Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #56
The Revolution Within
Peter Parker has fallen asleep at his desk in the biology lab at Midtown High. When the morning bell rings, Melissa Coolridge comes in and wakes him up. He offers up a lame excuse when in reality he’s been out late the past eight nights as Spider-Man. He’s taken a particular interest in Melissa’s brother Josh who was jailed after Spider-Man caught him robbing a car a few months back. Since then there has been a new wrinkle to the case, as Josh has disappeared since being released and Melissa has been sneaking out at night trying to find clues as to what happened to her brother with two of his friends. Last night, Melissa ran into some trouble with some crooks that are owed money from Josh. When they are about to get violent, Spider-Man drops some roofing rolls on the thugs so Melissa and her friends can escape. At the end of class, Melissa tells Peter that she wants to talk to him after school. Later, she asks him how she knows his brother. Peter fumbles for an explanation and she thinks that he was the one who flunked him out of bio, the thing she blames for Josh going down the path into crime, but he assures her that it wasn’t him as he hasn’t been working for the school that long.[1] With the situation defused, Peter walks her home. Spotting the guys who have been helping Melissa try to find her brother, Peter slips into an alley to overhear what they are saying. Melissa comes out and tells them that she can only be out until 6 pm when she has to go back for dinner, but will try to sneak out later after her mom goes back to work. Hearing this, Peter wonders how he’s going to keep Melissa from sneaking out. However, he comes up with a solution when he notices that Melissa’s bedroom window opens to the apartment building’s fire escape.
From there, Peter decides to look through official channels to figure out what happened to Josh. At the city courthouse, he learns that Josh was recently released based on good behavior. However, that’s all the information that they can release due to privacy laws. Leaving the courthouse empty-handed, Peter is surprised to bump into Ezekiel Sims. Sims claims that he has business to conduct, but Peter becomes suspicious when he refers to Peter’s investigation into Josh Coolridge to be an interesting case. Peter then pays a visit to a bar called Horan’s Pub to talk to an informant he used to use back when he worked for the Daily Bugle.[2] The man tells Peter that there are three options for a kid who just got out of jail: getting back into his old crimes, trying to join up with organized crime, or a third option he doesn’t want to talk about. He decides to tell Peter as long as he promises not to say who told him. The informant tells Peter that there is something big going on in the fashion district and a lot of guys who just got out of jail have ended up there. Something bad.
Later that night, Spider-Man webs up Melissa’s window so she can’t sneak out later that night. Spider-Man then swings over to the fashion district where he finds a group of men meeting at a warehouse. When he spies on them he sees that they have just recruited Josh as one of their numbers. That’s when Peter gets a phone call on his cell phone from Ezekiel Sims. Thankfully, he has the ringer on vibrate, but when the call goes to voice mail he still has the sound on for notifications. Hearing the noise from the phone, the men in the warehouse order whoever is responsible to show himself. Spider-Man leaps down and tells Josh that he has come for him and that he needs to go home to his family. A fight soon breaks out, but it is quickly stopped when Ezekiel Sims enters the warehouse and orders everyone to stop. When Spider-Man asks Ezekiel to explain what’s going on.
Ezekiel tells Spider-Man that sometimes when a criminal he busts ends up going to jail they spend their time behind bars reading philosophy because they are seeking challenges to their way of thinking, things that are not presented to him by society. Ezekiel has been recruiting these men who are willing to open their mind and giving them altruistic work. Something, that he thinks Spider-Man needs to consider if he’s ever going to be a true guardian — at least in the mythic sense. Josh chimes in by pointing out that Spider-Man never does anything until things have already gone wrong when he should also be looking into ways to prevent that from ever happening. Spider-Man decides to accept Ezekiel’s word that what they are doing is on the up-and-up and gets back to the reason why he’s even there to begin with. He tells Josh that he’s here because his sister Melissa is out looking for him and getting into trouble. Josh is shocked and said he was only waiting until he made something of himself before going home again. With that all sorted out, Ezekiel thinks everyone learned something this day.
The next day Peter is telling all of this to Mary Jane and how delighted Melissa was on the day Peter walked her home and she found her brother waiting for her at home. Melissa is surprised to hear that it was Spider-Man who convinced Josh to come home and tells his family that he is okay.
Recurring Characters
Spider-Man, Ezekiel Sims, Mary Jane Watson, Melissa Coolridge, Josh Coolridge, Laura Coolridge (voice only)
Continuity Notes
Actually, Peter couldn’t have previously flunked Josh Coolridge because Peter only started working at Midtown High since Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #31.
Peter worked for the Daily Bugle as a freelance photographer for years starting in Amazing Spider-Man #2. He stopped working at the Bugle after getting his teacher’s job in Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #31.
