“Am I missing something?”

Well, yes and no, I guess. Based on the first quote, you clearly “got” it, but you apparently don’t dig that.

The thing that’s awesome is that you’ve got somebody who wasn’t even established enough to be a genuine villain, just a stop along the way for Spider-Man, but that one encounter with Spider-Man completely changed his entire life.

That’s kind of the overall premise of the series, the quintessential example certainly being ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ in ish #4. There’s also a decent J. Jonah Jameson story, which is slightly gratuitous, in that it seems like a story which is told every few years in one spider-title or another. Sometimes they stray a bit — they did a Rhino story that was good, and a Spider-Man on Valentine’s Day story that more or less ignores that, but pretty much, the series is about the unknown impact of Spider-Man on other people’s lives.

Incidentally, answering the question above, this story is specifically in the third of four trades.

I notice the money seems to be a much larger amount here than in Amazing Fantasy.

What the hell is he drawing now that Steve Segovia’s on Dark Wolverine and Simon Bisley’s doing the Hellblazer interiors?

Is he rotating arcs on one or the other or both?

I can see why the promoter didn’t want to pay Peter since his business was failing, but in the Tangled Webs story he’s painted as this nice guy everyone’s loyal too. Also, by winning Peter accidentally screwed everyone. It seems like the story was created around the last line, but everything that came before it didn’t fit.

Am I missing something?

This goes along with another nice Spiderman moment I remember (though I can’t remember the specific issue). Crusher had opened a gym and was teaching kids from his neighborhood, and he was telling the kids that he had trained Spiderman. He ended up getting in trouble, and had to get Spidey’s help. Spidey going along with the story for the kids was always a nice moment.