Marvel Team-Up (1972 series) #72

Late at night, Spider-Man comes upon a band of costumed thieves robbing a fur warehouse. Spidey knocks them around but is then shot in the back with mercy bullets, drugging him so he crawls under their armored van and flips it on its side. As he grows increasingly groggy, the bandits flee but our hero’s Spider-Sense alerts him to danger. He is then attacked by Whiplash, cutting his outfit to pieces but declining to kill him as “destroying one’s enemies should be an act of inspiration.” As the villains depart, Spidey tosses a Spider-Tracer on Whiplash and then he passes out….

Spidey awakens in the hospital, with police, including Captain Jean DeWolff, plus Iron Man, around him. DeWolff assures him they did not look under his mask while he was out and they brought in Iron Man because Whiplash, assassin for the Maggia, was one of his old enemies….

At Maggia HQ in New Jersey, Whiplash reports to the Section Leader while secretly plotting to overthrow and replace him. But the leader already knows of Whiplash’s failure to kill Spider-Man; Whiplash rebels, insisting on doing things his own way. An alarm goes off, showing Spider-Man and Iron Man arriving at the front gate, with Jean DeWolff in her vintage Roadster…

…having followed the signal from the Spider-Tracer. The two superheroes suggest DeWolff stay outside because she has no jurisdiction in New Jersey while they vault the wall around the estate. But Jean follows anyway. Iron Man enters through an open window which closes with steel shutters after he’s in and he finds himself in a maze of mirrors, facing multiple images of Whiplash and multiple whips. He uses his computer to sort out the real from false images and yanks Whiplash into the room, and they face off….

As Spidey is crossing a ceiling he encounters mechanical spiders biting him so that he falls from the ceiling to find the carpet transforming into a huge serpent twining about him. He realizes that the spiders must have injected him with some sort of drug and he fights it to see his real enemy: the Wraith. And Jean DeWolff enters with her gun pointed at her brother. But Wraith hypnotizes her, ordering her to shoot herself; Spidey leaps forward but Wraith brushes him off, and Spidey goes crashing through the wall into the mirrored room where he bumps into Whiplash. Iron Man punches Whiplash back through the wall so that he bowls over the Wraith and Jean snaps out of his control. The two baddies plot to take her hostage but Jean slaps sense into Brian, freeing him from the mind-power that the Maggia used to control him for their own purposes. Whiplash makes to escape, slashing Jean with his whip, which causes Brian to fly into a rage and employ his power to make Whiplash think his whip has turned into a fanged one-eyed serpent, freaking him out. The cops come and take away the baddies and Jean asks Brian to promise to never use his mind-power again....