🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

👻🪸🐈‍⬛ Phantomoperand 👻🪸🐈‍⬛

Hysterical Entanglement and Allegorical Aestheticism in The Spectacular Spider-Man #176–177

A textual detail should be established first. Issue #176 spells the character’s name Dagney Forrester, while #177 generally uses Dagny. This article uses Dagny except when reproducing dialogue exactly. Page references follow the printed story-page numbers.

The two-part Corona story, The Love of Power and Fever Pitch, constructs superpower as poisoned beauty. Dagny’s transformation makes her radiant, sexually commanding, chemically creative and almost invulnerable. The same experiment poisons Soho’s water, infects Mary Jane Watson and Normie Osborn, threatens dozens of patients, and leaves Dagny’s own body subject to sudden decomposition.

Beauty and ugliness therefore refuse stable moral meanings. Dagny appears most beautiful when she is preparing to kill. She appears most grotesque when she is terrified, suicidal and vulnerable to institutional capture. Cedric Forrester remains handsome, composed and publicly respectable while treating human beings as experimental matter. Spider-Man becomes feverish, hallucinatory, physically weakened and covered in refuse while acting most fully according to his sense of responsibility.

The adventure’s allegorical aestheticism lies in this conversion of social power into bodily appearance. Beauty is neither decoration nor moral reward. It is the visible form of control over how one’s body may be approached, interpreted and possessed. Ugliness is neither inner evil nor simple punishment. It is the condition under which other people feel authorized to insult, restrain, study and administer a body.

The story is also structured through hysterical entanglement. Dagny repeatedly demands that Spider-Man recognize what she is—victim, woman, creature, sister, genius, perfection—while sabotaging every answer. Spider-Man repeatedly insists that she remains a person capable of choosing and being trusted, even while his interventions help deliver her into the machinery she fears. Each becomes implicated in the other’s self-definition. Neither can withdraw cleanly.

Poisoned water and the labor of beauty

The Soho Fever epidemic and Dagny’s superpower are one material event divided between spectacular and ordinary bodies.

Cedric and Dagny attempt to alter human cells so that they can convert surrounding matter directly into energy. The experiment creates Corona. At the same time, the purification equipment overloads and discharges toxic chemicals into the municipal water system.

Dagny explains:

The purifier overloaded—and the toxic chemicals were flushed directly back into the water main! That’s what caused the Soho Fever!

—Dagny to Spider-Man, #176, p.19

The superheroic transformation is therefore inseparable from industrial waste. Dagny’s private ascent appears elsewhere as public illness. Her shining body and the fever victims’ sweating bodies are opposite products of the same chemical circulation.

Mary Jane’s infection makes the beauty–poison relation explicit. Before collapsing, she tells Peter:

I’ve been bopping to Ronda and guzzling water all day—trying to burn off some of this fat!

—Mary Jane, #176, p.15

Mary Jane consumes the contaminated water as part of a beauty regimen. She exercises, dehydrates herself and drinks repeatedly because she regards her ordinary body as containing removable excess. Dagny’s experiment pursues the reverse operation: rather than subtracting supposed excess, it adds limitless energetic capacity.

Both women attempt bodily correction through the same poisoned medium.

Mary Jane wants to become thinner. Dagny wants to become more than human. One desire is socially ordinary and the other fantastic, yet the comic materially joins them. The pursuit of improved appearance becomes an intake system for contamination.

Peter answers Mary Jane:

You look just fine from where I’m standing, pretty lady!

—Peter Parker, #176, p.15

His reply has greater importance than simple marital reassurance. Peter sees beauty in a body that Mary Jane regards as needing correction and that the fever will soon render exhausted and visibly ill. Dagny, by contrast, cannot imagine retaining value once her body ceases to embody her desired image.

Mary Jane later tells Peter to act because people need him. Her illness produces trust and reciprocal obligation. Dagny imagines that perfect power would eliminate both.

Beauty becomes vulnerability the moment power fails

Dagny’s fear of powerlessness receives a concrete basis before her full history is known.

Cedric’s guards suppress Corona’s aura with fire-retardant foam. Once she is immobilized, one guard tells her:

Show some respect, babe—or I’m liable to get rough!

—Forrester guard, #176, p.9

The change in language is immediate. While she possesses destructive power, Corona is treated as a dangerous object requiring military control. Once restrained, she becomes “babe”: a sexualized body available for intimidation and rough handling.

