The Sting

Peter Parker comes upstairs from doing laundry to find his roommate, Michele Gonzales, talking to her new boyfriend Lucas.[1] The man sets off Peter’s spider-sense and after he leaves, he decides to see why, since he thinks his roommate doesn’t need any added stress in her life.[2] As Spider-Man, Peter follows Lucas to a construction site where he finds a gang of thugs has been gathered by Bushwacker and Tombstone. Once everyone has arrived, Tombstone announces the man they have all come to see, the Hood. The Hood has gathered them all together because he is auditioning for someone to take up the role of the original Scorpion. The winner wins the Scorpion's original costume.[3] As this is happening, a female in a Scorpion costume fights her way through the guards outside and confronts Spider-Man in the rafters of the building. She introduces herself to Spider-Man as the new Scorpion, as she was originally named by SHIELD.[4] She finds it amusing that Spider-Man sees things in terms of good guys and bad guys and attacks him. As they spar, she explains that she was a loyal SHIELD agent until they tried to turn her into a hired killer,[5] and how recently she has absorbed SPIN tech that amplifies her scorpion’s sting.

She manages to tag Spider-Man with her tail, causing him to lose his wall-crawling ability and he slides down the side of a glass window into the view of the combatants brawling down below. Spider-Man then remembers that he heard of SPIN before, it is a technology that stands for Super Power Inhibiting Nanobots, and he is now powerless against an army of thugs led by a trio of supervillains. The Hood, naturally, orders them to kill Spider-Man. The web-slinger attempts to keep them at bay with his web-shooters but discovers that without his powers he can’t aim them properly. As the crooks are busy beating on Spider-Man, the Scorpion ambushes the Hood and steals the costume that once belonged to her predecessor.[7] Annoyed, the Hood tells everyone to stop bothering with Spider-Man and kill her instead.

With the attention off of him, Spider-Man retreats and changes back into Peter Parker so he can try to get away unseen. As he tries to flee the construction site, he runs into Michele Gonzales who asks what he’s doing there. He quickly tells her that he followed Lucas and learns that he is not Michele’s new boyfriend, but a client that she is representing through Legal Aid. They are then caught by one of the Hood’s guards who has been ordered to kill any intruders. Although Peter is without his powers, Michele is far from harmless and easily disarms him with her tae bo skills. As they run from the guard, she explains how she represented Lucas when he was wrongfully accused of a string of pizza delivery robberies. Michaele fought for him through the courts but he still got locked away. Now that he is free, Lucas has been trying to prove he isn’t what the courts claimed to be. She then tells Peter that she came because he doesn’t want to see him throw his second chance away.

Meanwhile, the Hood and his goons have cornered the Scorpion and when Tombstone tries to attack her she manages to sting him. That’s when Michele and Peter find Lucas in the crowd. When she explains she came to get him away before he makes a huge mistake, he reveals to her that he played her the whole time. He actually did commit the robberies and had been manipulating her into giving him money. When he starts trying to choke Michele right then and there, Peter hits him over the head with a pipe and the two make a run for it. Peter is able to lead them away from trouble because his spider-sense starts has come back along with the rest of his powers. He then instructs Michele to go to a nearby bar to call the police for help, making an excuse that he has to go back to take pictures to cover for the fact that he is changing back into Spider-Man. Spider-Man arrives just in time to pull the Scorpion to safety and then collapse a number of steel girders on the Hood and the gang of crooks he has gathered. The Scorpion is surprised that he came back for her and tells him that he owes her one. He simply tells her that this is how things work in his world and swings off.

Peter later catches up with Michele at the bar to see how she is doing after finding out her former client was a liar and a crook. Peter tells her not to beat herself up over it because she isn’t the first or the last lawyer to be fooled by a criminal. She then admits that she misjudged Peter too and is impressed how he stepped up to save her life. The pair agree that they had gotten off on the wrong foot and make peace. Meanwhile, the Scorpion has delivered the costume of her predecessor to the people that hired her to collect it, Sasha and Ana Kravinoff. The Scorpion brushes off their talk about totems because they paid her well for the job and wishes the pair of “Russian nut jobs” good luck with whatever it is they are planning.

Recurring Characters

Spider-Man, the Scorpion, the Hood, Tombstone, Bushwacker, Sasha Kravinoff, Ana Kravinoff, Michele Gonzales

Continuity Notes

1. Michele mentions how Peter is unemployed. This is because Peter was fired from his job at the mayor’s office in Amazing Spider-Man #624 after he was outed for doctoring a photo in an attempt to convince the media that J. Jonah Jameson wasn’t connected to the new Vulture.

2. Peter glosses over his turbulent relationship with his roommate. Particularly when the Chameleon manipulated her into thinking Peter was interested in her. That happened in Amazing Spider-Man #602-604.

3. This would be the costume that Mac Gargan first wore in Amazing Spider-Man #20 and almost consistently for his entire career. Around the time of this story, Mac Gargan gave up his Scorpion identity when the Venom symbiote sought him out to be its new host in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #9.

4. This would be Carmilla Black, for more on how she became the heroic Scorpion see Amazing Fantasy (vol. 2) #7-12.

5. SHIELD assigned Carmilla to try and kill the Hulk in Heroes for Hire (vol. 2) #11-13 and Incredible Hulk (vol. 2) #110.

6. The Scorpion was enhanced by SPIN technology in Avengers: The Initiative #24.

7. The Hood mentions how he paid good money to Norman Osborn to obtain the Scorpion’s costume. At the time of this story, Osborn has become the head of SHIELD (renaming it HAMMER) and has formed his own Avengers team after killing the leader of a Skrull invasion of Earth made him a hero in Secret Invasion #8. Norman then formed a secret cabal of high-level super-villains which included the Hood, as seen in Dark Reign: The Cabal #1.

Topical References

• Dated pop-culture references: Oprah