Bit of kerfuffle here.  But that will come later, in the already-pretty-thoroughly spoiled-spoilers section, so look out.

 

First of all, “Nothing good in Peter Parker’s life can last.”  Ain’t It the truth.  That is some harshness, especially when it is just laid down like that, in what amounts to editorial decree.  Alright, granted he should have stuck out a toe to trip up the guy who was running off because, basically, he was late for an appointment to blow away Uncle Ben (spoiler), but hasn’t he suffered enough since ’62?!?

 

No!  Marvel’s favorite kick-me woobie is up to his armpit webs in crap again as this issue opens, with a Mayan god materializing in the middle of a literal tornado of malice while he and erstwhile flame/girlfriend/wife/devil’s plaything Mary Jane Watson look on in horror.  Golden Osborn and Ms. Marvel and eventually the Fantastic Four (spoiler) swoop in to help, but bad guy is unfazed and conjures up South American Gojira in the middle of Central Park to peel off some of those pesky reinforcements.

 

The FF were supposed to be super hacked off at Spidey because he played them so hard trying to head off basically the current fiasco, but tip of the cap to writer Zeb Wells for not overplaying that and having them basically be like, “Okay, we live in a comic book universe, these things happen; bygones,” and then zipping off to deal with the dragon in an utterly matter-of-fact way.  You can practically hear Mr. Fantastic saying, “Look, Mr. Come-Lately Villain, supposedly you are the master of Time and Death, etc., etc., but in reality you just showed up twenty-odd issues ago and we’ve been doing this shit since Fin Fang Foom.  So, THIS for your sub-plot.  And- we out.”

 

Back at the main event, PP is really angry at this guy for being the latest person to blow up his whole world, but the guy doesn’t care and instead whips out a jagged piece of metal called the Blade of Decay which has the power to kill anything it is jammed through the chest of, a trait it shares in common with other, non-named, jagged pieces of metal.  However, he has committed a mistake even greater than getting involved in a land war in Asia, which is that trying put pieces of metal through Spider-Man’s chest is traditionally one of the hardest things in comics.  Everyone knows if you’re going to kill him, you have to just Snap him away or some kind of other non-directional thing, or just forget it.  Noob.  Realizing he played himself by incarnating his awesome might in a JP of M (and side dragon, already destroyed, basically by Reed flipping him off in an elaborate way (spoiler)), he tries to distract them with a Searing Revelation about the True Identity of MJ’s side piece (Rabin’s SON! (spoiler) that she picked up in the dimension whence Rabin banished her with some evil math (is there any other kind?).  Again, our intrepid heroes are unfazed, having already Talked Over the Searing Revelation Amongst Themselves in a flashback.  Mature!

 

Realizing that he’s blowing his chance to get a write-up in Godlike Villains of Note Quarterly, Rabin/Mayep plays his ace of Snapping the kids MJ picked up (while she was hugging on side piece) in the alternate dimension back out of existence (spoiler)!  That does it.  Spider-Man can roll with having his entire continuity reset every few years, but MJ completely freaks out over the unmaking of her li’l plot-points from several issues ago.  Realizing she has some techno-magical doohickeys with her, she starts blasting the heck out of the guy herself.  Spider is as enlightened as the next guy, but he can hardly have his girlfriend save her own ass in his book (more on this later), so he persuades MJ and Ms. M to bug out while he regulates old school with a parking meter.

 

Actually, that really is old school.  Do those even exist in downtown New York anymore?  I suppose it wouldn’t be as cool to whup some villainous ass with a parking receipt kiosk, much less your Spider-phone because it has the app you just used to credit your license plate number, but I’m surprised it took this long for this particular move to appear, giving that super people have been grabbing whatever came to hand on the streets of Manhattan to do a little extra bludgeoning damage for decades now.  It’s like somebody just deciding it would be a great idea to use a phone booth to change into their costume.  Or beat somebody down with.

 

Anyway, it works great for S-M until Rab/’Yep gets wise and uses his fancy teleport/gate move to get the hell out of there and finish killing Mary Jane (who hopefully has had a chance to calm down now and reconsider killing him) so that he can complete his transmogrification into Mayep and then everybody finally will really be up that fabled creek with nothing to use but their hands.  Except that when he teleports in, Kamala punches him in the face with her trademark oversized fist, and it begins to seem that things just aren’t going to go his way until Kamala literally says, “He can come from anywhere.  We’ve got to split up.”  And bails.

 

Whereupon Rabyep, no doubt scarcely able to credit his own luck, teleports back in, Jagged Piece in hand, to take care of business. And this time it does seem that the Death of Somebody that Marvel has flogged for this issue for months is indeed about to go down.  Does he succeed?  Is the love of Peter’s life Double-Dog Dead, This Time For Real, Again?!?  Last chance to read the book.