Spider-Man intervenes:

There’s no call to treat anyone like that!

—Spider-Man, #176, p.9

He acts before deciding whether Corona is innocent. His response establishes a basic ethical distinction: danger may justify restraint, but it does not justify degradation.

The scene also explains Dagny’s later refusal to expend enough power to weaken herself. Her fear is not an abstract obsession with strength. She has already learned that any interruption of her aura changes how others handle her body.

Power is protection against interpretation. Once weakened, she no longer controls whether she is addressed as a woman, an animal, an experiment or a sexual object.

Woman, creature, her and it

Cedric’s first sustained violence against Dagny is grammatical.

When Joy Mercado identifies Corona as a woman, Cedric replies:

Woman? A natural mistake, Ms. Mercado—but that creature is no woman. It’s no longer even human.

—Cedric Forrester, #176, p.9

He needs Dagny to remain between person and object. Calling her a woman would imply bodily autonomy and intelligible desire. Calling her a creature permits containment. Calling her his sister later permits legal custody. Calling her an experiment permits invasive study.

Dagny identifies the contradiction:

You must make up your mind. Am I a “her” or an “it”?

—Dagny to Cedric, #176, p.11

Joy Mercado supplies the following judgment:

Inconsistency is so gauche, after all!

—Joy Mercado, #176, p.11

The attribution matters. Dagny exposes Cedric’s inability to stabilize her category; Joy aestheticizes his failure as bad taste. The polished scientist cannot maintain grammatical elegance because his interests require Dagny to shift continuously between subject and property.

Cedric’s beautiful surface

Cedric’s appearance and public manner remain controlled throughout the story. He wears the stable social surface that Dagny tries to obtain biologically.

He explains his ethics to Joy:

I do what I do because I like to, and because I’m good at it. Society is lucky to have me. I turn down all awards that don’t involve cash.

—Cedric Forrester, #176, p.4

Competence becomes its own moral authorization. He considers social benefit a fortunate by-product of whatever he already enjoys doing. Money is the only recognition he accepts because it can be converted into further control.

His respectability is supported by a network extending beyond the laboratory: campaign donations, political protection, attorneys, security personnel, controlled information and the expectation that fines can be treated as operating costs. Reports of EPA allegations, unlicensed weapons, earlier incidents and ecological damage reveal that Soho Fever belongs to a longer history of concealed consequences.

Cedric’s scientific process also presupposes disposable bodies. According to Dagny’s initial account, he considered using a “bedraggled vagrant” as an experimental subject. Even after her later confession complicates the story she told Spider-Man, Cedric’s willingness to select an anonymous, socially vulnerable person remains consistent with everything else he does.

His hierarchy of bodies is clear:

Cedric’s own body remains untouched. Dagny’s body becomes a valuable experimental platform. A vagrant’s body could serve as replaceable preliminary material. Soho residents absorb the experiment’s waste without knowledge or consent.

Cedric’s beauty consists in transferring disorder elsewhere.

The first hysterical reversal

Dagny initially tells Spider-Man that Cedric forced the Corona experiment upon her after she attempted to protect the intended human subject. She describes herself as his sister only to withdraw the identity:

Or at least I was—when I was still human.

—Dagny, #176, p.13

She then states:

As for me—I just—I just want to be myself again.

—Dagny, #176, p.14

The repetition matters. Her speech hesitates around the identity she supposedly wants restored. She continues:

It’s my hope that his notes will show me how to rid myself of this curse—how to become something more than an inhuman freak!

—Dagny, #176, p.14

The sentence contains its own reversal. She wants to become herself again, yet also “something more.” The human past and the superhuman future are folded together. What she calls a cure may restore her or complete her, depending upon which version of the story Spider-Man believes.

She later reveals:

I was a willing partner in the Corona experiment all along—it was Cedric who turned coward, not I—aborting the procedure halfway through!

—Dagny, #176, p.22

The chemicals Spider-Man helped her obtain were not intended to restore an ordinary human body. They would complete the transformation and grant greater power.

Her deception does not make every preceding claim meaningless. Cedric still regards her as experimental property. He still attempts to capture, drain and legally possess her. The lie attaches itself to a real structure of domination.

