Web Of Spider-Man #6: Gold Rush! / The Amazing Spider-Man #268: This Gold Is Mine!

WOSM #6:
Script: Danny Fingeroth
Layouts: Mike Harris
Finishes: Zeck, Layton, Simons and Mooney

ASM #268:
Writer: Tom DeFalco
Penciler: Ron Frenz
Finished Art: Josef Rubinstein

A cross-title two-parter about the aftermath of the Beyonder transforming Power Man and Iron Fist's office building into gold (an early Christmas gift), which just didn't gel for me.

I think my main problem is summed-up by the wording on both covers: "The good news is the Beyonder has turned this skyscraper into solid gold."

Yeah, that does sound like good news, doesn't it? Yet everyone in these issues considers it to be a tragedy.

Sure, people are trapped inside the collapsing building, and the worldwide value of gold will go down, but generally speaking, you'd expect those in the vicinity to be whooping with joy at their good fortune.

The US government moves in to forcibly take the building and its contents from their rightful owners. However, far from cementing its financial position on the world stage, the US orders that it all be cut-up and thrown away in the sea. Surely, although this extreme form of quantitative easing would push the worldwide value of gold down, the US would still own a higher percentage of it. If the US discovered a similarly-sized gold-mine, would they really destroy it? I guess they didn't want to be too rich.

Spidey has a moral dilemma of his own. At the end he actually takes a golden notebook from out of a trash-can and makes off with it. His angst over this decision makes little sense. He's hardly stealing from anyone, and certainly not from the US government, because the person who threw the pad out never gave it to them. I guess you could argue that refuse gets collected by the government whereupon it becomes theirs, especially if the commandeering of the building is viewed as a huge rubbish-collection operation, but that reasoning just isn't on display here. Really, that pad had no owner.

WOSM #6 concludes with him swinging away, with the golden notebook at his side, which the narration describes as a "turning point in the life of... the Amazing Spider-Man."

I'm sorry, I'm probably being very dim, but I still don't really get why.

Given the circumstances of part one to flesh-out, part two is better realised.