Amazing Spider-Man #501
Saturday in the Park with May
Aunt May is sitting on a park bench talking about how things are going in her life. She says she is happy to see Peter and Mary Jane are back together and that they are truly in love.[1] However, she doesn’t like how Peter has to work all the time. As she is still getting used to the fact that he is Spider-Man, May can’t be in the home when Peter is putting on his costume, and today she made her usual excuse to get out of the house.[2] She tries to explain that it’s not something she deals with every day, but today it seems like she couldn’t get away from Spider-Man. Between children playing Spider-Man in the street, to the owner of a newsstand complaining that his stall got wrecked during one of Spider-Man’s battles.[3] As May went to cross the street, she is shocked when a ton of rubble comes crashing down from the rooftops above onto the street below. Looking up, that’s when she saw Peter fighting a new foe wearing a high-tech suit of armor calling himself the Shaker.
As Spider-Man battles the Shaker, she thinks about how he found himself in this situation. It was earlier that morning when he was reading the newspaper while Mary Jane made him breakfast. There was a story about the theft of a high-tech suit developed by DeepCore Tech that would allow an individual to core deep into the Earth by using a combination of high- and low-frequency vibrations to pulverize rock. His mind snapping back to the present, Spider-Man is horrified when Shaker uses his vibration blasts to shatter the cornice off the side of the building. This forces the wall-crawler to stop fighting so he can web up the falling debris before it can fall on the people below. Then using the momentum of the falling debris, swings his web-net upwards and sends the rubble crashing down on his foe. Hoping this struck the Shaker before he could react, Spider-Man thinks about how he encountered him earlier trying to rob a bank. He remembers how powerful the Shaker’s vibrations were when he attempted to grab him earlier. Unfortunately, Spider-Man’s hopes are in vain as the Shaker uses his suit to shatter the rubble all around him into dust. He then stamps his foot causing the roof under Spider-Man to crumble.
May thinks about how she got most of the facts about this battle later when watching the news, and thinks about how she used to think Peter was so fragile, doting over him over something as simple as the sniffles. Now she thinks about the constant danger Peter is in every day and thinks that it is a whole new world. Still, she respects what Peter does because she understands he does it to make the world a safer place and she tries to live by his example. She then relates to earlier that day when she was waiting in a line at a cellular provider. The man in front of her is ranting and raving on his cell phone about having to wait in line, annoying everybody else. May then took it upon herself to nudge the man with her purse making him drop his phone, shattering it on the ground. Angered, the man turns around and May tells him it was an accident. Unable to think of how to deal with an elderly woman, the man stormed out of the store, prompting all the other customers to applaud her for finally shutting him up. She then caught the rest of Spider-Man’s battle on one of the store televisions.
By this point, Spider-Man has lured the Shaker into a nearby fitness club. There the wall-crawler tosses his opponent into the inground pool. In the water, the Shaker’s vibrational powers work against him, turning the pool water into a powerful series of waves that strike him with the force of a ton of bricks. Spider-Man pauses long enough to explain the science behind it to a young boy on the scene before deciding to help his enemy. As May concludes her story, she gets a call from Peter who invites her to meet up with him and Mary Jane for dinner. May accepts and when he asks where she goes on her mysterious Saturday morning walks, May just tells him that she goes to talk to some old friends. Ending the call, May says she has to go and that she’ll be back next week. As she walks away she turns and stop to turn around and say goodbye to the graves where Ben, Richard and Mary Parker have been laid to rest and says goodbye.[4]
Recurring Characters
Spider-Man, Mary Jane Watson, Aunt May
Continuity Notes
Peter and Mary Jane split up in Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2001. until Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #50. They are referred to as husband and wife in this story. However, soon after this, their marriage is erased from existence by Mephisto in Amazing Spider-Man #545. As such they should be considered a common-law couple in this story.
May recently discovered that Peter is secretly Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #35.
The owner of the newsstand is complaining about how his stall got wrecked during Spider-Man’s battle with Shanthra. That battle ran from Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #46-48. Although there is no particular scene where the two crashed into a newspaper stand. He also makes reference to the fact that the story was covered on Fox News (misspelled Foxx News) and he argues with one of his customers who watch Bill O’Reilly on that station. These should be considered topical references per the Sliding Timescale of Earth-616, particularly the reference to Bill O’Reilly. His political commentary series The O’Reilly Factor ran from 1996 until 2017 when O’Reilly was fired over sexual harassment claims of six women.
Uncle Ben was murdered in Amazing Fantasy #15. While Peter’s parents, Richard and Mary, died years earlier while on a mission for the government as revealed in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5.