Dagny’s demand is therefore impossible but intelligible. She wants Spider-Man to acknowledge her victimization by Cedric while helping her complete the project she pursued with Cedric. She wants rescue from the experiment and vindication through the experiment. She needs Spider-Man to oppose Cedric while preserving the shared premise that power confers superiority.

Privilege rather than responsibility

Dagny and Cedric oppose each other personally while sharing a class doctrine.

Dagny tells Spider-Man:

The one thing about which I agree with Cedric is that power gives one privilege—not responsibility! Power doesn’t bind one to the common people—it frees one from—

—Dagny, #176, p.14

Her sentence is interrupted by bodily collapse. The fantasy of liberation is spoken by someone dependent upon chemicals, laboratories and other people’s assistance.

Dagny also identifies the social history of her position:

I’m rich, remember? I’ve been hearing that garbage since I was a little girl!

—Dagny, #176, p.14

The “garbage” is the expectation that privilege produces duties toward others. She has heard such appeals throughout her upbringing and has learned to regard them as moral pressure imposed upon the powerful by those who need them.

Her rejection of responsibility is therefore more than personal vanity. It belongs to the Forrester family’s relation to the world. Cedric converts wealth into institutional immunity. Dagny wants to convert wealth and science into bodily immunity.

The siblings disagree about who should possess the experiment’s power. They agree that power should release its possessor from ordinary obligation.

The scarce-antidote trap

The original antidote produces a genuine ethical trap rather than a simple choice between selfishness and altruism.

Dagny needs the chemicals to stabilize or complete her transformation. Soho Fever patients need the available batch. Replacement ingredients cannot be obtained immediately. Cedric is untrustworthy. Dagny has also lied. Spider-Man cannot verify the decisive claims in time.

Giving the chemicals to the patients may condemn Dagny or cause her unstable energy to erupt. Giving them to Dagny may sacrifice the patients on the basis of her assertion that, once fully transformed, she could cure them herself.

Spider-Man’s responsibility does not supply a clear solution. It forces him to act inside uncertainty.

Dagny’s destructive flare occurs while she is blinded by pain and rage. Spider-Man attempts to contain it, and the chemicals are lost amid the collision. Her attack causes the disaster, but the event also exceeds deliberate intention. Pain, unstable power, defensive intervention and scarcity combine to destroy the only immediate remedy.

The later summary that Corona destroyed the chemicals compresses a much less stable event into a clean statement of blame.

Becoming a spectacle

As Dagny’s body deteriorates, Cedric tells her:

Dagney—please. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.

—Cedric, #176, p.24

This sentence condenses the story’s aesthetic order. Cedric watches his sister undergo cellular collapse and responds first to the impropriety of visible suffering. Her pain is objectionable because it disrupts the controlled appearance of the laboratory and exposes the failed experiment.

She later forces Spider-Man to look:

Look at me, Spider-Man! Look what you’ve done! You’ll pay for this!

—Dagny, #176, p.30

“Look at me” is her governing demand. She submits her body as evidence. The deformed face is supposed to prove Spider-Man’s betrayal and Cedric’s cowardice. The perfected face will later be submitted as proof of her superiority.

Dagny does not simply inhabit changing bodies. She uses each body to compel a verdict from another person.

Perfection as stabilized energy

In #177, Dagny enters Empire State University’s field-acceleration chamber. The remaining chemicals in her body are recatalyzed, producing the form she desired: smooth, golden, powerful and apparently complete.

She announces:

I am now what I was meant to be, from the very beginning! I am perfection! I am power! I am, finally and truly—Corona!

—Dagny, #177, p.14

The sequence of identifications is exact:

What she was meant to be equals perfection.
Perfection equals power.
Power equals Corona.

Dagny’s ordinary name belongs to an incomplete and dependent body. Corona names the image in which identity, appearance and force supposedly coincide.

Yet the form remains technological. It is produced by an experimental process and a university machine. Cedric’s siphon can remove it. The story never proves that it would remain permanently stable.

Dagny’s beauty is real as bodily experience, but contingent as material condition. It depends upon apparatus, energy and protection from anyone capable of reversing it.

Her face also becomes less individually expressive as it becomes more perfect. The golden form is smooth and iconic. The deformed face displays more fear, fury and emotional specificity. The comic’s visual paradox is that perfection makes her more spectacular but less personally legible.

Poison proves the existence of the cure

Corona’s attack on the truck provides a compressed demonstration of her power.

