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Mike P
Down on his luck college student Mike P has an
important decision to make. Little does he know that it will
effect the rest of his life. Needing money to stay in school he has 2
choices to climb out of his finical woes: sell off his impressive comic
book collection or volunteer for the university's clinical studies on
bio-feedback and sleep deprivation.
...cut to the next morning university behavioral lab
Mr. P meets with Prof. Marc
Venture to discuss the various tests and more importantly his
compensation . After being satisfied with the situation, Mike is
prepared for the first test involving brainwave patterns. He is
hooked up to odd looking EEG leads that attach around his head and is
told that he will be sedated for this preliminary scan. After
being strapped down to the table, the sedative is given and Mike drifts
off into a deep sleep...
Mike awakens only to find
himself no longer on the table, but locked in an isolation chamber.
He feels somehow transformed, but still can't move. The stench of
cigar smoke is almost unbearable and he can hear shouting in another
room. Then Prof. Venture enters the room and Mike demands to know
what's going on, only it's not Prof. Venture . The man pulls of
his mask to reveal...JOHN BYRNE!!!
He tells you he couldn't finish off
Spider-man by writing crappy stories about him or retconing his origin
so he will use you to kill spider-man. Mike is told that he has
been given a special serum to give him spider-like abilities and his
brain patterns have been altered to obey John Byrne and kill Spider-man.
Before Mike is released he is given a test, what some could consider the
cruelest form of torture...Byrne orders him to read all of CHAPTER ONE
as a test of his control. And as agonizing as it is, Mike cannot
help himself but to comply. After passing the test Mike is allowed
to test his abilities and just like Spider-man he does whatever a spider
can. Byrne gives his "spider" instructions on how to
find and kill Spider-man. Mike is screaming in his head "I
won't do it, I won't...HOLY SHIT I had to read all of CHAPTER ONE!"
...cut to NYC the following morning
Mike tracks down Spider-man on a
rooftop in Queens. He confronts Spider-man and can hear Byrne
yelling in his head "kill Spider-man". But Mike finds
the willpower to not attack. "Hey kid , you okay?" says
Spider-man. Mike replies "I am now but I have some
unfinished business with a certain comic writer." "You
too, huh, sometimes I think their worse than facing Dr. Doom when
he's having a bad hair day. See ya' around kid, it's a big
city and I can't let the Fantastic 4 catch all the bad guys, I'll
lose my super hero union card."
Standing on that rooftop Mike figured it
out, the trauma of having to read CHAPTER ONE must've broke Byrne's
control over him. From that day forward he vowed to use his powers
to stop Byrne and all other crappy writers like him. Later on
Mike met up with a group of super-powered individuals that shared his
common goal. They're known as the Crawl Space Avengers and they
continue to wage the war against bad comics to this very day.
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