Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #41
Looking Back
Spider-Man swings across the city to meet up with Jennifer Hardesty, one of the students he teaches at Midtown High as Spider-Man.[1] She is excited that Spider-Man has actually come to see her and she is more than willing to answer his questions. Spider-Man wants to know if there was a regular officer that dealt with her brother whenever he got arrested for drugs. He learns that this office, Lieutenant William Lamont at the 14th Precinct, also deals with most of the crimes in the area. Spider-Man thanks her and swings off unaware that he is being watched by one of Shade’s drug dealers. Spider-Man finds Lieutenant Lamont and convinces him to help him out with the street children that are going missing. Lamont tells him to get in the car and the two go for a drive. Spider-Man says he needs information on the man responsible. However, all he knows is that the man calls himself Shade, has a tattoo of a star on his neck, and that he did time in prison where he likely got his nickname. Lamont admits that’s not a lot to go on, but agrees to see what he can find out. Spider-Man says he’ll be by when he has the information and swings away.
Later, Peter pays a visit to his Aunt May and learns that she is writing letters to all the local newspapers and magazines to ask them to publish positive stories about Spider-Man. When Peter tells her that it could raise unwanted attention. May then tells him that she is sending them anonymously one per day and from different mailboxes, impressing him. She goes on to say that she can’t go on and let the press speak ill about her nephew. She explains that she has to keep on moving and doing things until she can properly process the knowledge that Peter is actually Spider-Man.[2] She then changes to the subject and tells him he needs to wash his costume more often because it never hurts to leave a good impression.[3] As she sends Peter to check on the roast they are having for dinner, she reminds him that he is supposed to meet Mary Jane at the airport on Tuesday so they can talk and that she is only going to be in town for one night.[4]
Sometime later, Spider-Man meets up with Lieutenant Lamont and learns that he found someone who matches the wall-crawler’s description that was sentenced to six-year stretch at the Latterby Mental Institution for murdering a Long Island bookstore owner six years ago. They are going there now, but Lamont said Spider-Man needs to wear a disguise so he doesn’t upset the other inmates. The web-slinger isn’t impressed to discover that his “disguise” is a simple trench coat and snap-brim fedora. At Latterby, they are taken to the cell of Richard Cranston. Spider-Man knows this isn’t the same guy he fought earlier but he has the same tattoo on his neck. That’s when the guard says it’s not a tattoo but a branding that never fully heals. All they know about it is that he got it in prison just prior to being moved here from prison. Spider-Man decides they should talk to him to see what they can learn. When Spider-Man starts asking Cranston starts shouting at Spider-Man that Shade took something but he can’t control it. Spider-Man gets him to calm down and explain himself. Richard explains that he killed the bookshop owner so he could get what he needed from an old book. Although the police arrested him he memorized a passage in the book that would have given him great power. He eventually got the missing portions of the passage from people on the outside. He then used the prison metal shop to make the icon he needed to perform the ritual. Cranston explains the ritual would have allowed him to escape from prison and go anywhere he wanted even to the astral plane. When he conducted the ceremony in his cell, he was betrayed by his cellmate who then took the icon and attempted to use the spell to escape from prison. Furious at this betrayal, Richard broke the mystical pental gram he had drawn on the floor affecting the spell trapping his cellmate on the other side. He concludes his recollection by saying what he saw on the other side drove him mad.
After leaving the institution, Lieutenant Lamont is convinced that Cranston is insane, but Spider-Man thinks he can work with the information he obtained. He then web-slings over to Greenwich Village and pays a visit to Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme.
Recurring Characters
Spider-Man, Shade, Aunt May, Jennifer Hardesty, William Lamont
Continuity Notes
Spider-Man jokingly wonders if Bill Gates is looking for a mascot and then figures he’d have to keep changing his name to things like Spidey98, SpideyMe, and SpideyXP. This is a dig on how there were a number of updated versions of the ubiquitous Windows operating system. Particularly the changes from Windows 98 (released June 25, 1998), Windows 2000 (February 17, 2000), Windows ME (September 14, 2000), and Windows XP (October 25, 2001). This should be considered a topical reference not only because of the dated Windows systems joked about here, but also the reference to Bill Gates being associated with Microsoft. Although Bill Gates is known as the founder of Microsoft, he stepped down from all roles in the company in 2006 so he could focus on philanthropy.
Aunt May discovered that Peter was Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #35.
Aunt May jokes about someone making a movie about Peter someday. This joke is a reference to the 2002 Spider-Man film that came out two months prior to this issue’s publication.
At the time of this story, Peter and Mary Jane have been separated since Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2001. This was so Mary Jane can process being held captive by a stalker from Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #13-29. The couple will eventually get back together in Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #51.