She liquefies solid components, reshapes the resulting material around Spider-Man, leaves selected molecules crystalline and converts other molecules into tear gas. The gas weakens the prison enough for Spider-Man to escape.

The scene proves that she can perform the chemical conversions required to produce an antidote. Her poison demonstrates her capacity to cure.

When Spider-Man asks her to help the fever victims, she refuses:

Responsibility is your mania of choice, Spider-Man—not mine.

—Dagny, #177, p.16

She adds:

I leave it to you to save the innocents and unfortunates of the world—I’ve got rather more than enough to do keeping myself safe, thank you very much!

—Dagny, #177, p.16

Her refusal is selfish, but it also rests upon a material fear. Producing enough antidote may weaken her. Weakness has already meant restraint, humiliation and exposure to Cedric.

She asks:

Do I look like a fool, Spider-Man? I won’t make myself vulnerable again!

—Dagny, #177

Her apparent indifference to the victims cannot be separated from the reality that bodily vulnerability places her at risk of capture. The power that poisons the city also protects her against the man who caused the poisoning.

Spider-Man’s responsibility as internal compulsion

Dagny’s description of responsibility as Spider-Man’s “mania” is not merely an insult. The story visualizes it.

As Peter’s fever develops, Spider-Man appears to him almost as a separate internal figure, ordering him to help Harry create the antidote. His heroic identity addresses him from within. Responsibility is no longer simply a principle he consciously chooses; it becomes a voice that refuses rest.

This explains why Dagny can eventually trust him. Spider-Man tells her:

You think it’s a big joke that I believe my powers give me an obligation to help people—and maybe you’re right. But you know I believe it—you can trust in that!

—Spider-Man to Dagny, #177, p.18

He does not ask her to trust his superior judgment. His judgment has already been deceived. He does not ask her to trust his strength. The fever is destroying it. He asks her to trust the predictability of his compulsion.

He then offers himself without resistance:

If you don’t believe me—go ahead and kill me now. I won’t try to stop you.

—Spider-Man to Dagny, #177, p.18

Dagny answers:

Very well, Spider-Man. You were a fool to help me against Cedric—but you did help me.

She continues:

I suppose it’s my turn to be a fool.

—Dagny, #177

The exchange is not reconciliation. It is mutual recognition through acknowledged foolishness. Spider-Man’s morality appears irrational to Dagny, yet its irrational consistency makes it trustworthy.

Ego redirected toward a cure

Spider-Man’s first moral appeal fails. He then appeals to Dagny’s rivalry with Cedric. If she succeeds where Cedric failed, she will demonstrate that she is the greater scientist and make him appear foolish.

This works because her desired independence remains organized around her brother. Corona is an answer addressed to Cedric. He aborted the experiment, treated her as an incomplete specimen and denied her transformation’s value. Her perfected body is intended to force recognition from the person whose recognition she claims no longer to need.

The cure therefore emerges from compromised motives. Dagny’s narcissism can be redirected toward public benefit even when solidarity cannot.

The comic neither purifies her motive nor rejects its result. The needed act becomes possible through resentment, pride and the desire to defeat Cedric.

Three poisoned families

The Osborn family creates a second structure of chemical guilt.

Liz confronts Harry after Normie becomes sick:

You poisoned your own child, Harry Osborn! What kind of father are you?!

—Liz Osborn, #177

Harry continued moving the family into a house supplied by the contaminated water. He did not knowingly poison Normie, yet he accepts the accusation’s force and works to repair the harm.

This produces three contrasting masculine responses to poisoned dependents.

Cedric conceals causation, redirects blame and treats affected bodies as property.

Harry accepts guilt, however indirect, and works on the antidote.

Peter assumes responsibility even where he neither caused the contamination nor controls the outcome.

Harry also supports the feverish Spider-Man physically and insists that he keep his promise to Dagny. His response to guilt opens him toward repair and cooperation. Cedric’s response to guilt produces deeper concealment and control.

The domestic scenes prevent the adventure from becoming only a conflict between Spider-Man and the Forresters. Poison moves through homes, marriages and parent–child relations. It changes who must care for whom.

The trap that is also a betrayal

After agreeing to help, Dagny tells Spider-Man:

I’m in your hands, Spider-Man!

