhood hadn't updated its security contract, the Public Eye tells the officer not to deploy.  However, Spidey decides to head there to see if he can help.  On the way to the scene, Miguel wonders about the comment that the Vulture had made to him about what "indy" made him.  Wondering if indys had made someone like him, he encounters the aforementioned girls, who had used special armor that they purchased with their "black cards" to kill a homeless man.  Spidey tries to stop them but, as mentioned above, they're able to repel his attack.  Expositing that they're just rich kids who think that their money entitles them to murder, Spidey proceeds to divide and conquer, taking them down one by one.  In the battle with the last girl, who appears to be the ring leader, she falls through a board and plummets into the water below before Spidey can save her.  The other two girls are shaken by her apparent death, threatening Spidey when the girl's rich father discovers what happened to her.  Spidey tells them that he can get in line with all the other people who want to kill him and orders them to go home.  They're scared, given that Spidey has appeared to have disabled their armor during their battles and they face the "slash gangs and ripper kids" on the way home.  Spidey then makes matters worse for them by tearing up their cards, wishing them a good night as he departs.

The Review
The first strike against this issue is that it's a non-sequitur one-shot that interrupted a pretty great story.  We ended last issue with the promise of finally getting to the bottom of Gabe's belief that Miguel is Spider-Man.  But, instead, we get dumped immediately into a story about teenage thrill-killers with no reference to where the story fits in context of the previous cliff-hanger.  I was expecting something on the letters page, but the editor uses his column to write about a biography he read.  Um, thanks, Joey.  The second strike is the fact that the story itself isn't all that thrilling.  This story doesn't really cover any new ground, feeling much like Spidey's confrontation with the corporate raiders from "2099 Unlimited" #2.   Moreover, Edginton seems to want us to be outraged over the disdain that the Private Eye and the girls have for the Downtown residents, but that story has definitely been done and I don't really feel like Edginton brings any new perspective on it.  The third strike is that the dialogue is pretty awful.  Edginton way over does it with the future slang, with the girls saying things like "shockola extremis double plus."  All in all, it's a pretty forgettable issue and I'm just anxious for David to return and deliver us Gabe and Miguel's conversation.