I think this guy probably committed his first costumed crime, then realized he spent five times as much on his outfit, but shrugged and said something like "you gotta spend money to make money." As someone who can put tons of work into things nobody cares about, I feel that. From 1982,
Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #62, "Gold Fever!" Written by Bill Mantlo, pencils by Ed Hannigan, finishes by Jim Mooney.
Prepare your sense of disbelief for a pounding today: the costumed criminal Gold Bug negotiates with the
Mafia Maggia for a partnership, and all he has to do is a little gold heist, from some second-rate college science lab.
Empire State University sucks, go
State! But ESU is getting a veritable ton of gold lent to it, for a science experiment, by a promising researcher: Peter Parker! As a teaching assistant, he had a dismal attendence record, and was currently late for his own experiment, but his department head Dr. Sloan thought his paper on radiation absorption properties of precious metals had promise. Still, while Peter goes on about how important that job and science overall was to him, he spent so much time being Spidey that it was hard not to see his studies as an afterthought. Especially since he also seems like he's there to meet girls, since he's working Marcy Kane and Deb Whitman, before getting to actual work.
While Peter is irradiating the gold...for science reasons? Gold Bug approaches ESU in his Blue Beetle-like ship, and laments his high overhead: he used real gold in all his stuff! Which seems ill-advised, as does his deal with the Maggia: they got 80% of the take; but GB acts like that was his only way forward. Dr. Sloan leaves Peter to finish his work, but before he can de-irradiate the gold (...through science?) Gold Bug smashes the roof in on top of him, pinning him in his radiation suit. Gold Bug then blasts two security guards, then accidentally, Deb Whitman, with his "gold-gun," covering them in a hardened shell of gold dust to suffocate! That seems horrible
and wasteful. With a clever resin-plastic carrier, Gold Bug hauls the gold away in his ship; while Peter gets free, throws a spider-tracer on the ship, then scrambles to mix a chemical solution to free the guards and Deb. Dr. Sloan returns and doesn't immediately point fingers, but is dismayed since the gold would have been radioactive enough to kill anyone handling it unprotected. Sounds like a problem that'll fix itself, then!
After the cops finish questioning Peter--that would have been
never--Spidey follows his tracer to Gold Bug's hideout, and interrupts his meeting with the Maggia. In the fight, Spidey takes Gold Bug's gloves off, to show him the sores and radiation burns he already had from handling the gold. If Gold Bug is upset by being "
poisoned by gold!" the Maggia goons are more so, and gun him down when he goes for his gold-gun. He goes into the river, and seemingly sinks like a stone. A furious Spidey, too late to save him, turns to beat the tar out of the goons, but the cops had turned up by that point, and Spidey seems to spend the rest of the night swimming around, looking for Gold Bug.
Gold Bug--I'm used to it being 'Goldbug,' but it was the former this issue--is probably best known for a brief appearance in the
Civil War comic, where he gets shot by the Punisher. I was a bit more sympathetic to him before this issue: killing someone with that gold-gun seems messed up. I swear I had seen another comic where he went into the water, maybe in a gold-mobile or some stupid thing; but easier to miraculously survive something like that than the Punisher shooting you in the face...
5 comments:
Yo that is pretty F'd up to be shot by that gun now when you really think about it. I mean, what if Peter wasn't around to return them to normal? What if the process wasn't all that quick? I imagine time would immediately be against you, depending on how much air was sealed in with the person who was shot & the amount of coverage by the gold.
Also, is Peter resistant to a degree to radiation? I'm curious if it's ever been tested besides this issue just how much radiation his body could handle before he succumbed to its effects.
Honestly being eventually put out of his misery by Frank like the mort of the month he was was probably the best thing to happen to him.
Yeah, that's an ugly way to die. Isn't that what Goldfinger did to people in the Bond movie, or did he just have them painted gold after he killed them?
As for Peter's radiation resistance, I know he pumped himself full of radiation (or some kind of radioactive sludge/ooze/fluid) to beat Morlun the first time they fought in the JMS/Romita Jr. Amazing Spider-Man run. It kept Morlun from feeding off the "spider" energy because it wasn't "pure" or something. Didn't seem to be any ill effects, but Peter eventually developed cancer, which killed him in The Other. Well, that and getting the shit kicked out of him by back-from-dead-somehow Morlun.
At least, I think that's what was happening in The Other. I try not to think about it more than I can avoid.
I think it is. As in gold was in EVERY nook & crevasse of a person's body, so the they both suffocated to death & died from overheating due to their pores being blocked from breathing.
I hear you. JMS's run was VERY much a mixed bag that tended to have bad takes on Spider-Man towards the end there. Between the Other & Sins of the Past, JMS should've been removed from that book A LOT sooner.
For some reason, I had it in my head that Spidey could absorb x amount of radiation (more than a regular schmoe) but more than that, stuff started to happen: he'd get sick, grow extra arms, something. That might be one of those things that was maybe true once but has fallen by the wayside.
He turned into a Spider-Hulk from getting too much gamma radiation, right? I think I had a '90s trading card about that.
But he has to have a certain amount of radiation in him already, because it was his giving Aunt May a transfusion that made her sick and lead to that whole story in the Lee/Ditko days where he has to lift all the heavy stuff to get the serum to save her.
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