—Dagny, #177

Spider-Man has her enter the Forrester Building after him while he attempts to negotiate a cease-fire. Cedric activates the siphon and strips away her power.

From Spider-Man’s perspective, Cedric has deceived him.

From Dagny’s perspective, Spider-Man has delivered her into the machine he promised to protect her from.

Both accounts remain materially true.

Spider-Man’s sincerity cannot alter the appearance or effect of the event. Dagny trusted him, entered under his protection and immediately lost the bodily condition upon which her safety depended.

This is the story’s most severe hysterical entanglement. Spider-Man needs Dagny to trust his responsibility. Her act of trust produces the very vulnerability she feared. His ethical promise becomes objectively indistinguishable from betrayal.

The ugliness Cedric can possess

After the siphon removes her power, Cedric describes Dagny’s value:

We don’t need her help—her true value is as an experimental subject, not as a technician.

—Cedric to Spider-Man, #177, p.20

The sentence confirms her fear. Her intelligence matters only while it serves Cedric’s project. Once autonomous, she becomes biological material.

The removal of her beauty also changes her social position. As Corona, she can resist guards, escape laboratories and define herself publicly. In her deformed condition, she can be tranquilized, classified as incompetent and transferred under legal authority.

Ugliness becomes dangerous because Cedric’s world interprets it as permission.

His own outward beauty remains intact. His suit, voice and paperwork never visibly deform. He becomes the story’s most monstrous figure while retaining the appearance most easily recognized as civilized.

Falling out of the body

After losing her perfected form, Dagny climbs to a rooftop and prepares to die.

She says:

I was perfect. I was everything I ever wanted to be. Why won’t they let me stay that way?

—Dagny, #177, p.22

Then:

If I can’t be perfect—I won’t live at all!

—Dagny, #177, p.22

The narration describes her surrender to:

the peace of the fall—the wind—the weightlessness—

Death offers the disembodiment her superpower failed to secure. Falling removes weight, resistance and dependence. It resembles a final purification from the body that will not remain perfect.

Spider-Man catches her, but his reassurance initially fails. When he says that things may “seem bad,” she answers:

Seem bad? Seem?!

—Dagny, #177

Her situation does not merely appear bad. She faces confinement, involuntary experimentation and return to Cedric’s control. Her response exposes the inadequacy of consoling language detached from material conditions.

Spider-Man’s rescue still matters because it refuses Dagny’s equation between imperfection and nonexistence. Yet the scene does not prove that life has become tolerable. It only prevents the irreversible act.

The rescue then loses every trace of visual grandeur. Spider-Man is feverish, his swing fails, and both characters crash into refuse. Ethical beauty survives in a dumpster rather than in Dagny’s golden aura.

Fever as corrupted vision

Spider-Man’s infection changes the artwork’s visual logic.

During the confrontation with Cedric’s guards, opponents multiply into overlapping colored figures. Forms blur. Bright colors obstruct rather than clarify. His capacity to distinguish bodies, surfaces and threats becomes unreliable.

The effect extends the beauty–poison allegory into perception itself. Color, usually a source of superheroic clarity, becomes hallucinatory excess. Spectacle interferes with recognition.

The story repeatedly stages related visual collisions:

Corona and Spider-Man crash through polished glass.

Dagny’s golden form is surrounded by unstable toxic energy.

Her supposedly ugly face carries more emotional information than her perfected one.

Cedric’s rigid clothing and controlled posture contrast with Dagny’s streaming hair, aura and cellular instability.

Bodies become silhouettes before returning to physical vulnerability.

Beauty is produced as outline, shine and composure. Truth repeatedly returns through sweat, deformation, shattered surfaces and exhausted weight.

The respectable monster becomes the hero

Harry produces the antidote, but Cedric delivers it publicly and absorbs the achievement into his reputation.

He tells Spider-Man:

All charges filed have been dropped—thanks to my “quick and decisive action” in formulating our little antidote. I’m a hero, Spider-Man. Would you like my autograph?

—Cedric, #177, p.29

This is the story’s final chemical conversion. Cedric transforms scandal into publicity as efficiently as Corona transforms matter. The man responsible for the contamination becomes its official solution.

He then produces a court order assigning Dagny to his custody as her only living relative.

Kinship now performs the work previously performed by scientific classification. Cedric calls her a creature when he wants to deny autonomy, an experimental subject when he wants access to her body and a sister when he wants legal possession.

