At
Defenders HQ, Hellcat is putting on a show with the magical Shadow Cloak she
picked up last issue. But during the finale, she pulls an Ort-Beast out of her
cape, Hulk remembers the monster from issue #59 and nearly tears the cape (and
the room) apart trying to find it. Hulk calms down, and Dollar Bill shows them
from the newspaper that Lunatik is still terrorizing the campus and they decide
to act against the baddie….
So,
Hellcat, Valkyrie, and Bill take the Hellcatmobile down to the college and meet
with Professor Turk. They appeal to the Professor for a scheme to capture the
villain. Turk suggests that Lunatik would be enraged by a statue honoring a
notable lawbreaker and so they plan to use a statue of Spider-Man as bait in a
trap….
In
Russia, The Presence (formerly Codename: Sergei) is brooding over his rejection
by the Red Guardian and so seeks solace in the radioactive Forbidden Zone,
brooding instead about the secret past of that region….
A
week later, Val on Aragorn and Patsy on a regular horse are performing for
Bill’s camera when the statue is delivered. Nighthawk called in a favor from an
artist friend and he shows them a hollow base that Hulk can hide in to capture
Lunatik when he comes to deface the statue. But Hulk refuses and leaps off into
the distance, necessitating a change of plans….
At
the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson orders Peter Parker to be at the
unveiling of the statue the next morning, So, that night, Spider-Man,
suspecting some sort of trap, swings over to the campus and confronts the guys
putting the statue up. His Spider-Sense tells him someone is watching and he
ends up nabbing Hellcat. While waiting an hour for the webbing to dissolve, there’s
a lot of time for explanations. Then some disgruntled anti-Spidey students
approach and Spidey goes to warn them and he is attacked by Lunatik. Hellcat
and Nighthawk join in, with Dollar Bill filming the action. NH is knocked out
so Val swoops down on Aragorn to carry him to safety and the villain hurls his staff
and knocks out the winged horse, sending two heroes plummeting to the ground.
Spidey swiftly erects a giant net to save them and Lunatik unveils the statue,
dropping the curtain over the good guys and vanishing in the confusion. Then
the Defenders stand round noting how ugly the semi-abstract statue of
Spider-Man is….