 

…

 

Nope. Everything’s fine, for MJ, anyway.  Except for the dead kids and all, and the fact that her own life is in ruins because she got forced to live several years in the space of what turned out to be basically a weekend, during which time she had to sever all of her former ties and hook up with a new dude, who turned out to be a real son of a villain, and will no doubt become a villain himself in the fullness of time, (as evidenced by his ability to smack the crap out of Peter, Spidey Sense and enhanced reflexes and all notwithstanding, during the aforementioned Mature flashback, unremarked by all, but I noticed.  I noticed.), and adopted some kids with said guy, who are now dead, as mentioned, and all she really has to go back to is her old boyfriend, who is pretty good with his parking meter fu, but to whom this type of shit happens to all the time.

 

But that’s just all routine comics collateral damage, which she will live to face, thanks to the supreme sacrifice of… Kamala Khan, getting her Ms. Marvel on for reals using the shapeshifting aspect of her power (oft-neglected in favor of the more straightforward Big Fists) to offer up her vulnerable back in place of Mary Jane’s.

 

ComicsOnline agonized over this searing reveal of our own for some time, but… actually no, this twist got leaked some weeks before even the preview edition came out, has been chewed over by fans for a bit, and the general verdict seems to be neither grief nor uplift but mainly annoyance.  Discussion revolves to a large extent around whether this is an example of “fridging” aka Women in Refrigerators Syndrome, which as anyone reading this likely knows, was a trope pointed out back when the then-new Green Lantern got his girlfriend killed in a particularly gnarly way.  The contention is that people, almost always women, are constantly getting thrashed or killed basically to provide a pretext for the hero to feel some feelings and become better people, usually after opening up an extra can of whup ass on whoever brought their beloved to that sorry state.

 

That does indeed happen.  Quite a bit.  It seems to basically to be an extension of the the trend that goes all the way back (at least in comics) to Lois Lane being clumsy in high places.  She takes a header, Superman swoops in before her hair gets mussed, and everything’s cool (40’s).  Better yet from a drama point of view if Lex Luthor pushed her off to show his dastardliness, providing yet another reason to kick his ass, after grabbing Lois first, of course (60’s).  But what if you don’t get there in time and all you can do is gnash your teeth and look balefully up at Lex waving at you from the top of the building in that idiotic purple and green power suit he used to rock all the time, and you gnash your teeth and summon up deeper reservoirs of power than ever before and fly up to End. This. Once and for all (80’s)?  Wouldn’t that be dark and deconstruct-y and not for kids and playing for keeps and don’t-miss-next-issue?  

 

Maybe it was for a while, but by the time ’99 rolled around and that fridge door crept open to reveal an artful glimpse of the mangled limbs of a character introduced just half a dozen issues previously, clearly for the purpose of absorbing the misplaced anger of a nobody upset about being a crappy nineties villain with a stupid moniker, so as to inspire dudebro slacker Kyle Rayner to dig deep and be a real (rehash) hero, Gail Simone had to call bullshit on the whole thing.  (Gratuitous plug here for Valente’s drolly arch Refrigerator Monologues for more on this topic.)

 

Since then, despite the numerous legitimate occurrences, it has fallen victim to trope creep and had a tendency to be over-cited.  Supporting characters get offed in comics all the time, and it isn’t necessarily an example just because somebody gets killed while in the condition of being a girl.  Even if, as is often the case, whoever’s book it is then gets to cradle their dead body and shed some manly tears while bellowing their grief to the heavens with a pantheon of their mighty comrades standing around grimly in the background (pretty close to the sitch here).  In this case, it’s mainly disqualifying because bridging proper revolves around agency and here Kamala actually did the other well-known heroic move of sacrificing herself, not incidentally screwing up the transmog spell thereby and sending Rabin and Mayep, half-assedly linked together for all eternity, screaming back to, uh- Xibalba, I guess.  So she actually saved the day and the somber super people assembled were nothing more than her Hero’s Due.

 

But people are right to be alert for that sort of thing in ASM.  Green Lantern is a piker. As the apotheosis of super hero guilt, Spider-Man already has such a pantheon of fridge moments, that Kamala’s gesture is lost in the clutter.  He has some of the arch-deadest people in comics on his tab already.  Uncle Ben of course has been swinging around on his back the whole time, and then there’s Gwen Stacy, the fridge-stuffedest sig oth of all time, predating the trope namer, nearly to the time when a refrigerator was an ice box for fancy people.  This whole Mary Jane situation of the past 50 years was intended to be a sexy side plot until Stan realized that the time might be right for someone to die permanently outside of an origin story, and the hard-luck hero’s main squeeze was elected.  He even had it be by Spidey’s own hand, though it wasn’t his fault; physics briefly popping up in the middle of a super hero fight being even more unexpected than the Spanish Inquisition. 

