Marvel Comics Review Spotlight: Amazing Spider-Man
When I first started the Marvel Comics Review Spotlight (MCRS) and DC Comics Review Spotlight (DCRS) columns, my intention was to highlight a truly awesome comic and be an advocate for readers to pick it up. After the second outing with the Fantastic Four, things went horribly wrong. I had to devote columns to dreadful things like Teen Titans and Outsiders, simply as a public service to warn people away. As much as I was looking forward to getting back on track with a good recommendation, Marvel takes a turn on ye olde train, “how not to write a comic book.”
Amazing Spider-Man 624
by Mark Waid, Tom Peyer, Paul Acazeta, and Javier Rodriguez
We start off with errors on the first page, as Spider-Man’s spider-sense is going off. Now, Peter’s spider-sense has been used to do all sorts of crazy things, but they are always related to a threat to him, personally. If he is next to his Aunt May and a wrecking ball is about to tear through the place where they sit, his mental alarm bells will be going off like crazy. However, if a bank robber on the other side of a wall is about to shoot a police officer, his spider-sense will not start working overtime because there is a threat to the cop. The spider-sense can be directional, it has even interpreted cameras as threats and helped warn him against losing his secret identity, but the threat is always to him in some manner.
On page one, the spider-sense is going off in both panels, but he’s entering a room where the new Vulture is killing an innocent. Vulture is ignoring Spidey, engrossed in his… meal?!? There is no danger at that moment to Spider-Man himself. There is no incoming bullet or impending doom. In fact, Spidey actually has time to lounge in the doorway, dumbstruck, gaping at Jonah, who is not the one being killed like Peter thought. He has so much time, in fact, that even though he has spent some time doing double-takes, he still gets the drop on Vulture, hitting him in the back. Notice that as soon as they are outside and Vulture’s attention is actually on Spider-Man, and he is attacking Spider-Man… the wavy lines signaling his spider-sense actually stop. By the third panel on the second page, we can all safely conclude from the way Spidey’s stomach is distended that he is either pregnant, or has been starving for months. The art is deplorable, the worst I can remember.
Okay, let’s break away from the trivia of how his powers work and discuss his villain. The new vulture’s main power is… throw up. That’s right, the big battle royale is going to be fought by a guy who pukes, and that’s his super power. We live in the shadow of Maus, Watchmen, the Dark Knight Returns, alongside Astro City and Blackest Night… and Mark Waid gives us a guy whose main function is to upchuck his dinner. How sad is it for me to miss Adrian Toomes? I mean, he was not the biggest threat, but when he was written well, I could at least take him seriously.
Wait, it gets worse. Spidey decides the way to combat this guy is to throw webbing all around the place. So he webs up the left, and he webs up the right… but he never webs above and below. The Vulture is so stupid, he never tries to fly over or beneath these webs, he flies directly into them and pukes on them. Of course. Now, you don’t have to take my word for this: go talk to a racecar driver and how he thinks about his arena, and then talk to a fighter pilot about his thought process. Fighter pilots have more directions to move around in, and they think about things differently. They think in more dimensions. Waid and the artists orchestrate this battle as if Vulture can’t fly, and they are fighting on the ground! The wonderful art spends most of the time depicting blank blue backgrounds, despite the fact that they are fighting in the middle of New York City. The colorist makes sure to blend a couple of blues in there, but keep in mind, there are actually two artist names on the credits, but most of the pages have no backgrounds. There are also two writer's names on the credits. Moving on.
You think it can’t get worse? Guess again. The fight itself is not consistent. On one page, Vulture throws up on his hands to dissolve some webbing. It doesn’t appear to have any effect on him at all. On THE VERY NEXT PAGE, he throws up on his right hand… and it hurts him this time! We see the vomit dissolving his sleeve and burning into his arm. Quick, turn back to the previous page! He’s throwing up on the same sleeves, but with no damage to them! Waid’s masterful dialogue has gone off the deep end, with Spidey throwing an arena echo effect into his monologue for no discernible reason. These aren’t even the normal juvenile jokes they’ve been having Spidey spout, these aren’t even corny jokes. They’re just random nonsense now.
Okay, remember a few months back when Spidey ran out of webbing? Then he ran out again? Remember how a ton of readers wrote in and complained about the lazy writers and the idiocy of using the same plot device two months in a row? Guess what, he runs out of webbing. Again. Think maybe he could reload from all of those cartridges on his belt? He already reloaded once in the comic, but somehow he’s out of spare cartridges.
For his next nonsensical stunt, he climbs very high and jumps off to launch a web-tracer at the fleeing Vulture, and then pulls his shoulder reaching out to a statue. Yet again, with a picture of his stomach distended out to such a distorted shape, you’d think he threw out his stomach instead of his shoulder. What makes no sense is that they didn’t need to give him this extra excuse not to follow Vulture, because he had already decided to give up the chase. See, without his webbing full, Spidey can’t do anything like jump far or cling to buildings. He’s completely unable to chase someone! Setting that aside, Waid makes sure to tell us via thought bubble that Spidey can now track Vulture anywhere, so it’s safe to let him get away. THEN they have him tear his shoulder. This is the man who can bench-press forty tons, who has faced Firelord and knocked him out, and he tears his shoulder out on a landing. Riiiight.
I’m going to skip over the worst part for a minute, because there is still more nonsense to describe. Our next shot of the Vulture shows him threatening a mobster, but the picture makes it look like he’s grabbing a lady’s breast. Is she afraid of dying, or just screaming because someone got grabby? Perhaps she’s afraid that he’s about to throw up. Regardless, they choose this moment to show the reader a flashback to the new Vulture’s secret origin!
