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Boomb Tube: “Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors” Comes Back With An (A)vengeance

By | September 4th, 2014
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Welcome to Boomb Tube, Multiversity’s ongoing column regarding the world of Cape Cartoons. After a brief hiatus caused by my recent arrest, we’re back! Also back: Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors. Check out our spoiler-filled recap below!

Last time on Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man beat up the Green Goblin again which impressed The Avengers enough to let him on their team. That’s great for Spider-Man, though he seems to have forgotten about it when the episode starts and he’s recruited onto The Avengers all over again for beating Doctor Octopus. Apparently the end of the last season was just them saying it’d be chill if he joined, not an actual recruitment. But here, Thor just springs out of nowhere, offers the deal again, and Spider-Man instantly begins angsting about how he’s going to miss his friends. And then he instantly gets over that, straps into The Avengers’ jet and screams “This is awesome!”

Consistency: it’s what’s made Spidey a great character all these years.

Soon, Spider-Man’s neck-deep in montages of Marvel vs. Capcom style fights with Fin Fang Foom, Attuma (ugh), and Batroc, which pisses off Spidey’s friends because resenting the success of others is the key to any good friendship. Even if that success means your friend is running around not really using his cool powers and more just using whatever fancy gadgets Tony Stark or SHIELD could come up with to boost toy sales. Or getting Loki to come after you like it’s still 2012. Or fighting fucking Attuma. Guys, being an Avenger sounds like it sucks.

Anyway, Loki’s plan (which is to literally just mess with Thor) is to get Doctor Octopus to breed him an army of Venom-fueled Asgardian monsters, which is the raddest sentence ever associated with a Drake Bell show even if it is the premise to any Marvel comic from 1993. Also, Loki restores the Tom Kenny-voiced Otto Ocatvius’s underwater lab.

Who lives in an evil lab under the sea?
DOC! TOR! OCT! PUS! 

There were too many syllables for Octopus. Sorry, not sorry.

While Ock is breeding his Venom army, Loki confronts Spidey and swaps minds with him. He probably got the idea from one of Ocativius’s blueprints, or from the fan fiction I wrote about Loki taking over Peter Parker’s body in a decidedly more manual way. Heh. With his plan now ready to begin, the Superior Loki begins his Venom-Asgardian invasion of Manhattan which must be like Christmas for J. Jonah Jameson. When he called Spidey a threat or a menace, I doubt he could have predicted Spider-Man acting like the cover to several metal albums.

Also Black Widow takes an opportunity while fighting to reenact that Spider-Woman variant Milos Manara drew.

Ouch.

Before and during the huge battle, Spider-Man-In-Loki gets his ass kicked by everyone who just assumes Loki is up to his old tricks by saying he’s Spider-Man which is… actually sort of likely. Deciding not to even bother with convincing anyone, Spider-Man goes to Loki to re-swap bodies right as The Avengers walk in, now believing they’ve swapped bodies when they’ve only just swapped back. So now they think Spidey is Loki and Loki is Spidey! Oh that ol’ Parker luck!

Part two of “The Avenging Spider-Man” starts with Spidey saying “When I joined the Avengers, I never expected them to attack me,” despite the fact that all The Avengers have done since 2005 is attack each other. If he signed any paperwork before agreeing to just do whatever Thor said, he’d see it’s right there in the team’s mission statement. Thankfully he’s able to escape everyone by jumping off the George Washington Bridge which is… an unfortunate sentence.

Spidey finds his old friends and gets in a confused fight with them which somehow gets resolved more swiftly and calmly than the encounter with a team full of grown-ups who are in charge of defending the world. Everyone then goes to The Avengers and proves Spidey innocent. No one really cares since there’s still Venom Frost Giants running around but hey, we got the Spider-Guy on our team again. Good for him.

In order to keep more bad guys from coming, The Avengers send the team of kid heroes to Ock’s base undersea base where they destroy the Venom formula pretty simply. Unfortunatley, Ock (who’s been given an upgrade by Loki) is not even remotely pleased and blows up the base because if he lost it once he can probably afford to lose it again. This plan doesn’t work as Spider-Man uses his webbing to form that balloon from The Prisoner and shield his friends, followed by the Avengers showing up and fighting what Thor calls “Man of Octopi.” Yeah, I’d smash Thor if he called me that too. Which Ock does. So good on him.

Continued below

Loki congratulates Ock on destroying his brother (which goes directly against my fan fiction head canons) before he erects a gigantic statue of his own head onto Avengers tower (which is now absolutely in my fan fiction). Regrettably, The Avengers and Their Amazing Friends can’t comprehend Loki’s majesty and beat him and Doc Ock up, who betrays Loki because he just realized that the guy who’s literally a god of mischief will probably betray him. What a twist. Then, Loki is sent back into another dimension where his formerly mind-controlled henchmen wait to beat him up. What a twist.

Finally, Spider-Man decides to leave The Avengers to be with his friends. What a twist.

Final Verdict: 6.4 – I know this sounds like a lie, but I really am excited for Web Warriors. Ultimate honestly hasn’t been the best at being a Spider-Man show as much as it has been a poor man’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The best episodes have revolved around Spider-Man going on crazy adventures with non-traditional characters like Deadpool, Damage Control, or the city of Boston, but this episode doesn’t stray away from the type of stories we’ve seen from the new Marvel Animated Universe and ends up being just a fairly predictable string of events that happen. It wasn’t bad but like many episodes of Ultimate Spider-Man it just sort of happened.


//TAGS | Boomb Tube

James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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