The next day saw Spider-Man foil a bank robbery in midtown and Peter Parker hand a dozen superb photos to JJ, who called them garbage and immediately announced that the Bugle's next banner headline would say, "SPIDER-MAN - VIGILANTE, MENACE, BANK ROBBER!" Peter was also told that he'd better not forget about the generous assignment he'd been given, or there would be serious consequences and repercussions, including a major slash in pay. He gritted his teeth and took his paycheck while he could.
He didn't have anything better to do, so he decided to swing uptown and be depressed with Harry for a while - it was always fun, hanging out with friends. On the way, he took a detour and followed Mary Jane from her job at the diner to her apartment.
Even from twenty stories up, she was beautiful. He followed her, bouncing and climbing from roof to roof and sometimes swinging between the big gaps. Sometimes he got ahead of her, sometimes he misjudged the climbing time and fell behind her, but he never, ever, lost sight of her among the crowds. Next to MJ, the rest of New York was just shades of gray - boring and hardly noticeable. He stayed with her until she went inside her apartment building, and then sighed and returned to his original path.
Oh yeah, he was a good friend, Spidey thought, a little sourly, as he webbed onwards. He made sure Harry wasn't sliding into homicidal mania, and he made sure MJ got home safe. Meanwhile, he didn't want to spend more than two minutes with Harry and he couldn't tell MJ how much he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. It was enough to make a guy go crazy.
His spider-sense hummed its familiar song of warning, and he glanced down at the passing rooftops to see the missing and un-missed gunman standing on a fire escape, staring up at Spidey with an expressionless face.
"Speaking of going psycho..." Spidey said to himself, and winced at his own bad pun. Well. This certainly beared investigating. He didn't feel like changing lines, so he swung around, kicked off a building's side, and came back the way he'd come, landing with expert grace on the rooftop Psycho was occupying.
"We've got to stop meeting like this," he told Psycho. "People will talk!"
"You got a lucky shot last time, spider," Psycho said, apparently choosing to ignore him in favor of being menacing. He raised his metal arm, displaying a gun. "Now it's my turn."
Spidey didn't wait for the shot, but jumped and kicked out, hoping to knock the gun from his hand. The kick connected, and Psycho went tumbling over the side of the fire escape into the alley below, but the gun stayed firmly clenched in those silver fingers.
"Hey, what gives?" Spidey asked no one in particular, frowning beneath his mask. The hit was solid - the gun should've been out of the park. He climbed halfway down the wall and leapt to the ground, watching with his arms crossed over his chest as Psycho struggled to rise from a pile of trash and trash cans. "Well, you're tough, I'll give you that."
"Who cares what you think? You're just a little bug." The effectiveness of the insult was somewhat foiled by the fact that Psycho was still flailing about in the trash.
"Hey, pal," Spidey said loudly, offended, "spiders are arachnids, not insects. Flunk out of Bio?"
"Never took it," he said, finally getting to his feet and immediately raising the gun again.
Spidey dodged the lasers, fired a line at the metal arm, snagged it, pulled it hard, and jumped. Psycho hit the filthy asphalt just as Spidey landed squarely on Psycho's gun, now stretched out on the ground, and heard a very satisfying cracking noise.
"Betcha never took Physics, either," Spidey said, shamelessly invading Psycho's personal space and sticking his face right in the other man's.
Psycho growled and kicked him off, then flipped backwards and landed in a fighting stance.
Spidey, meanwhile, had recovered his own footing. Now he tilted his head and said, "Wait, let me guess - you were bored, so you thought you'd try some kung fu."
Instead of charging, Psycho stepped out of his stance and looked mad. "You know, I'm not getting paid enough to listen to your big, flappin' mouth."
" 'Big mouth'? 'Big mouth'? You've got a tire iron wedged between your incisors" - he pointed at Psycho's abnormally large jaw - "and you're saying I have a big mouth?"
"It was a metaphorical insult," Psycho said, scowling. He scowled quite well, Spidey noticed.
"Ooo, big word," Spidey said. "Be careful you don't blow a servo."
"At least I'm not running around in tights. Or is that your underwear?"
"Whoa, whoa, no dissing the superhero," Spidey exclaimed, not really bothered; he'd heard worse before. But form had to be kept, so he stuck out one hand and sent a big, gooey blast of web right at Psycho's leering face, the better to shut his mouth.
But instead of the usual futile-grabbing-while-trying-to-complain maneuver that most of his victims went through, Psycho simply reached up, hooked his fingers into the mass of web, and pulled.
His face came off.
There was no blood, no fuss, no nothing - just a flesh-colored mask of a face falling through the air and hitting the cement with hardly a sound.
Spider-Man looked at the face, then at Psycho, then at the face, and then back at Psycho. His newly-revealed countenance resembled nothing more than a silver metal skull, complete with a permanent, oversize grin and glowing red eyes. He looked like the Terminator's dentist's worst nightmare.