Reed Richards has already offered to attempt a cellular reversal of her condition. His arrival therefore introduces a real medical alternative. Yet the court document changes the situation. Reed recognizes its authority and prevents Spider-Man from simply taking Dagny away.

The failure occurs at the intersection of three incompatible claims:

Spider-Man’s personal promise.

Reed’s medical capacity.

Cedric’s legal custody.

The law selects the claim supported by documentation and family status, even though the person holding that claim caused the danger.

Dagny is taken away screaming:

No! Please—help me! Somebody—help me!!

—Dagny, #177, p.29

Her deformed body now produces the story’s most direct human appeal. Cedric’s composed body, legal document and public heroism become the perfected mask.

Spider-Man’s failure

Peter later tells Mary Jane:

Face it, honey—I blew it!

—Peter Parker, #177, p.30

His judgment arises from the promise Dagny trusted. He protected her from Cedric’s guards, persuaded her to help produce a cure and asked her to place herself in his hands. She did so. Cedric obtained her anyway.

Spider-Man’s failure is not reducible to insufficient strength. He loses because personal responsibility has no recognized institutional form. A promise made to a contradictory and legally vulnerable person cannot compete with Cedric’s paperwork, political reach and family claim.

The story also avoids making Spider-Man morally pure. He initially believes Dagny too readily. He attacks Cedric before verifying her account. He manipulates her rivalry to obtain the cure. He arranges the entry into Cedric’s building that becomes her trap.

His responsibility makes him trustworthy, yet the same urgency makes him gullible and coercive. Dagny is correct to identify his foolishness. She is also correct that he helped her.

Mary Jane does not erase his failure. She places it within a relation that can continue. Her response differs from Dagny’s absolutism. Dagny interprets imperfection as final annihilation. Mary Jane treats failure as something people survive, discuss and address with help from others.

The second golden moment

The final page transfers the story’s central color away from Corona.

Normie recovers and runs to Harry. The narration calls their reunion:

a great moment—a golden moment

The phrase echoes Dagny’s perfected golden body. In both cases, gold names a state of intense fulfillment that cannot be retained.

Dagny’s golden moment promises power without dependence.

Harry’s golden moment consists entirely of dependence: a recovering child returning to his father.

The comic immediately warns that golden moments seldom last. Harry hears the returning Goblin voice. Internal poison follows the family reunion just as chemical instability followed Dagny’s transformation.

The difference is relational. Dagny seeks a perfected body that will make other people unnecessary. Harry’s golden moment exists because another person needs him.

Neither form of beauty lasts. Only one allows vulnerability to become attachment rather than humiliation.

The beauty that cannot be kept

Dagny’s tragedy begins from an accurate perception. Power changes how the world treats a body.

As Corona, she controls distance, movement and interpretation. She can resist Cedric, escape confinement and force others to acknowledge her. Once deformed, she becomes available for sedation, custody and experimentation.

Beauty genuinely functions as privilege in her world.

Her error lies in imagining that beauty can be purified of dependence. Corona still requires chemicals, machines, witnesses and protection. Her perfected identity remains organized around Cedric’s refusal to validate it. The more completely she declares herself free of others, the more clearly her self-image remains addressed to them.

Spider-Man embodies a different superpower aesthetic. His power binds him to other bodies. It infects his private life with obligations he cannot complete and promises he cannot always keep. Dagny calls this a mania, and the comic gives the accusation real force.

Responsibility here is neither serene nor clean. It is feverish, manipulative, humiliating and vulnerable to institutional defeat. Yet it allows Spider-Man to continue seeing a person where every available category—villain, freak, experiment, liar, suicide, legal dependent—threatens to replace her.

Cedric sees a successful or failed product.

Dagny sees perfection or nothing.

Spider-Man continues to address the unstable person between those extremes.

That unstable interval is the story’s actual site of beauty. It is not the smooth golden body. It is not suffering converted into picturesque ugliness. It is the body whose contradictions remain unresolved yet still command fidelity.

The ending makes the reversal complete. Corona’s ugliness becomes the truthful image of vulnerability. Cedric’s respectability becomes the triumphant lie. The official cure preserves the system that produced the poison. Spider-Man’s failure remains the evidence that another relation to power briefly existed—one based on promise rather than possession, even though the promise could not be kept.