Dark Reign: Mister Negative #3
Negative Reinforcement
While Mister Negative and the Hood fight it out over control of Chinatown, Spider-Man (who has been corrupted by Mister Negative) hunts down DB! reporter Betty Brant. As she runs for her life, Betty Brant resigns to the fact that she is probably going to die, as she knew she would. Growing bored of the chase, Spider-Man snares Betty with a web-line and drags her up to the rooftops. As she is being pulled away she thinks about how both her husband,[1] and brother ended up murdered.[2] She decides that she is not either of those men and decides that she wants to live. Undoing the clasp on her high heels, she manages to get free by falling onto a fire escape. She dives into the apartment but cut her foot on a broken piece of glass. She thinks about how Mister Negative has turned Spider-Man’s inner darkness outwards, and figures she has a fair share of her own that she can use to her advantage.
Meanwhile, the battle between Mister Negative and the Hood rages on. Negative manages to slip behind his foe and tries to use his corrupting negative touch to try and turn him into a loyal slave as he has done to Spider-Man.
At that same moment, Spider-Man has followed Betty into the apartment and follows a trail of her blood. Instead of finding Betty, he discovers that she tied her bloody stalking onto the tail of a cat so it would lead the web-slinger on a false trail. By this time, Betty has gotten out of the building and runs into Yana Li who offers to help her. Betty isn’t sure if she should trust this woman since she gave Betty up to Mister Negative earlier. Yana says that she didn’t know Mister Negative would try and kill her and has now decided to tell Betty about the connection between her husband, Martin Li, and Mister Negative. She tells Betty how Martin tried to illegally smuggle himself into the United States and seemingly drowned when the ship smuggling him and other illegals into the country got stuck on a sandbar forcing them to all try swimming to shore.
She tells Betty that the Snakeheads who smuggled him into America didn’t care that Martin drowned they still sought payment and attempted to force Yana to pay the bill, even though she couldn’t afford the thirty thousand dollars on her bookeeper’s salary. They decided to make an example of her by taking Yana to Sunset Park, where they take the Chinese immigrants who can’t pay their debts. They took her there to torture her but before Yana could be harmed, Mister Negative came barging in. At the time, Mister Negative was making his opening play on the Chinatown crime rackets by actively clashing with the White Dragon’s gang. She tried convincing Mister Negative to free her, explaining how she got into that situation. She recalls it was talking to a wild animal, but for a brief moment what she says to Mister Negative gets through to him as he briefly reverted to human form — a fact that she keeps from Betty. She then says that not long after she discovered that a man named Martin Li — who knows all about the shipwreck — was being given a US Presidential medal. The thing is though she had never seen that man before in her life. That’s when Spider-Man catches up to Betty.
Meanwhile, Mister Negative discovers that his corrupting touch has no effect on the Hood as he is already fully corrupted. Negative finds this amusing as he was once like the Hood, all darkness or all light and never both. He explains how he was once a Snakehead smuggling a number of Chinese illegals into New York. Panicking because his allies weren’t there to pick up the illegals in international waters he decided to force the captain of the ship to bring it to shore. When it got stuck on a sandbar, he decided to abandon ship after stealing the documents of one of the passengers who died of pneumonia on the voyage, a man named Martin Li, and swam to shore. He then went to the Snakehead’s hideout in Flushing to discover his friends were dead. He was then confronted by Silvermane, the leader of the Maggia who were taking over criminal operations in that part of Queens.
Amused by the Snakehead’s situation, Silvermane had the Snakehead taken to the abandoned immigration facilities at Ellis Island where the Maggia was testing new experimental drugs on unwilling test subjects. He was injected with a new type of synthetic heroin by Simon Marshall. When two of the other prisoners, Tandy Bowen and Tyron Johnson, made their escape.[3] The Snakehead followed them and as he fled the facility, he suddenly underwent a transformation into Mister Negative for the first time.
As Mister Negative explains all this to the Hood, Spider-Man is trying to choke Betty Brant to death. As she struggles to remain conscious, she says that she used to blame him for the deaths of her brother Bennett and Ned Leeds but realizes that he is just as much a victim to tragedy as she is.[4] This causes Spider-Man to think about his past history with Betty Brant causing his true personality start breaking through.[5] That’s when Spider-Man begins screaming in agony as his boy expels the negative energy that turned him evil to begin with.
