Amazing Spider-Man 548

January 26th, 2008 by Brack

And so the first Brand New Day arc finishes.

Overall it was a very good Spider-Man story, which is clearly what they were aiming for. That may sound like an obvious thing to want, but for a long time it looked like they were aiming at writing stories that had Spider-Man in, rather than Spider-Man stories. And in this recent age of event excess, having a self-contained Spider-Man comic feels like a breath of fresh air.

The gelling of McNiven’s art with Slott’s writing picked up through the three issues and by the end you can pretty much forget the reset button they’ve pressed and go with the new flow (of course, Jackpot’s appearance in the next arc may reverse that).

Between the success of this arc and the Messiah Complex storyline in the X-Books recently, there is a strong argument for moving this to a weekly rather than three a month. I thought the X-Books crossover made a bit better use of the pacing opportunities that a weekly format gives you, thought the mish mash of artists hampered the appeal of the lengthy fight scenes that this pacing allows. Spider-Man at the moment feels like a median between the pacing of a US monthly comic and the pacing of 20+ page weekly shonen action series. I think there’s room to push it closer to a weekly manga’s pacing in terms of giving the artist more room to breathe and lessening the hammering home of plot.

For example, there’s a reveal in this latest issue that really could have had more time to breathe. In fact, even if this was a monthly, the reveal would still seem too hasty. Also this issue had some of McNiven’s best action art, looking a lot looser and more natural than his art has in the past, and it would have been nice to see the fights given more panel time.

Next issue we have Marc Guggenheim and Salvador Larroca. I’ve enjoyed Guggenheim’s work on Wolverine, and I think his fast paced, vibrant scripts are a good fit for this format. Larroca’s evolved from a poor man’s Carlos Pacheco into a very good superhero artist, his newuniversal work was very good and look forward to see what he can do on Spider-Man.

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Amazing Spider-Man 547

January 17th, 2008 by Brack

Now, that’s more like it.

Freed of new status quo exposition, Amazing Spider-Man read much better than the opening issue of “Brand New Day”. As much as people wanted to see a return to the everyman loser Peter Parker, what was really missing was the everyhero loser Spider-Man.

I would much rather read a story of Spider-Man having a bad day because of the stress in Peter Parker’s life infringing on his heroics, than read one of ordinary working schlub Peter Parker having a bad day. Likewise, it’s similarly fun to see the superheroic lifestyle of Spider-Man infringe on Peter Parker’s everyday life. It’s about two lives, with two sets of responsibilities, pulling at one man, and last issue was too much about Peter Parker having a crappy time because he was Peter Parker.

Here, Peter finally puts the Spider-Man suit back on as he sets out to track down the mugger who robbed him last issue and save the Daily Bugle from bankruptcy with much needed pictures. Pictures of Spider-Man! Through a series of  coincidences, of the sort Dan Slott writes so well, he ends up entangled with another plot line we saw begin last issue.

We also get editor footnotes, something I don’t think I’ve seen in ages. Just like the good old days (i.e. when I read Spider-Man comics as a kid), they are used to reference old issues of Spider-Man where necessary. While I’ve missed these, I do have a slight reservation seeing them used here. As I mentioned before, I think there’s a risk in referencing old storylines so soon. They may act as a reminder that we just had a major fiddling around with the perception of the past. I think they pull it off this time. The references that crop up are to 1969’s “Secret of the Petrified Tablet” story and what seems to be a tidying up of a dangling plotline from a recent book.

Best of all, I thought Dan Slott’s script now flows with Steve McNiven’s art a lot better. McNiven could probably stand to break up his long rectangular panels a little more often that he does, but the combination of the art and script worked very well this issue. The pacing felt a little more relaxed, with the (near) weekly schedule there really isn’t the call for an infodump like the one we got last week. Especially not for the first issue.

Anyway, enough whining about last week’s issue, this week was what I wanted from a Spider-Man comic and the plotline that put us here never came to mind once.

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Bland New Day

January 12th, 2008 by Brack

OK, that subject title may be a little harsh. It came from a google.jp search that got someone to this website. Amazing Spider-Man #546 is a perfectly fine comic. It just has a few problems that kind of grate.

First off, there is a lot of infodump here. Slott seems to be setting up a large number of future plot threads all at once, as well as establishing the new status quo for the character. And it’s a bit overwhelming. Particularly when combined with McNiven’s art.

McNiven is my biggest problem with this comic. His art just doesn’t work for me here, the detail is actually distracting from the amount of information Slott is trying to convey. On a panel by panel basis he has some great layouts, but it all looks a little too busy for the story. His art worked wonders on the vacuous framework that was Civil War, but things move faster here, and in the end it feels rather tiring to look at his art AND read all the dialogue Slott’s providing (often a lot in a tiny panel - are they doing this comic “Marvel Style”? If so I’m more inclined to blame Slott for not working his dialogue to McNiven’s panels.).

