Spider-Man mixes it up with Marrow and Operation: Zero Tolerance!
Originally Published August 1997
We begin at the offices of the Daily Bugle. Famously curmudgeonly publisher J. Jonah Jameson is ranting, because as much as they've been known as the paper of record on Spider-Man, the webhead is old news -- today it's all about mutants!
With Operation: Zero Tolerance in full swing and the X-Men being smeared on cable news, J. Jonah Jameson is determined to get to the bottom of this. Rule #1: Do not believe anything you see on cable news (good advice for life.)
It's also personal -- Jonah suspects OZT and Bastion are responsible for killing reporter Nick Bandouvier in England, but he was smelling rats long before that happened.
Star freelance photog Peter Parker -- also known as the Amazing Spider-Man, at least since he re-donned the costume earlier this year after that whole clone fiasco -- tracks down Henry Gyrich leaving the TV studio after touting his claim that the X-Men attacked a military jet unprovoked. He's looking weirdly down about his role as the face and mouthpiece of Institutional Oppression.
As Spider-Man, he follows Gyrich, since there's probably more to the story. He thinks to himself, mutants aren't so different from him, so why should they get the shit end of the stick?
It isn't long, of course, before Spidey sees Gyrich's limo attacked by a few familiar faces (who appear to have patched things up -- including patching up what was seemingly a fatal wound to one of them.)
Meanwhile, in case you were hoping to see some X-Men in this X-Men comic, we see that our wayward heroes have crash-landed on an alien planet. We only have time to check in with Gambit, however, who is wondering when enough is enough and he can go back to being a small time t'ief with a clear conscience and not a world-saving mutant hero.
Of course, he is not alone, but we'll have to find out what that's about later.
At the Daily Bugle office, Jonah shakes every tree he can for sources and gets nothing...
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| Panels that haven't aged well |
...but surprisingly enough the real source comes to him.
In the streets, the dance continues as Spider-Man works to protect Gyrich and his Secret Service agents from Callisto and Marrow.
But the Agents are more than they appear...
They take aim at Spider-Man and Marrow, who are distracted by the arrival of some police, but Callisto throws herself in the way of their blasts.
Meanwhile, Bastion continues to tempt Jonah with his mystery disk, filled with the information he has thus far been able to decrypt from the Xavier files (which he only stole earlier tonight, the man works fast, like he's got a computer for a brain or something!)
The fancy new Sentinels take aim again -- this time at Gyrich!
Gyrich realizes to his shock and horror that these were the same agents that had been assigned to Graydon Creed -- some kind of fix has been in from the start!
With the robots now the primary threat, Spider-Man and Marrow find themselves fighting side by side as reluctant allies. Ooh, I love a reluctant ally.
The Sentinels take aim again but they're stopped by an unlikely source...
...Henry Gyrich and his trigger finger.
With that out of the way, Marrow is ready to resume her attack on Gyrich, but Spidey puts a quick stop to it.
At the Bugle Office, Jonah flips it around on Bastion: he's been doing a little investigating of his own, and he's ready to show what he's got on Bastion:
Seems Basty is a man without a Pasty. And that's setting off alarms in Jonah's journalism-brain. He figure's there's more to Bastion than meets the eye and he intends to find it, and to crack this case open the right way.
Back on the streets, Spider-Man and Marrow have a moment of bonding over their status as outsiders. Marrow sneeringly asks Spider-Man why he helps people who hate him, and we are treated to a rare and unusual glimpse into Spider-Man's backstory (something about a burglary or something? I'm not really sure.)
Gyrich interrupts to say he's bringing Marrow in, but Spider-Man, who knows that Henry emptied his clip into the Sentinels, says that Gyrich can't make her do anything. Thus humbled she returns to the sewer to bring Callisto's body to the Morlock Healer, known to us as Dave Stevenson, whom I'm pretty sure died the last time we saw him (then again so did Marrow.)
I mean, there's still two seemingly unstoppable Sentinels just waiting to return to the fight, but maybe they're getting held up by a system upgrade that'll take the next hour or so.
Back at the Daily Bugle, Joseph "Robbie" Robertson has put out the fire on Jonah's desk. He's a little curious what it was all about, and Jonah has a single word for it.
Further Thoughts:
Here is where you might expect me to do my usual song and dance about how the X-Men are reduced to guest-stars in their own book. Except they're not even guest stars -- a single X-Man appears on a single page and that's it. Otherwise it is fully an issue of Spider-Man, written by Lobdell and drawn by Madureira with "assists" from Humberto Ramos (one of my personal favourite Spidey artists.)
So if you happened to want the follow up to last month's two months ago's cliffhanger -- make that cliffhangers -- you're out of luck because we only get the merest glimpse of what happened to the spacebound X-Men and no word on the others. But if you can leave that aside, this is a pretty damn good comic. Scott Lobdell writes a pitch-perfect Spider-Man, which makes one wonder why he never got a run on the character back when he was still a fixture at Marvel (honestly, based on everything that happened with the character between the Clone Saga and J. Michael Straczynski's run with the character, he might as well have.) Madureira and Ramos' art styles blend quite well (thanks largely to Tim Townsend and Bucce) and capture that wild wall-crawling action.
And there's a certain logic to it, too: with half the X-Men lost in space and the others in captivity, there needed to be some protagonist out there mixing it up. The issue never takes its eye off the ball of Operation: Zero Tolerance and incorporating one of the few major Marvel heroes not currently being Reborned helps sell that this is every bit the major conflict that Onslaught was. Now, of course, if you're the type of person who wants and expects there to be X-Men in your X-Men comics, I could never blame you for disliking this issue. Spider-Man, when written well, is my next-favourite Marvel property, so I'm good here.
I still don't, however, totally love the casting of J. Jonah Jameson as the bastion (so to speak) of journalistic integrity. That's simply not my take on the character even though I know it has precedent and people love it. I can accept being in the minority on that, and Scott Lobdell has clearly long since thrown all in on this take so it's what we've gotten for many months now. Although the Spider-Man/Marrow stuff has a bit of thematic waterweight, the heart of the issue is clearly in Jonah standing up for what he believes in, Lobdell's paean to the fifth estate. Here on Earth in 2025, you've got the New York Times willfully throwing trans people under the bus to kowtow to the current Presidential administration and its hateful policies. So this dewy-eyed stuff couldn't be further removed from reality as we know it, where the press is run by greedy media barons every bit as corrupt and cowardly as the politicians who are so often cast as the villains of the X-Men saga (which is, of course, normally the point of J. Jonah Jameson, in Spider-Man comics.) But there's certainly nothing against comics being aspirational.
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