Keemia’s Castle Part One

A little girl named Keemia has been brought to a place that her father calls her kingdom, because she wished to be a princess. She enjoys her little winter wonderland because she can watch whatever she wants in a theater and the fast food restaurant always has food ready for her to eat. However, as the little girl plays in the sand she misses her mother and her grandmother. As she falls asleep in the sand, the sand suddenly lifts her up in the air as it forms into a massive bed and home made entirely of sand. As she dreams she thinks how her father promised he would bring her family and how he’s every where all at once and how he is the best father in the whole world.

That morning, Peter Parker arrives at his job at city hall. Glory Grant is glad to see him because things have been hectic after Electro’s attack on the city.[1] She has her hands full dealing with the mayor, who is now proposing a Freedom of the Press Tower to be built in the space where the Daily Bugle building used to stand. She wants Peter to go down to the NYPD’s crime lab to get ahead of a Front Line story that is about missing evidence. She wants Peter to document that this is an isolated incident caused by an inexperienced crime scene analyst before lawyers from all over start demanding retrails. Peter is shocked to discover the CSI technician in question is his friend Carlie Cooper.

Meanwhile, J. Jonah Jameson and Joe Robertson have come to the ruins of the Daily Bugle building. This somber moment leads to the pair talking about the one time they worked overnight during a tight election on Thanksgiving and how Joe’s wife, Martha, was so mad she didn’t talk to him for a week. They get a good laugh when Martha mistook a voting term for an actual person and asked why this person was ruining their Thanksgiving. This brings a tear to Joe’s eye and Jonah tells him that the building can’t be salvaged and will have to be totally demolished. All they are waiting for is an order from the mayor to take the building into eminent domain so they can do their job. It’s laying on Jonah’s desk and he can’t bring himself to sign it and asks Joe for advice on what to do. All Joe can say is that he thinks Jonah should do the right thing, and walks away saying that he knows Jameson always does.

Later, at the NYPD’s forensic’s lab, Peter Parker is taking photos and thinking about how much things in life change. Back when he used to work at the Daily Bugle this was the type of story they would bust wide open, now that he is working for the mayor’s office, Peter is helping to damage control. In either case, they were doing what they thought was best for the city. That’s when Carlie Cooper rushes into the lab to tell Peter that she didn’t lose anything, even though the rest of the staff have been asked to escort her out of the building. She explains that the evidence lockers are hemetically sealed and required a combination to open. Even though the logs show nobody opened the lockers after Carlie sealed the evidence at the end of her shift, they somehow disappeared overnight. Peter notices some particles of sand on one of the evidence bags and asks her about the cases.

She tells Peter that all of them were all murder cases where there were no finger prints on the murder weapons. The first victim was Herman Cohen who was found in a dumpster on Friday night with an ice pick in his back. The next was a woman named Alma Alvarado who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer at the cell phone store where she worked. The last victim was a man named DeShawn Prince who was found dead in his bathtub with a hunting knife in his heart. She tells Peter all of this to show how sharp her mind is and that she wouldn’t lose evidence like this. He believes her, but the staff still insist that she must go as she has been put on suspension until a formal invenstigation can be completed. She pleads with Peter not to let them do this to her and how promises that he’ll do what he can to prove she is innocent.

That evening, Peter bundles up against the cold weather and goes out as Spider-Man to look for clues to clear Carlie’s name. He starts by searching the apartment of Alma Alvarado. In her bedroom he discovers that she was a supervillain groupie with stacks of letters from the various criminals she wrote to in prison. When he finds a stack of letters from the Sandman, things start making sense. That’s when Alma’s mother comes into the room and tries to shoot the intruder with a shotgun. Thankfully, Spider-Man’s spider-sense allows him to get out of the line of fire and he quickly convinces the elderly woman that he’s there to try and find out who killed her daughter. However, he also learns that Alam’s daughter, Keemia has been missing for three weeks. According to the two children she was playing with, Keemia was led away by the snowman they were building when it suddenly came to life and started talking to them. It lured Keemia away by offering to bring her to her father, playing on her fantasies of being a princess. When Spider-Man asks about Keemia’s father, the grandmother doesn’t know who it is, but says that Alma had to get a lawyer recently to keep Keemia’s father away. The lawyer turns out to be Herman Cohen, one of the other murder victims.

Spider-Man then pays a visit to Betty Brant to see what she knows about DeShawn Price to figure out how the concert promoter connects to Alvarado and Cohen. Betty, who has started her own blog after the DB! shut down tells the web-slinger that Price was in negotiations with the city to put on a winter concert series on Governor’s Island and that his recent death put a kibosh on those plans. Spider-Man congratulates Betty on her Bugle Girl blog and wishes her the best.[2] She is certain she’ll do well since she has her own connections to the mayor’s office. Spider-Man leaves allowing Betty to eavesdrop on her roommate, Glory Grant, who talks in her sleep.

Spider-Man then paraglides to Governor’s Island, which would be the ideal place to stash Keemia since it is the off-season. Spider-Man hits pay dirt when he sees that there are snowmen built all over the place. He finds what appear to be the footprints that belong to a little girl and follows them into the massive outdoor coliseum. There he is ambushed by the Sandman who denies being involved in the murders and tells Spider-Man to get lost and leave him and Keemia alone. When Spider-Man puts up a net of webbing, the Sandman tells the web-slinger it’s useless because he can always sift out of the webbing. However, this time, Spider-Man has upgraded his webbing since he the Sandman is now killing people. His webbing has been coated with hydrofluoric acid, which can melt sand particles. Spider-Man doesn’t think this will kill the Sandman but figures it’ll keep his busy until he finds the little girl and gets her out, promising that he’ll find a way to restore the Sandman later.

The Sandman quips by sarcastically saying he didn’t know Spider-Man cared. When the wall-crawler turns around and is shocked to see an army of Sandmen has suddenly appeared.[3]

Recurring Characters

Spider-Man, Sandman, Keemia Alvarado, J. Jonah Jameson, Glory Grant, Joe Robertson, Betty Brant, Carlie Cooper

Continuity Notes

1. Electro destroyed the DB! Building in Amazing Spider-Man #612-614.

2. Betty tells Spider-Man that she was thinking about striking on her own ever since Dexter Bennett assigned her to do a hatchet job on Martin Li. This began in Amazing Spider-Man #588 because Martin Li was supporting Bill Hollister during the mayoral election. Her investigation into Li occurred in Amazing Spider-Man #568-573 and Dark Reign: Mister Negative #1-3.

3. One of Sandmen is wearing an outfit patterened after the high tech costume that the Sandman wore on and off from Fantastic Four #64 until Amazing Spider-Man #214.

Topical References

• J. Jonah Jameson and Joe Robertson’s election day story is a reference to the 2000 United States Presidential Election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The joke here about “hanging Chads” is about a contentious issue during that election about balots that were cast in Florida. That year, votes were made using punch cards, each chad on the card was for a different candidate. It lead to a lot of in fighting about the actual vote numbers because Florida was a swing state and these voting cards were notoriously bad at recording people’s actual votes because chads were prone to being partially punched or left dangling raising question on if they were spoiled ballots or votes intended for on candidate over another… It was a much simpler time. Anyway, needless to say, this should be considered a topical reference since at that point that US election was 10 years old when this comic was published.