“With great power comes great responsibility.” There is no phrase more famous or better attributed to Spider-Man than those pronounced by Uncle Ben – although his authorship is actually erroneous – and it is the one that gives meaning to the unavoidable duty that Peter Parker to put on the red and blue suit. In this way, the death of the hero's father figure led to a net thrower beginning to climb and swing around New York.
That happened in 1962 in the pages of Amazing Fantasy #15, iconic cartoons that bore the stamp of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee to give rise to the most famous face in all of The House of Ideas. Little by little important figures began to emerge such as Ned Leeds, JJ Jameson, Mary Jane Watson, Harry Osborn and a huge range of characters who were relevant in the events to come. However, nothing at all about that thief who the last time we saw was tangled in a spider's web and was handed over to the police.
Therefore, what happened to that murderer, unfortunately, so relevant? The truth is that we had to wait until the events of The Amazing Spider-Man #193, in 1979, to see him again and again intruding into the old Parker house searching everywhere. Luckily, neither Aunt May nor Peter lived there anymore, so they didn't have to suffer her wrath for not finding what she was looking for.
And although the murder of Uncle Ben could be understood as accidental, the truth is that the thief had reasons to enter the family home. This guy, whose name has never been known, He shared a cell years before with Dutch Malone, an important gangster who murmured in his sleep that he had hidden a real fortune in his house. By chance, that house, in the 1930s, was the same one that the Parker couple would later occupy. The criminal made money at the time thanks to his illegal supplies of alcohol during Prohibition, but was eventually captured by Elliot Ness himself.
The treasury agent hunted down Malone and managed to convict him of tax evasion, like Capone, so he ended up dying in prison with that secret, taking it to the grave… or not. The truth is that the thief was never sure of the veracity of that story, but he became obsessed with finding the blessed treasure and He did not hesitate to kill Ben Parker as soon as he got in his way. Little by little, Marv Wolfman shows us the ploy that the thief creates with Dr. Ludwig Rinehart to find out the location of the money.
There are seven issues in which we see how the person in charge of the senior center is threatened by the thief and is forced to fake the death of May Parker. This is because they needed to keep Peter away from her beloved aunt as much as possible, since the boy was always close to her, taking care of her. Once her purpose was achieved, Rinehart revealed himself to the thief as Quentin Beckthe original Mysterio, who had supposedly died.
That death was also faked and his new job consisted of fraudulently inheriting the possessions of the elderly who died in the residence he ran. After getting rid of the thief, the villain confronts Spider-Man after the hero learns his true identity, but the result is unfavorable for the wall-crawler. A synthetic drug makes him lose his powers and this is when we enter fully into The Amazing Spider-Man #200a round figure that always represents a turning point for the characters.
In this case it led to the reunion, many years later, between Peter and his uncle's murderer. Curiously, searching for information about his enemy, Spider-Man sneaks into a television station building and arrests another thug who was trying to escape from a security guard. Peter recognizes him, because he is the same one who reproached him for not catching the thief back in the day. The thief, for his part, is tired of not finding answers and decides to wait for Parker in his apartment to point his gun at him. Our protagonist does not hesitate for a second when entering the door of the house and rushes to kill the criminal, although he ends up knocked out because he does not enjoy the advantages that his superpowers give him.
Knowing that May can be used in his favor to extract information from the boy, the thief goes to the warehouse where the old woman is still kidnapped to bring her to him. He barely manages to follow Spider-Man who manages to escape the ropes that tied him and it is the Acme building where the final confrontation between the two takes place. Peter is shot in the side, but that does not prevent him from fighting the thug who is completely terrified by the aggressiveness that the net thrower gives off.
In the middle of the fight, the nethead takes off his mask and reveals his true identity to the thief, which causes even more fear for the thief, since he now fits all the pieces of what is happening. Peter harasses him and pressures him to remind him that he is not going to stoop so low as to kill him, since he will turn him over to the police, because “with great power comes great responsibility.” The burden that the thief suffers is such that… dies from cardiorespiratory arrest. The wall-crawler tries to help him, but it is too late for him, and all that remains is to take May to the hospital.
It is there, already certain that no one is going to bother them, that the endearing old woman confesses to her nephew that in reality they did find the said box in the house years ago. The problem was that the silverfish had devoured the inside of it, so whatever was in there, it was completely useless. In the end, that treasure hunt only led to the thief dying knowing the truth. harsh truth of the crime he had committed.
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