"Well," Spidey said after a long moment, finding words at last, "that's a little different."
"What, no wisecracks? I'm disappointed," Psycho said with audible sarcasm, hissing the words a little.
"I'm sorry, was I supposed to be funny?" Spidey retorted, involuntarily glancing at the webbed face on the ground and feeling just a little sick to his stomach. Okay, so it wasn't real, but it was still creepy as hell. "Gee, I must've forgot in all the excitement of seeing someone pull their face off."
"Max reacted better," Psycho informed him.
Psycho was having entirely too much fun with this. Spidey decided that, regardless of the mild queasiness, it was time to take the guy down a peg or five, and said, "Well, he's your boyfriend, so I'd hope so."
Psycho stiffened, visibly incensed. "He's my archnemesis!"
"Oh, that's sad. Have you considered counseling?"
"You're dead, bug!" Psycho said, shifting into a new stance and tensing to lunge.
Spidey didn't wait for him to make up his mind to attack, and closed the distance between them in a single jump. "Promises, promises."
But one that Psycho intended to fulfill, he saw quickly. Psycho moved fast - not as fast as a human spider, but fast enough to get out of the way of his strikes, and to keep the ol' spider-sense constantly screaming. And Psycho was actually quite good at kung fu, or whatever form of martial arts he was practicing. Spidey found himself unable to get a good hit on the guy, while perilously close to taking a metal fist to his jaw more than once.
And that simply wouldn't do.
Fortunately, Spider-Man had more than just super-strength, speed, agility, and sticky feet at his disposal. He also had a quick mind and a quicker mouth. Both of which could run circles around a B-grade baddie like Psycho. Besides, he'd noticed something that he just had to exploit.
"You're what, thirty?" Spidey asked, dodging another kick and trading it for one of his own. "I bet you were an aggressive kid - watched a lot of action cartoons. Probably cheered for the bad guys, right?"
Psycho snorted and swung at his head; Spidey ducked just in time. "This is the lamest excuse for witty banter I've ever seen. You got a punch line or what?"
He forestalled a witty-banter-type comment about punches and went on with his original line of attack. "Well, see, I've been thinking to myself - 'Spidey,' I've been thinking, 'why does this schmuck look so familiar?' And then it hit me - you look just like Trapjaw."
That actually stopped Psycho cold. He looked at Spidey with an expression that, had he still had a face, would have been puzzled. "Who?"
"You know, Trapjaw," Spidey said, delighted with this turn of events. "One of Skeletor's flunkies. Come on - the arm, the industrial-grade smile - you're a total Trapjaw wannabe!"
Psycho growled and lunged at him.
Spidey leapt backwards easily, sticking to a wall with one hand and foot. "Oh, all right, we'll call you 'Trapjaw Jr.' "
Psycho punched the wall, sending mortar and brick chips everywhere, and Spidey jumped again, this time landing on a trash can. "No? How about 'Trapjaw's Revenge' ?"
An incoherent sound of pure annoyance was followed by a charge at the trash can. Just for variety, Spidey webbed away, swinging over Psycho's head and landing on the ground behind him. "Okay, okay - 'Trapjaw II, the Sequel'! But I should warn you that sequels are never-"
The rest of the sentence was lost as Psycho caught him full in the chest with a punch from that metal arm. Spidey hit the cement, and just as quickly jumped up to his feet again, shaking his head to clear it. Under his breath, he murmured, "Then again, what do I know?"
Psycho flipped the claw out and snapped it a few times. "Please... call me Smiley."
Spider-Man decided to mix up his humor a little, and throw in some "patronizing" along with the "smartass." Too much routine was boring. "Smiley? Awww, did you think of that all by yourself?"
"Don't you ever SHUT UP?" he roared, exasperation and frustration blazing from every syllable.
Aaaaaaand it was back to "smartass." Spidey grinned, even though Psycho couldn't see it, and said, "Not my style, Trapjaw McGraw."
Psycho's eyes glowed brilliant red - a shade that, Spidey noted, might best be described as "murderous crimson." Too bad Prismacolor never asked superheroes for color names. He had a few good ones stored up: "panic green," "web gray," "upside-down-for-too-long purple"...
But before anything (assuredly bad, and probably very messy) could happen, a siren whooped and the alley was splashed with red-and-blue light. Spidey looked over his shoulder and saw some of New York's Finest scrambling to reach them. One of them shouted, "You in the alley - freeze!"
And people said the cops were never there when you needed them.
Psycho, obviously intent on being a living villain cliche, snarled, "This isn't over!" and ran down the alley, away from the police.
Spidey didn't wait to see what became of the gunman, but decided a judicious fleeing-of-the-scene was warranted and quickly webbed out of range himself. He didn't have time to play the "I'm a good guy, you're good guys, let's not arrest me," game today.
After all, he had places to go and friends to depress.