 

The essence of the trope is not necessarily the death, per se, it is the underlining of supposedly important other people’s totally ancillary relationship to the main character.  Which brings into play the much-reviled One More Day where it was editorially decided that Spidey would work with Mephisto (read: the Devil) to unilaterally cashier his entire relationship with Mary Jane, along with most of their adult lives, in order that his octogenarian aunt might live, well….  Considering that he necessarily reset the entire world to sync up with that particular move, you could say the fridge was getting a little crowded that day.

 

Kamala herself actually already has a better qualifying incident, where, coincidentally, she was already lying dead in the arms of a Spider Man, that time Miles.  In that brief Champions series, she got killed by Zzaxx, which served as the catalyst for, yep, Mephisto to pop up and allow a different Spider-Man to make a doubtful moral decision by effectively swapping a bystander’s life for hers.  No wonder she has such an affinity with MJ.

 

Anyway, it is still appropriate to ask whether her death was actually meaningful and came off right in the sense that they apparently intended it to.  It’s hard to say that it does.  Many have complained that her appearances in the book to this point have been too limited and brief for her to even reach sidekick status, so her death was just a throwaway show-up-to-be-dead kind of thing like GL’s gf.  Plus it didn’t happen in her own book, or with her own supporting cast, and her streaming series is on sketchy ground, and the political situation in America today, etc.  Form your own judgments on that, but before you even get to any of that, on a comic-book basic structure level, I don’t think this was set up to be satisfying.  For one major thing, the vill himself does not live up to his own hype.  He is the overarching bad guy of the arc, but has no standing outside of that, and the main damage he did to anyone who wasn’t an actual toddler was to hurt their relationships.  Granted, feelings are important, but it goes without saying that in order for the I Offer My Own Life move to really shine, it’s important to establish that that particular tactic is pretty much the last one on the board.  In that context, we should consider that maybe he was hot shit in his limited earlier appearances, but in this issue, everyone who threw down with him, including both his intended and actual victims, was winning, with panache.  It makes it seem like KK was still doing her read-too-many-comic-books thing again and just needed adult supervision:

“I’ve got an idea!  I’ll pretend to be the one he wants, and he can kill me, thereby dooming himself, and everyone can mourn the heck out of me!”

“Okay, or- or, whoever engages with him next can just keep kicking his ass until he stops moving, and then he will die, instead of you.”

“Hmmm…”

 

So, bottom line, it was just another day at the office in comic-book land.  There’s nothing in here to get particularly fired up about, never mind offended. A routine comic-book-death occurred and in this particular case you could hear the machinery creaking more than usual.  Cebulski or somebody pretty obviously told Wells to bring KK into the run and contrive a reason for her to be dead by the end of this issue.  Why?  For those who are new around here, Kamala is fine.  She didn’t get fridged, she just is female Spider-Man.  A plucky kid with weird powers in over her head always trying to do the right thing in a world that just doesn’t understand.  She gets kicked around a bit and everyone’s eyes mist over.  She will spend around six months real-time being dead before her triumphant resurrection right around the time The Marvels hits a theater or streaming service near you later this year.  Old pro move on her part.  The kid’ll be fine.  Your kids will be thrilling to her zany adventures when you’re creeping around in an anti-gravity walker getting back issues beamed directly to your eyeballs.

 

In the meantime, let Norman Osborn’s weird epitaph suffice: “She wasn’t interning… She was watching me…”.

 

Art: John Romita Jr.  What is there to say?  If you’re not familiar with this guy’s work by now, you really are new.  Pretty much everyone has formed an opinion of his immediately recognizable style, and few people are indifferent. Whatever you think of him, he is doing his thing full force here; inker Scott Hanna chooses to do little to soften the edges of the pencil work- it looks like JR Jr. did the finishes himself.  Now that I think of it, Jr. has been in the game since his dad drew Gwen’s ticket getting punched.  And as a matter of fact, it was Mr. Osborn that did it too, of course.  Though at the time it was son Harry upholding the family traditional while Norman was a bit under the weather with a case of temporary death himself.  I’m sure everyone must feel super comfortable with the Golden Goblin gliding around while all of this is going on.  Tangled web…

 

Don’t forget to pick up original writer G. Willow Wilson handling the memorial duties in Fallen Friend: Death of MM, then come back for Ed McGuinness taking a crack at a Doc Ock story.  He’s no Mayan deity, but he’s got provenance.

 

Rating:

ComicsOnline has to knock Amazing Spider-Man #26 (Legacy 920) back to 3 out of 5 stars for not considering the racio-gender religi-politics underlying a teenage Muslim killed by a middle-aged Jew possessed by an ancient Mayan while half a dozen white people and one orange one in the prime of life look on, aghast.

 

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