Trouble #3

Background

May, Mary, Richard and Ben, doing and not doing it at Summer Camp.

Story Details

Sorry, the big thing I forgot to mention last time was that Richard was doing it with May, the slutty chick who is "officially" Ben's babe. But Richard happened to be there to offer her a little comfort after some rich-kid bullies gave her a hard time, and then Richard ended up giving her a "hard" time himself, if ya know what I mean.

So, the rest of this issue is May doing it with Richard and Ben, separately and secretly. She asks Mary to help cover for her so that Ben doesn't find out, which is... pretty damned cold since she's doing it with Mary's man.

Ben belatedly finds out that May got hassled, goes to pick a fight with said bullies, and get's KO'd. Richard is being nice to Ben, 'cos I guess he feels guilty. But ya know it can't last, sooner or later it's gonna get found out.

May spends the night playing strip poker with the rest of the boys in the camp, but it's all a front to hide her more serious problem. She's gone and gotten herself knocked up by somebody. Who? Dang! Could be anybody!

Oh, couple of minor tweaks too. First, there's a cutesy sort of "Hey, I shouldn't be telling you this..." intro on the comic, instead of the simpler "Previously, in Trouble..." Also, there's no title for this story mentioned, so we'll just call it "Part 3". These are both small things, but it does make me wonder if maybe there was some sort of feedback from the first issue which made the editor try a couple of changes. Of course, it's basically re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, 'cos this story is sinking, and nothing's gonna save it!

General Comments

Damn, I knew why I was reading this comic. There's no Spidey in it, and it really doesn't look like this is anything to do with the Parker family in any way at all. Basically, I got ripped off, and the completist in me won't let me give up half-way through.

The quiz for this month asks our readers to give a Good/Bad verdict on a number of Spider-Man tie-in comics. "Trouble" is part of that poll, and with 2400+ votes, this crappy little Limited Series has received the damning verdict of 88% Bad and only 11% Good.

By a disturbing coincidence, that's exactly the same percentages that the "Get Kraven" Limited Series received in a similar poll a few months back. "Get Kraven" received the dubious honour of being as far as I know the only Limited Series to be canned while in progress! The last issue was cancelled, and the story was prematurely wrapped up.

Now, at only five issues in length, "Trouble" is unlikely to suffer the same fate. But I sure hope that Marvel thinks long and hard before trying a similar scam to leverage the popularity of Spider-Man into a completely unrelated story.

Overall Rating

Marvel has shot itself in the foot with this one. One web.