Written by Zeb Wells
Illustrated by Joe MadureriaThis is what you’ve been waiting for! The return of legendary artist Joe Madureira (X-Men, Battle Chasers) and fan-favorite Spidey writer Zeb Wells in a brand new, highly anticipated, monthly Spider-series that teams the wall-crawler up with some of the greatest heroes in the Marvel Universe. In our first issue, Spider-Man and Red Hulk take on a Moloid army during the New York Marathon! Stay safe until November because you’ll want to be here!
Fresh and new from the House of More, Spider-Man splits off into another strand of web-slinging adventure with his buddies the Avengers, because he can and because it may be profitable. Do you care? Should you care? Is Zeb Wells able to make it worth caring about? Is Joe Madureira drawing it something to be cherished or sneered upon? There are a lot of questions that all boil down to whether or not this is worth however much of your time four dollars fits into these days.
And I’ll get to that, but you’ll have to click ahead after the jump and read the actual, you know, review for it.
So it’s come to this, has it? In the 1960s, if you wanted to read Spider-Man, you bought Amazing Spider-Man. (Sure, he popped up in other places, but you don’t go to a Mazda showroom when you want a new Civic.) In the 1970s, Spider-Man had been disseminated widely enough that a second title could be supported: Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, whose title was later mercifully abbreviated. In the 1980s, Web of Spider-Man made three. In the 1990s, the adjectiveless Spider-Man rose to life, to serve as Todd McFarlane’s playground. Since then, musical chairs. Different titles, different numberings, different volumes, but until Brand New Day, you had your choice of Spider-Man. Any color you want, so long as it’s black, et cetera. Brand New Day collected all of the books under one thrice-monthly Amazing aegis, and now that Spider-Man’s potency has diminished to a mere two issues a month (plus other stuff, and there is always other stuff), it’s time to split off a new book.
Avenging Spider-Man‘s raison d’etre is to document Spider-Man’s adventures with the Avengers or various components thereof. It must be, or the title would be egregiously stupid. Of course, if you want to see Spider-Man as part of the Avengers, you can just go ahead and buy Avengers. Spider-Man’s Avengerdom hasn’t figured very prominently in his own solo title since the days of J. Michael Straczynski, when the idea of Spider-Man as an Avenger was still fresh and mildly baffling. (For whatever reason, the Spider-mythos enshrined the fact that Spider-Man felt himself a poor fit for a team, despite the fact that he spent 150 issues joining forces with various people in Marvel Team-Up.) Amazing has been far more enamored with the idea of Spider-Man as a member of the Future Foundation, in fact.
So on the one hand, fair enough. Spidey and his Avengers bros, stomping Avenger-level threats that, in theory, Spider-Man couldn’t take down on his own. (In actual execution, Spider-Man could beat Galactus solo, if only because it’d make for an appropriately dramatic moment in some Spider-Man vs. Galactus story — but that’s getting outside the sandbox.) On the other hand, the question: What unique qualities could this possibly offer?
Avenging Spider-Man‘s closest relative in the Spider-Family tree is the adjectiveless Todd McFarlane book, Spider-Man. Back in ’91, that title was a speculator’s wet dream, not so much for being a Spider-Man #1 (although that certainly helped!) but for being written and drawn by Todd McFarlane. Todd had eclipsed Spider-Man as the star of the book, and he was the center of the marketing push, as opposed to “more Spider-content, for slightly more money.” So Spider-Man #1 sold roughly infinity copies, all of which were deemed to be worth (again, roughly) a billion dollars, and all of which can be obtained for $0.75 today. But I digress. The point is, the key virtue of Avenging Spider-Man is not star or co-star, but its creative team, and thus we have to reframe our expectations a bit.
Continued belowZeb Wells made a short film about superheroes ages ago. It was funny, and Wizard Magazine printed as much. This led to Wells getting work at Marvel, and his first Spider-Man story — drawn by Jim Mahfood(!) — was a fill-in about Spider-Man fighting the Sandman at a spring break beach party. He rapidly found his voice as a comic book writer, penning stories that laugh with the strangeness and absurdity of superhero universes, while tethering same to at least functionally relatable human crises. (In one of his Brand New Day-era issues of Amazing, Peter Parker fails a cab-driver exam because his knowledge of New York City travel routes is based on swinging high above the streets, not actually driving on them.) He’s a multifaceted writer who’s become something like the Spider-World’s best kept secret, although this low profile is simply because he spends most of his time getting paid substantially more money to help create the TV show Robot Chicken.
