Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #101: Echoes...

Script: Cary Burkett
Pencils: Juan Alacantara

Though it lacks much connection to the issues surrounding it, Cary Burkett has put together a good all-round satisfying story here.

Despite the legal predicament that we last left him in, Mark Scarlotti, aka Blacklash, is back, his only explanation being the line "But I've been given one more chance."

Alas, true to Scarlotti's ill-fortunes (well, bad choices really) this one chance ain't gonna turn his life around either.

His petty theft job quickly has him battling honest hard-working security guards, again, and Spider-Man, again. What are the chances?

The generic cover by outsider John Byrne, though brilliant, looks like a stock one, featuring as it does a stylish image of the wrong costume.

For all that, this is a good tale. Under the surface Pete is dealing with his annual grief over Gwen Stacy's death, until ultimately he is able to use that angst to save someone's life, and his own. If Gwen hadn't died so tragically, it appears that he wouldn't have been able to save the damsel in this one.

Just how old is Peter though? How characters age in such a long-running, and slowly-progressing, narrative such as the Marvel universe has always been a bone of contention, and the ambiguity is kept up here by the dates on Gwen's tombstone in the final panel. It looks like she died in 1972, but the artist / letterer doesn't seem too sure...


This issue is dated 1985, but if page seven panel six is to be believed, I'd really like to suppose that this is set in late 2008...