Also: the “nerdy” new love interest for Peter is really too attractively drawn for her character. For all the complaints about Spider-Man being married to a super-model (MJ being a super-model seemed something born out of general pop-culture trends of the time), replacing her with someone with model looks WHO JUST HAPPENS TO WEAR GLASSES seems stupid and shallow. It gives the comic the aesthetic of a dumb Hollywood teen movie. John Romita Sr. style comic book sexiness please, rather than this aseptic glossy magazine prettiness.

Phil Winslade’s art in Bob Gale’s Aunt May back up strip is much more in line with what I want to see on a Spidey comic. Winslade’s art increasingly reminds me of Gene Colan. I’m sure it was there before, but I’m only noticing it now since I’ve seen uncoloured Colan art in various Essentials. What it boils down to is that I’d like to see Winslade do a main story on the book.

Script-wise, a little too much is given to running through Spidey tropes that seem a little old to longtime Spidey fans. The Aunt May and job hunting stuff seemed out of place 40+ years down the line from his first appearance, particularly now when the material that did that originally is so freely available. The Osborn entourage stuff seemed a little bit like a clumsy stab at modernity at first, but at least it felt a little new. The villain, Negative Man, was interesting and the stuff with Jonah at the end was the high point of the book. Overall there was a little too much housekeeping and pipe laying, and note enough story.

Of course the advantage of the new format is we don’t have so long to wait for the next issue and so what flaws there are, aren’t left to stew. McNiven’s art on it’s own looks great, so I’m hoping when the script moves towards following the flow of a story, rather than acting as an establishing issue, it will run at a pace that suits McNiven’s style.

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Rambling Pre-Emptive Thoughts About Spider-Man: Brand New Day

January 8th, 2008 by Brack

I saw this splash page that recaps the status quo of Spider-Man in the post-One More Day Marvel Universe and it got me thinking.

Now, the whole One More Day malarky doesn’t bother me too much as I’ve not read Spider-Man regularly since the Micheline/McFarlane era. So it’d be churlish to complain about changes to a comic I’ve not been a reader of. However, I am intending to read Brand New Day. I like Spider-Man (read the Spectacular Spider-Man Essentials last year, which is just getting to where I came in on the character via 80’s Spidey UK reprints), I like a lot of the writers involved and I like the format they are planning. I’m not too fussed about the supposed “retcons” implied by the ending of the OMD story, as I can see an easy way they can get round that (Mephisto has only altered the present not the past. This particularly makes sense as in Marvel, Time Travel Doesn’t Work Like That. The line about people remembering Spider-Man unmasking, but not who it was, suggests memories have been altered rather than the timeline).

Plus, and here’s the main thrust of post, the Bob Gale’s script on that splash feels very forward looking. The best way to deal with the OMD ending is to say, these are the changes, this is how everything is now, let’s move forward. The big mistake would be to do a series of surprise reveals of Things Aren’t What You Expect like the Harry reveal. It’s a rare chance for a superhero comic to sever itself from the approach of writing stories tied to past events. However, I don’t expect it to last…

In one of the Flaming Carrot collections it’s discussed how superhero stores are invariably tied heavily to the character’s origin. All of their actions are coloured by what made the hero a hero in the first place. To avoid this, Bob Burden made Flaming Carrot a hero without an origin (well… he read 5000 comics in one sitting), giving us a diverse range superhero stories that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. The best way to use a character’s origin in subsequent stories is to use it thematically, which various Spider-Man comics have used to great effect over the years. For instance, the villains that really resonate in Spider-Man are the ones that in someway reflect Spider-Man/Peter Parker himself. Venom, I think was the last Spider-Man villain that was successful - the suit and echoes of Peter in Eddie Brock resonated with Spider-Man. The attempt at recreating the success of Venom in Carnage fails, the character having resonance with Venom rather than Spider-Man. A psychotic serial killer with an alien suit isn’t a Spidey villain, a depressed, disgruntled, jealous journalist with Spider-Man’s OWN alien suit, that has resonance with the character, regardless how poorly the character might have been (over)used down the years.

The bad way to use an origin is to tamper with the origin, to generate cheap shocks by creating reveals that were never there in the original material. Such is the problem of inherent in corporate superhero comics. Eiichiro Oda can pull a reveal regarding the origin of an One Piece side character from 7 years ago and it will make sense, doesn’t feel cheap and gives the reader a genuine surprise. Mid-nineties Spider-Clones and 21st century spider totems feel tacky and disconnected from the original character.

In the case of long running characters I think it’s possible to amass a number of origin stories, namely those stories that made such an impact they noticeably changed the tone/types of stories you could tell with the character. I’d argue that as well as the radioactive spider/Uncle Ben origin story, the death of Gwen Stacy and the marriage to MJ are origins of a sort too. I can see arguments for the reveal of Norman Osborn as the Green Goblin as an origin too.

And so, the problem I can see them having with Brand New Day, is that One More Day is essentially yet another new origin story for someone to be tempted to use it as a theme for future stories (and I can see two potential ways they can already), and then, eventually, tamper with the events of the story. The fact that the story was so reviled gives it a sense of inevitability that we will see that Everything Was Not As It Seemed.

But for now, I can ignore that.

Slott, Gale and Guggenheim tend to write superhero stories I like to read.

And it’s Spider-Man, Spider-Man is cool.

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