Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #25: Spider-Man doesn’t really show up in this issue. And that’s a great thing.
It continues to be impressive how Brian Michael Bendis makes it feel like superpowers are zapping across the page when the only thing happening is a bunch of people talking. The writer on many of Marvel’s biggest books has been doing the dialogue-heavy, talking-heads thing for, wow, more than a decade now and it still manages to surprise me how much more satisfying it can feel than an issue packed with fight scenes.
The emotional tug-of war inside this issue — set a year after the death of Miles Morales’ mum — feels incredibly raw. On one end, you have Miles’s understandable desire to pull away from superhero life. It’s what’s on the other end that’s surprising. The call back to a web-slinging destiny doesn’t come from inside of Miles. It’s his friends who try to remind him of the good he can do. And the conflicts ring true. Would anybody want to throw themselves back into a career where a loved one was lost? Even if it meant helping avert the suffering of others? With the personal nature of the threats he’s faced, Miles hasn’t had a much of a carefree good time wearing the webs. David Marquez’ artwork shines in this issue, bringing to life the painful emotions and hard-won wisdom in the faces of the characters. There’s a stronger undercurrent of sadness in this incarnation of Spider-Man. It’s probably not going away anytime soon.
Wonder Woman #22: There’s a vestigal reflex that makes you want to feel like seeing Jack Kirby’s Fourth World characters in the hands of others is sacrilege. Resist it. This is mythology, after all, where stories get re-told and re-imagined all the time. Moreover, it’s mythology happening in comics, another plane whether constant reshaping happens. And the strength of this iteration of Wonder Woman comes from how Azzarello, Chiang and their co-creators manage to boil things down to a primal core.
Generations of gods — from different pantheons, different families — fighting amongst themselves. But not just that: drinking, laughing and loving, passing along all their dysfunctions and foibles down through the ages. And like the storytellers of old probably did, Azzarello and company make these characters their own. So, Orion adds a layer of douchebro attitude to his brutal/noble duality and Highfather comes across as more of autocrat than compassionate prophet. Different? Yeah. But still the same in ways that matter.
Fantastic Four #10: For a while now, it’s felt like there’s been two Reed Richards in the mainline Marvel Universe. The kindly father figure leading his family into spacetime adventures has seemed at odds with the more mournful keeper of secrets sliding down a Machiavellian slope in New Avengers. In the latest issue, writer Matt Fraction does a really deft job of reconciling the two. We still get the more familiar Reed-as-genius-dad but also get a glimpse of the guy who sometimes makes a mess while saving the universe. Better still, we see his family react to the uneasy calculus of saving the day. Johnny’s reaction to the series’ current subplot was particularly wrenching.
And anchoring this story to a historic moment of political compromise during the earliest days of the United States is a great, great thing. Mark Bagley’s art juggles the rustic and the galactic with equal flair. In lesser hands, a time travel adventure with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be trite or corny. But, as an exploration of family and of what makes the Fantastic Four work as a concept, this issue is a highlight in an already strong run.
Comments
7 responses to “Angry, Grieving Spider-Man Is My Favourite Comics Panel From Last Week”
Evan, you never start a sentence with ‘and’. And that’s a basic piece of journalism.
Don’t be a silly-sil-sil, these days people are allowed to end sentences in prepositions and start sentences with “And”. So long as it flows, it’s fine. (And that’s coming from a writing student.)
As an english teacher I assure you then, you would fail any course I teach.
I am aware of the punctuation errors in my last post. I loathe using phones for posting comments. 🙁
Well, he did use ‘silly-sil-sil’ which I half suspect is a subtle message saying, “Anything after this point is now invalid!”
In high school, students are given tonnes of rigid rules to follow, whether it be math, science, or english. Before you learn to write, think, or calculate freely, you must learn to do so rigidly. That’s why high school teachers do, and to some degree should, enforce the rigid rules. However, in the real world, the rules are meant to be broken in stylistic ways. Now if you don’t know you are breaking the rules, then it’s not style but amateur.
You cannot progress a field forward if you do not know what has already been done, but you cannot progress forward if you repeat what you have learned has been done.
Or to paraphrase Tycho from Penny Arcade, “It’s OK for us, because we know it’s naughty.”