At that same moment, Mister Negative is finishing his story he explains that his transformation made him a creature of both light and darkness and that to survive, one cannot be one or the other. He has decided to tell this all to the Hood beacuse he doesn’t expect him to live long enough to tell anyone else. However, the Hood isn’t quite dead yet as his gang members have recovered from their beating from Spider-Man and have now surrounded Mister Negative. That’s when the Hood gets a call from Norman Osborn, who tells the Hood to stop gang war with Negative as he has now made an arrangement with Mister Negative to protect his criminal operations just has he made arrangments with the Hood.[5] The Hood doesn’t care and orders his gang to kill Mister Negative, however during his foe managed to escape while the Hood is distracted.
The following night, Norman Osborn is talking to his Green Goblin mask, explaining to it why he made the deal with Mister Negative. This is because Negative got ahold of files on how Oscorp was recently experimenting on illegal Chinese immigrants with biochemicals produced by the Freak.[7] However, he has decided that Mister Negative is still a threat that will have to be dealt with later. He takes the file, labelled “Martin Li”, and places it in his office safe. Moments later, the Spot recovers the file and return it to Mister Negative. As it turns out, the Spot has been working for Negative the whole time with in the Hood’s gang. He has been working for Negative in the hopes that he can be cured of his power once Mister Negative crushed the Maggia.
Several days after this, Betty Brant has decided that her original angle of reporting on Martin Li was had led her to a dead end and has decided to do a more balanced investigation into him. As such, she has arrived to the construction site where Martin Li is building a new FEAST facility in Chinatown. He is also repairing the damage caused during the Hood and Mister Negative’s gang war. When Betty Brant asks how he can stand the destruction caused by the two criminals. Martin, however, says that if it wasn’t for evil people he wouldn’t get the opportunity to do so much good.
Recurring Characters
Mister Negative, Spider-Man, Hood’s Gang (The Hood, the Answer, Bloodshed, Scorcher, Speed Demon, the Spot, the Squid, White Rabbit), Hammerhead, Norman Osborn, Betty Brant, Yana Li, (in flashback) Maggia (Silvermane), Tyrone Johnson, Tandy Bowen, Simon Marshall
Continuity Notes
Betty makes reference to how her late husband, Ned Leeds was murdered and framed for being the Hobgoblin. Betty married Ned back in Amazing Spider-Man #156. Ned was murdered and framed for being the Hobgoblin in Spider-Man Versus Wolverine #1/Amazing Spider-Man #289. Betty’s own work as an investigative reporter in Spider-Man: Hobgoblin Lives #1-3 exposed the frame-up and exonerated Ned.
At the time of this story, Betty believes that her brother was killed by Blackie Gaxton back in Amazing Spider-Man #11. However, he secretly survived and became the new Crime-Master. He will resurface in Venom (vol. 2) #1 and the explanation for his survival is covered in Venom (vol. 2) #21.
Ty and Tandy later went on to become the vigilantes Cloak and Dagger, as explained in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #64.
Spider-Man mentions how Betty used to be the secretary to J. Jonah Jameson. She started working at the Daily Bugle as Jonah’s secretary in Amazing Spider-Man #4. She worked on and off as a secretary for years until Web of Spider-Man #91 when she became a reproter.
Peter has a memory of himself sitting next to Betty behind a desk with his arm in a sling. This is from Amazing Spider-Man #7 following a battle with the Vulture. This marked the start of their romance while lasted until Amazing Spider-Man #18 when she started seeing Ned Leeds.
Norman Osborn became the leader of SHIELD, which he rennamed HAMMER after he killed Veranke, the leader of a Skrull invasion on Earth in Secret Invasion #1. He made his arrangements with the Hood in Dark Reign: The Cabal #1.
The Freak was captured by Oscrop in Amazing Spider-Man #554 and the revelation that he was being used to create new bio-weapons was revealed in Amazing Spider-Man #568-573.
