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Untold Stories of Spider-Man (1995) #15-16 - Kurt Busiek/

Gordon returns - you know, the guy who used to hang out with Betty and her brother and got him into trouble? Well, he has been hanging out with some mob types, getting experimented on and he wants to gain control of the Daily Bugle.

For this, he threatens Betty to give him access to J. Jonah’s coffer, where he hides fake evidence of embezzlement. Jonah gets arrested and the plan could have worked, if, as Spider-Man later points out, Gordon had let things run its course.

Instead, he tries to threaten Jonah into ceding control of the newspaper to Gordon’s boss. It doesn’t work because J. Jonah Jameson can’t be intimidated. Spider-Man stops Gordon from throwing Jameson out of the window and they fight, until Peter traps Gordon under a pile of blank newspaper’s rolls.

All end well, except for the fact that Jonah is convinced that Gordon and Spider-Man were working together, as usual.

Next, the lovely Mary Jane Watson makes her entrance and we learn why she faked a headache to avoid a date with Peter. See, she knows that Peter is Spider-Man because she saw him crawl out of his window that night Uncle Ben was murdered - which is a later retcon, btw - and MJ’s having a hard time reconciling serious, nerdy Peter with wise-cracking, carefree Spider-Man.

Meanwhile, Peter is trying to prevent the Radioactive Man from going nuclear in the middle of Manhattan. Some people flee, others barely register the threat - which is a nice way of showing how the regular people are dealing with the Marvel Age of Superheroes.

MJ doesn’t feel ready to meet Peter face to face yet, but she’ll some day - which is a flimsy way of dealing with the story constraints.