So here’s the thing about the “Brand New Day” format: It’s got rotating creative teams, each turning in several issues every few months, which means they all want to create their own internal plotlines and also have to pay tribute to all the other storylines so that the reader feels a strong sense of continuity. This means that there is a lot to keep track of. Spider-Man’s extended cast has always been recognized as one of the best in the history of comics, but now it’s … A lot. Menace kills a mayoral candidate. The Daily Bugle is under new ownership after J. Jonah Jameson’s wife sold it out from under him while he was recovering from a heart attack. Mary Jane might know who Peter is but he he barely knows her and instead is trying to get with Harry Osborn’s girlfriend. And there’s a lot more.
On top of that, there’s new super characters. In these issues, we get the villain “Screwball.”
She has the unfortunate distinction of being introduced sledding down a water tower covered in white splooge above the heading, “Money Shot.”
She’s just a good gymnast. No powers. And she wants to be famous so, as far as villains go, she’s pretty trivial.
And speaking of trivial villains, Peter Parker’s new job at the rebranded “DB!” is as a paparazzi. He gets pics of a celeb named Bobby Carr, who has a super-powered stalker named Paperdoll.
Carr is an ass who hits a waitress who then sues him, using Peter’s paparazzi pix as evidence in the lawsuit. Paperdoll decides to kill her to save Bobby, and does so by turning the woman into a two-dimensional paper doll using powers that…I just don’t care that much about. But if you do, she was dimensionally compressed in a lab accident.
By the end, Spidey has captured her.
Along the way…
…Peter gets pictures of Bobby Carr with Mary Jane. The last panel of this arc has her boarding a plane, leaving New York. Which is sad because her and Peter was one of the few truly great love affairs in comic book history.
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