Issue(s): Lethal Foes of Spider-Man #1, Lethal Foes of Spider-Man #2, Lethal Foes of Spider-Man #3, Lethal Foes of Spider-Man #4
Cover Date: Sep-Dec 93
Title: "Deadly reunion" / "Hate is a many splendored thing" / "Power struggle" / "Re-disunited"
Credits:
Danny Fingeroth - Writer
Scott McDaniel / Keith Pollard & David Boller / David Boller - Penciler
Brad Vancata / Brad Vancata & Frank Turner / Ian Akin, Keith Akin, & Jim Amash / Brad Vancata, Jim Amash, Mike DeCarlo, Ian Akin, & Keith Akin - Inker
Rob Tokar - Editor

Review/plot:
The previous "Foes" series, Deadly Foes of Spider-Man, which was also written by Danny Fingeroth, surprised me by having a strong character focus. There was a core group of villains, and the story was all about the their interactions: what their motivations where, what kept them together, what they thought of each other, etc.. And i thought that was great. This issue adds more villains to the mix, in various factions, and in juggling that larger cast there's less room for character. It also has more of a "continuity" focus, both in terms of building on the developments of the last series and in terms of providing revelations and backstories about the additional characters. So overall it's more busy and not as innovative. It's still a decent Spider-Man adventure, but that's sort of the point. The last Foes book was arguably about the Foes. This one is a Spider-Man story that happens to have a lot of Foes. And when you've already got four ongoing Spider-Man titles, it's hard to say why something like this couldn't have run in one of them instead of as yet another Spidey book.

The story starts off with Dr. Octopus' arms being destroyed.

Both the adamantium set and the regular set are destroyed. Doc Ock, thousands of miles away at the Vault, screams out in pain. But after that, he finds himself under attack from telepathy, through the chip that he used to control the adamantium. With his strong willpower, he's able to resist the attack. And the attacker turns out to be the spirit of the Answer.

The Answer gives some more details about his origins than we've seen before.

In this series, including in the above flashback, the Answer seems far more powerful than he ever was in his original appearances. His powers were more subtle originally (and i was never 100% sure what they were, exactly). They're much more flamboyant here.

The Answer wants Doctor Octopus' help getting a body, and says that he'll break him out of the Vault and help him re-create his arms. Octavius' specialty as a nuclear scientist is what made him come to him (i mean, that and the fact that thanks to the chip, Doc Ock was able to contact him).

Doc Ock's initial plans involve using a cousin named Elias Hargrove, who he has leverage on, to gain access to the nuclear device that he used to use before the accident that made him Doctor Octopus.

Meanwhile, Leila Davis, is let out of jail. She was the woman seeking vengeance against the Beetle on the behalf of her husband, the Ringer, in Deadly Foes. And she recruits Boomerang, Rhino, and the Vulture to make some money and maybe go after the Beetle again. Boomerang has a personal grudge against the Beetle as we saw in Deadly Foes, and the Rhino has no love for the Beetle after that story as well, although now that he's able to take his suit off again his primary motivation has become raising enough money to get his family out of eastern Europe (later said to be the Balkans). The Vulture was not in Deadly Foes last time, but he is looking for a cure for cancer. Which you wouldn't think would be found in a grudge match against the Beetle, but you'd be surprised.

Davis has a super-suit for herself, and she is now Hardshell. Her first mission for the team is to steal the same (conveniently gun-shaped) device that Doctor Octopus planned to use to give a body to the Answer.

Despite attempted interference by Spider-Man...

...the Foes manage to get away with the device. But they wind up fighting amongst themselves after they escape, and a stray blast from the device in Central Park accidentally causes the return of Stegron.

The next player in this story is the Beetle himself. He is struggling with cash, in a large part because he's apparently paying off people that might know his secret identity. It looks to me like the bigger issue is that the Beetle has some very expensive fetishes (but i'm not judging).

He decides that he needs to stop thinking small and taking "henchmen" gigs. But he calls around and can't seem to scare up anyone to work with him. We don't see who he talks to but they're presumably other super-villains. During the course of those calls, he learns that Rhino and Boomerang are working with a "mysterious woman", and he's able to guess that it's Leila Davis. So he decides to go steal the gun that they stole.