The origin is that this guy was Jimmy the Fixer, a competent cleanup guy who took away dead bodies, hid evidence, and basically kept his fellow mobsters out of jail. A resourceful guy to keep around, yes? Jimmy has been cleaning up too many messes in his opinion, and tells his bosses they need someone to keep all the losers on the payroll in line. Jimmy takes his bosses to a secret hideout where their genius plan is to create… a new Vulture. Because the old one was so frightening and successful.
Leaving that lame reasoning behind, not worthy of any further dissection, the three mob bosses take out a gun and shoot their most competent worker in the knee, and shove him into the transformation chamber, planning on his memory being wiped as part of the process. Because that’s what good management does: they take their best worker, shoot him, and then throw him into an experimental chamber, not knowing what-all it will do to him. What was Jimmy just saying fifteen minutes ago, about how dim some of the mobster clowns were?
Now back to some spider-sense nonsense that ruins more internal consistency: on two pages in a row, we see his spider-sense going off, now drawn as white lines instead of black, to signify that he is following the frequency of his spider-tracer. Vulture found the tracer and pulled it off; so much for Spidey’s brilliant plan. The next page, Waid’s masterful dialogue has Spidey shouting out loud to nobody in particular, “Where are you, Vulture?” Note that is white spider-sense is going off again. Why? He’s not in danger, and he’s not following the tracer anymore, and he didn’t launch two tracers, so why are we being shown his spider-sense? I would have fired the editor before this, but this part really reminds me that someone needs to be fired. It’s like they are daring us to stop reading the book entirely.
Okay, now we get to the worst part of the book. Earlier, Peter Parker took out his camera, sat down, and Photoshopped the Vulture into a picture with Jonah, in an attempt to exonerate Jonah by showing him at odds with the villain, rather than responsible for creating him, as was the latest rumor. The first simple problem with this idea is that Jonah could still have created him, and had a falling-out, just like he did with Scorpion. Fighting with your own creation does not exonerate you of anything.
The second problem with this scene is that Peter doesn’t think his subterfuge will be discovered. A ten-year-old knows enough about Photoshop at this point to spot the tricks, and even big nations like Iran got into trouble when running a photo with “extra” missile launches in it. Terrorists have released battle-damage photos with the exact same smoke cloud digitally duplicated to exaggerate the damage. Professional photographers have lost their jobs by tampering with photos and submitting them. None of this goes through Peter’s mind. Yet, Peter is supposed to be an ultra-intelligent scientist. He has been a teacher, he has invented his webbing, he has manipulated sophisticated technical equipment… yet he can’t figure out that people can spot a Photoshop image.
The third, bigger issue is that honest Peter Parker, who feels guilty about the slightest thing he ever does wrong, calmly sits down at a computer terminal and commits a fraud. This breaks the believability bank. I can be disgusted at a vomit-throwing super villain, I can understand that you have awful artists who are ill-suited to drawing a super hero, I can understand lazy people who can’t be bothered to draw a background. I can even understand inattentive editors who let the “I ran out of webbing” plot be used… AGAIN!! But I cannot believe in a million years that Peter would do something so dishonest. He’s not being mentally controlled. It’s just not in his DNA to do this.
That’s not all. The very next day, JJJ has already been exonerated. We do not have any time in which they spread the photo. No, the photo is there, and the headline already reads, “Photo that Saved A Mayor.” Because they weren’t being subtle enough about this in the first place. No headline would read that way. The point of a headline is to give the main point of the story. Although the main point of this photo was the writer’s intention to draw attention to its “importance,” a real paper would have had a headline suitable to the actual event. Because photos illustrate a point, the photos themselves are not worthy of comment in bold typeface above the photo. On the side, 82% already say that JJJ is not guilty of creating the Vulture! Isn’t that nice, they were able to release the photo and conduct a poll all in the last couple hours. How convenient and tidy.
JJJ himself analyzes the picture and points out a portrait of the previous mayor’s family on the wall, a portrait that is no longer hanging there, proving that the picture is a fraud. JJJ fires Parker for the fraud in public, and blackballs him. It’s the only part that might ring true in the whole ordeal. Sure, JJJ can create a super villain like Scorpion, can be a maniac, can run distorting editorials, but only HE can do that. You better believe he demands the truth from everyone else in his old journalistic profession.
The writers forecast this event, revealing that they wanted Peter to lose his job. This is what they came up with. Now they can give us an unemployed Peter Parker, to mirror the 10% unemployment America currently has. Isn’t it nice that Mark Waid just keeps taking ideas off the front of our newspapers and slapping them right into our comics? Presto, instant story! No need to waste time thinking up something good, like in the old days! No, we’ll just mimic what’s happening to your next-door neighbor, because that’s the kind of escapism you want in your comics, right?
I finally figured out what’s going on. Peter is a man-slut now, sleeping with Black Cat, Michelle, etc. He used to be honest, now he’s committing fraud. He used to know how to keep a supply of webbing, now he keeps running out. Mephisto cursed him. When Peter agreed to the deal, Mephisto added in some extras: Peter must now be a lying, cheating idiot who sleeps with any woman who bats an eye at him. This is the nice return to classic Spidey stories that Quesada was always talking about, the reason they needed to dissolve Peter and MJ’s marriage. Give me my No-Prize now, please, Marvel!
Ugh. Makes me want to vomit.
Tpull is Travis Pullen. He started reading comics at 5 years old, and he can't seem to stop.
Previous MCRS columns:
Inhumans
Fantastic Four
Previous DCRS columns:
Teen Titans
Outsiders
