Spider-Woman (vol. 5) #9

Dec 23

Dec 23 Spider-Woman (vol. 5) #9

Spider-Woman has agreed to help Ben Urich with some of the final cases of his career. For the inevitable road trip, Jessica has managed to buy a vintage convertible. After packing up the car, Jessica asks where Ben’s files are. that’s when Roger Gocking, aka the Porcupine, comes running for the car with them in hand. Jessica can’t believe Ben invited the villain along. However, Ben points out that Roger wants to turn over a new leaf and thought the best way to do that was with Jessica keeping an eye on him. Jessica reluctantly accepts this and they head off for their first destination, Pittsburgh.

There stop Master Panemoniam who had been attacking the residents of area retirement homes. Later, on Blarney Island, Illinois, Spider-Woman puts a stop to the so-called “Blue Man”, an Atlantean who was attacking college students partying along the shore of Grass Lake. While on the highways outside of Kansas City, Missouri, Spider-Woman and her allies put a stop to a gang of street racers who were also involved in arms smuggling. In every instance, the Porcupine’s cowardly nature lands him in trouble necessitating Jessica save him. She has grown so fed up, she tells him that on their next mission he’ll be observing from the car.

The Porcupine is given driving duty and five hours later, as they are approaching Dodge City, he confides that he didn’t always want to be a super-villain. He tells Jessica that as a kid he actually wanted to be a sheriff like Wyatt Earp. As they pass by the city welcome sign, Jessica is fast asleep and unaware that a scanner built into the sign has identified her. Their passage is also observed by a man standing next to a nearby barn.

A few hours later, Jessica wakes up and finds Roger has parked the car and wandered off somewhere. She wakes up Ben so they can go look for him, but Urich is confident that the Porcupine probably went shopping at one of the town’s many western-themed tourist traps. Sure enough, Roger returns decked out in a cowboy outfit with arms loaded with merchandise. As he tells them that he bought cowboy hats for everyone, Roger is suddenly shot in the chest. That’s when Spider-Woman spots an entire posse of armed men and yanks both Ben and Roger to safety under a hail of bullets.

Jessica waits until the men run out of bullets and then rushes out from her cover and beats all the men into submission with her bare hands. The man who organized this posse claps, very impressed with how Jessica handled herself. This is the local sheriff who admits that they don’t get a lot of visitors, let alone Avengers. Suddenly, Jessica is swarmed by the locals who are all in some kind of trance and dressed up in clothing from the days of the American frontier.

Jessica later wakes up on the conveyor belt in a slaughterhouse with the sheriff watching from the catwalk. Spider-Woman quickly leaps away from a buzz saw and climbs up to the catwalk to face the sheriff. Unfortunately, she doesn’t anticipate that he has a cattle prod. Stunning her, the sheriff figures he won’t be able to get her to talk but he’s going to have fun trying. The jolt from the cattle prod causes Jessica to fall to the slaughterhouse floor below where a bunch of enslaved locals armed with slaughterhouse tools is waiting to carve her up.