But on his way, he comes across Spider-Man fighting Stegron, and he helps Stegron defeat Spider-Man. They agree to a partnership with the usual "and then I'll betray you..." bullshit (the sort of thing the first Foes book mostly avoided).

Beetle and Stegron bring Spider-Man to Hardshell and company, hoping to trade him for the nuclear blaster. Which kind of makes the Beetle look like a doofus.

As Hardshell notes, they have an agreement with AIM to sell the blaster for a billion dollars. She's got very little personal investment in Spider-Man, and the other villains don't either, really, at this point (more on that below). So the Beetle comes across looking like, in Boomerang's words, a "loser". But then things turn into a real cluster when Boomerang, who does have an investment in a grudge against the Beetle, tosses an exploding boomerang at him. Hardshell tries to stop Boomerang but misses and hits Stegron with a blast instead.

So a big dumb fight breaks out.

In the confusion Spider-Man gets free. The Beetle tries to escape with the blaster and the other villains give chase. The Beetle is repeatedly called a loser and he's totally rattled by the Vulture ,who has a personal reason for wanting the blaster back, since he thinks it can cure his cancer.

My personal vote is that Stegron gets the blaster, because he wants to use it to create a race of dinosaur men, and that's awesome. Unless of course if the Vulture can really use it to cure cancer, but in that case he has to share. Frankly, i'm fine with them both taking a turn. Let the human race become a cancer-free race of dinosaur people. It's the best of all possible worlds!

But that's not the direction we're going in. Instead, this whole donnybrook is observed by a guy with the lame name Strikeback, and he's obviously the Ringer returned from the dead. Because that's what we needed.

Spider-Man tries to follow as well but passes out from his recent injuries.

Meanwhile, since Doctor Octopus' plans have been foiled, he goes a different route. Through his lawyer, he gets his cousin Hargrove to write a formula that will help restore the Answer to a body (i'm disappointed that Octavius couldn't come up with it on his own), and then Ock goes to a Vault guard that he's been helping earn a night school degree, and tricks him into using his equipment to implement the formula and allow the Answer to materialize.

Like Stegron, the Answer never intended to honor his partnership, but Doc Ock still has the mental connection via the chip that the Answer used to contact him. So he's able to brainwash and control the Answer.

He uses the Answer to help him escape and build a new makeshift set of arms. We're getting cornier and cornier with that "pleasanter for me" dialogue.

When Spider-Man wakes up, he finds himself drawn to Empire State University, where Doc Ock is trying to retrieve the remnants of his original arms and the computer chip that controlled his adamantium armor. So just to be clear, there are three sets of Doc Ock's arms in the discussion. His new ones, which are crude, his original arms, which are damaged but repairable, and the adamantium set, which have been melted down (but the control chip still exists). The space necessary to clarify all of this and the scenes devoted to Doc Ock building one suit of armor and then stealing another, etc., is an example of how this story gets cluttered up with plot mechanics instead of character development.

Note the Answer's extensive powers.

It's suggested that Spider-Man's arrival is also thanks to a subliminal summons by the Answer, an "answer" to his need to escape from Doc Ock. When Spidey arrives, the Answer says that he's unable to fight him, but his powers do manifest when Spidey attacks. Doc Ock is admirably focused on his original goal and doesn't stick around for vengeance even when Spidey gets knocked down. So he escapes with his (still damaged) original arms. As he's leaving, he bumps into a container on a roof, and in this random way the Swarm will be added to our cast.

At this point, the Vulture has retrieved the nuclear blaster. And in what is almost a nice scene, Hardshell suggests using it to cure the Vulture's cancer and then giving it to AIM. But even as i was cheering that (obvious) solution, Hardshell was already betraying him.

And so the madness continues.

The fights and chases continue until the arrival of Strikeback...

...followed in quick succession by the Swarm.

