Skin-Deep Peter Parker is working on a new web-fluid formula at Professor Edwin Swann's lab at Empire State University. The fluid makes a squishing sound instead of the trademark "thwip". Suddenly, the fluid begins to eat through the plexiglass that he sprayed upon it. This, like his last formula, turns out to be a dud. Suddenly, Peter's spider-sense goes off, and he quickly hides his work, leaving a flask of the new formula on a shelf. However, the warning isn't about someone about to walk in on him, but of some kind of commotion going on outside. Looking out the window, Peter is horrified to see a group of white supremacists burning a cross on the lawn of the quad to protest the opening of a Hall of Afro-American Studies. Peter quickly puts on his Spider-Man costume to get photos for the Daily Bugle and diffuse the scene before it gets violent. The leader of the skinheads is a young man with a Swastika tattoo on his cheek named Eddie the Cross. Eddie begins inflaming the witnesses with his racist rhetoric. Just as Spider-Man is arriving on the scene, he witnesses the Rocket Racer arriving on the scene.
