Jack of Hearts is a virtual prisoner in his New Haven, Connecticut, mansion, his
powers dampened by a steady infusion of Neutro-Mist while SHIELD personnel
patrol the grounds to ensure that the hero does not leave. But they did not
reckon on Jack’s becoming resistant to the low level of Neutro-Mist. Jack does
some calculating and then jets through the house, faster than the sensors are
able to increase the volume of Neutro-Mist and he duels with SHIELD agents
manning floating devices, jumping into a car and speeding off, to the chagrin
of William Martins, Jack’s butler but really the agent in charge of keeping him
prisoner….
Having
dropped out of the graduate program, Peter Parker returns to Empire State
University to clear out his locker. While there, he runs into a couple of
friends, Steve Hopkins and Phillip Chang, who are sad to see him go. Also there
is Marcy Kane who questions Pete’s judgment in leaving school and he responds
with a snide comment about her lack of human feeling….
Jack
Hart arrives at the University where he uses Neutro-Mist to suppress his powers
and make-up to hide his dead eye and burned face. He asks a passing student
where he can find Marcy Kane and the student, Peter Parker, directs him to the
physics lab but his Spider-Sense starts tingling so, after some inner
deliberations, he decides to follow Jack, especially when he sees armed figures
swooping down from the sky….
And
now we learn from Jack Hart that he was once a student there, majoring in
literature and popular with the ladies but there was one he couldn’t charm:
physics major Marcy Kane. She considered him frivolous so he wrote her a poem
that melted her heart—but he had to leave school because his father discovered
Zero Fluid and the rest we know. And now that she sees him, she is angry,
accusing him of trying to make a challenging conquest; he denies it, she slaps
him, his sunglasses fly off, revealing his mutated eye—and then the SHIELD agents
arrive to take him back. A battle ensues, Jack of Hearts doffs his disguise,
Spider-Man arrives and assumes that Jack, trying to protect Marcy, is the good guy.
So he joins the fight against the armored agents. After several pages of action,
Spidey finally spots the SHIELD insignia on an armored agent’s helmet and
realizes he may have gotten things a bit wrong. Marcy fills Spidey in on what
the agents told her: that Jack’s power is unstable and is slowly killing
him—and there’s the real danger that he explode, taking half the city with him.
But Jack refuses to be locked up again and accuses Spider-Man of having
betrayed him; Jack follows Spidey to the lab where the wall-crawler has turned
on the gas; Jack fires his energy bolts and touches off an explosion. Marcy
rushes upstairs to discover Jack of Hearts unharmed. She promises to help him
find a cure for his condition. He figures he has nothing to lose….
Story
continues in JACK OF HEARTS #1.