Strikeback is indeed the original Ringer and Hardshell's husband. He was found by AIM after the Scourge slaughter while they were scrounging through the carnage to steal all the dead villains' technology, and they used him as a guinea pig in their cyborg experimentation. He had to do a few jobs for them, but now he's a free agent (that's a pretty fair deal!). He wants to be a good guy now, and he tries to convince Hardshell to come with him. She's not so sure at first, but things come to a head when he's getting crushed by Stegron.

But Strikeback manages to get free and teleport away with Hardshell.

In the meantime, i continue to be disappointed with the infighting between the other villains.

C'mon, Rhino! Let the old man cure his cancer, and then go team up to make money to send to your family. This isn't hard! But that's the last we'll see of the Vulture. He's knocked out, and then the blaster is all used up. So no cure for him.

Swarm, without ever doing much, gets blasted by the device, and is put to rest again.

Doc Ock and the Answer fight apart from the rest of the group, and eventually decide that their debts are settled and they go their separate ways. All the other villains are knocked out. I doubt that if this series was billed "The Return of the Original Ringer" that anyone would have bought it, but that's the main lasting contribution.

The final issue is just a big fight, which i guess was inevitable considering the number of characters. I want to make it clear that big slugfests of course belong in super-hero comics. And Stegron and the Swarm are awesome by default, there's no denying that. Any comic can be improved just by having them walk across the page and wave. I also have a personal investment in the Answer, since Al Milgrom's Spectacular Spider-Man was one of my earliest runs, so it's nice to see him again (even though he's brainwashed for the majority of the story and seems way overpowered).

But truly good super-hero comics manage to blend the slugfests with good characterization. There was a lot to work with here. The original Foes series showed the potential, but this book goes in the opposite direction. In other books we've seen nuanced depictions of the Vulture and (to a lesser extend) the Rhino, but that's all discarded here. In general i wish there were more cases of villains showing loyalty to each other. Not to make them good guys but just because it's in their own self-interest.

As for the art, it starts off pretty good in an old school (i.e. non-Image influenced) way, which i like. But it seems to be a hard rule that as an early 1990s Marvel project went on, the number of artists involved increased exponentially. And the art gets sketchier as we go along, which is all the worse because it happens as the plot requires the fighting to become more chaotic. So overall this is in the "fine for what it is" category but that's a downgrade from Deadly Foes.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This story makes an unfootnoted reference to Spider-Man/Punisher/Sabretooth: Designer Genes, so it takes place after that. It's said that Doc Ock's next appearance will be in Spider-Man Unlimited #3. Beyond that, it seems context free.

References:

• Doctor Octopus used the adamantium arms "in his spree of murder and power-seeking of a few months past" in Spider-Man #18-23.
  We learn in a flashback that the Answer started working for the Kingpin, as a nonpowered hitman and advisor, back when the Kingpin and Richard Fisk were running a division of Hydra, circa Captain America #145.
  
• No footnotes for this, but the Answer was later given powers through the same process that gave the Black Cat her powers. The Cat got her powers in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #88-89, and we learned that the Answer got his powers through the same process in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #98.
  
• The Answer gave his life to save Dagger in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #96.
  
• After that, his essence floated around the Earth's atmosphere unconsciously. The implosion of the multiverse matrix in Excalibur #50 is said to be what woke him up.
  
• Doctor Octopus' origin was in Amazing Spider-Man #3.
  
• This is in many ways a sequel to Deadly Foes of Spider-Man #1-4.
  
• We learned that the Vulture was dying in Spectacular Spider-man #186-190, although i don't think it was said specifically to be due to cancer.
  
• The Ringer was forced by the Beetle to fight Spider-Man in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #58.
  
• The Ringer was killed by Scourge in Captain America #319. We're reminded twice that there is now a new Ringer, separate from Strikeback.
  
• Stegron was last seen in Amazing Spider-Man #166.
  
• Doc Ock says that ESU could use some positive publicity after the recent fiascos as the hands of the Human Torch (Fantastic Four #371) and then says "not to mention Sabretooth", which is a reference to Spider-Man/Punisher/Sabretooth: Designer Genes.
  
• Doc Ock says that he can't keep fighting the Answer because he's got urgent business that cannot be delayed, with a footnote to Spider-Man Unlimited #3.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A