Joe Madureira is more or less Wells’s polar opposite. In the 1990s, he ripped a hole in the spacetime continuum of X-Men art by delivering to the market manga-by-way-of-Image. After years of scratchy Whilce Portacio, gritty John Romita Jr., and ever-understated Lee Weeks, Madureira’s long-legged, smooth-cut, devastatingly unsubtle figures were a sharp left turn. Over the course of four years, he grew into his niche, and his drawings grew too: slender contortionists thickened and rippled with muscle. He left Uncanny X-Men to co-create, draw, and subsequently abandon the fantasy story Battle Chasers, and then went to work in video games. He came back, a few years ago, long enough to deliver Ultimates 3 with Jeph Loeb. Ultimates 3, like Avenging Spider-Man, was shot from Madureira’s pencil art, which was digitally darkened and then colored. The coloring, though, was imprecise and muddy, and drowned every page in darkness. Still: His men and women had become even bigger, massive entities surging around the page, improbably moving.
What we have, then, is the critical darling and the populist superstar, both baited hooks to lure in the rubes. Clever trick, no? But back to what I said earlier, about reframing expectations. When something is sold like this, as the new Zeb Wells or the new Joe Madureira before it’s the new Spider-Man, the parameters of its success change. It’s less about competency in a vacuum than it is about being able to stand up against our old favorites from the creators — whether the line goes up or down on some graph of the quality of their working lives.
That shift of viewpoint is why I won’t harp on about barely anything happening. (It is, however, always a bad sign when the credits take up two full pages, with no accompanying art or narrative.) Spider-Man and the Avengers beat up a robot, and then Red Hulk gives Spider-Man a lift back to NYC, where they arrive just in time for the Mole Man’s subterranean minions to rise up and attack a marathon. That’s it, really — see you in 30, True Believers. What you think of the story is almost inessential, because it’s just the beginning of one. Instead, Avenging Spider-Man #1 wants to hit you in whatever nerves in your system appreciate the amiably sarcastic tone of Wells’s writing and the steroidal grandeur of Madureira’s art.
Wells is in fine form, and one suspects that if he was given 144 pages to write every issue, he would happily expand outward like a gas to fill them, and still move the plot at the same per-issue rate. J. Jonah Jameson is more of a lively and memorable guest star than Red Hulk, twice as much of a dick and four times as entertaining for it. Spider-Man’s running patter, both in and out of the narrative captions, has actual wit and bite. The only real gaffe is an abusive-boyfriend joke that would have fit seamlessly into, say, an episode of American Dad!, but seems at odds with the way we’re meant to see Spidey. It’s dark enough to spoil the panel’s mood, but not enough to derail the issue, or even the scene. If only my problems with other comics’ writing were so fleeting.
Continued belowMadureira, meanwhile, does what one would expect. His figures hunch over themselves or careen around the page, bending their limbs and pulling joints to their limits — no one ever stands still. Unlike the Ultimates 3 mire, colors come in bright hues that emphasize Madureira’s two key sensations: impact, and the moments leading up to it. The downside of the visuals in Avenging Spider-Man is that the darkening of Joe Mad’s pencil shading gives everything a rough texture, something that can look marvelous in solid black but just seems unfinished in shades of grey. Madureira needs a good inker, like his old Uncanny X-Men cohort Tim Townsend, to truly convey the weight of his world and its inhabitants — the sketchier his art gets, the more it just looks like power and speed, divorced from physicality no matter how burly the musclemen get.
As a Spider-Man comic, Avenging Spider-Man #1 is a promising side-trip, but has no bold path of its own. The storytellers provide the personality and flavor, not the story itself. At the same time, it’s hard to deny the fun that can be had with these guys, as Wells leavens Madureira’s fury with humor and Madureira livens up Wells’s conversations with motion. You could do a lot worse. A lot, lot worse.
Postscript: I tried to download the digital copy that came packaged with the issue (along with a collector’s edition sheet of blank yellow paper), but Marvel’s Chrome store rabbitpunched my web browser (via an infinite-redirect error) and no downloads were made. I did poke at an issue of Astonishing X-Men that they had available, though, and while the viewing mechanism is attractive (and moves from panel section to panel section with minimal fuss), the controls are mildly frustrating and don’t operate with the telepathic cursor-to-result precision I’d have liked. Oh, well. I still have a paper copy to read, don’t I?
Final Verdict: 7.0 – And if you count the digital edition as a separate copy, that’s like buying two $2 comic books!
