Finally! Peter Parker has come back to the Marvel Universe!
Written by Joe Caramagna
Illustrated by Scott Koblish, Giancarlo Caracuzzo, Francesca Ciregia, Elena Casagrande, Tim Seeley, Scott Koblish• Young Peter Parker is the high school bullies’ favorite target. But all that changes the day a science experiment goes wrong, and Peter begins to transform!
• When a personal tragedy teaches Peter a harsh lesson in responsibility, he must find the inner strength to become a hero!
• Can the brand-new Spider-Man master his new powers in time to take on the villainous Vulture?
• When a giant robot spider attacks New York, Spider-Man must prove his innocence by tracking down the scientist responsible: the diabolical Dr. Octopus!
• When the sinister Sandman assaults Midtown High, it’s up to Peter to stop him — even if must risk revealing his secret identity!
• Four titanic tales set in Spider-Man’s past!
After the epic saga that was “Superior Spider-Man”, Peter Parker returned to the Marvel Universe last month in the pages of “Amazing Spider-Man” #1 and it was a pretty fun start to a new chapter in the wallcrawler’s life. Here, though, we’re not messing with that new fangled future stuff, we’re kicking it old school as Joe Caramagna brings with him a team of artists to explore the earliest days of Peter Parker and Spider-Man. Now, some of you may be asking “Didn’t Dan Slott and Ramón Perez literally just do that?” and you would be right, but you know what? Who can say no to another re-telling of Spider-Man’s origins?
That’s actually the thing that stands in the way of this one-shot: there is an immediate feeling, from as soon as page one, that we’ve been over all this before. No matter the flourishes that Joe Caramgna infuses in his writing and the charm he weaves the stories, this is material that has been told and re-told for 50 years now and there’s only so much mileage one can get out of a story like that.
That’s not to say that the issue is bad. In fact, taken as a whole I’d wager it’s pretty good. The issue is split into four stories, all written by Caramagna, but with a different art team on each story. The first story is your run of the mill retelling of the Spider-Man origin, but Caramagna does something interesting. He weaves a theme throughout each story, starting with this one, that shows how Peter is affected by Uncle Ben’s death and changed by becoming Spider-Man, adopting the idea of ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. It allows for there to be connective tissue throughout the four stories instead of them being random and disconnected and gives a cohesive feel to the issue as a whole.
Another interesting move in the formatting of the issue is how each story is split into two halves in the same way the stories in the original issue of “Amazing Spider-Man” were. That means the first story has two artists working on each half, with Scott Koblish drawing the first half and Giancarlo Caracuzzo drawing the second half. The artwork is often great on this story, with Koblish’s style being simple enough to evoke the feeling of the Golden Age of Marvel, but expressive in a way that really fits some of the over-the-top emotions of Caramga’s script; this story really captures that melodrama of the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko story. Koblish and Caracuzzo are really well paired together as the change in artist might have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been pointed out by the issue itself. Both artists capture the feeling of classic Marvel to make this story work, despite how many times it’s been told in the past.
From there, things actually do start to pick as not only does Caramagna follow the threads of Peter taking responisiblity for his actions, but he delves into the origins of some of Spidey’s classic villains. The first to get this treatment is the Vulture as Caramagna teams up with Francesca Ciregia and Elena Casagrande. This story, much more than the first, really showcases the talent in this issue and begins to feel like a story that could do with a re-telling like this. With Dan Slott and Ramón Perez delving into the dark secrets of Peter’s early days, this issue could serve as the perfect companion to that as Caramagna and the art team present a Peter Parker who is instantly recognisable, give him an arc throughout the four stories and leave wanting little more than to read more Spider-Man.
Continued belowPerhaps the best of the bunch, at least I’d say so, is the third story focusing on the origins of Doctor Octopus. Tim Seeley provides the artwork here, being the first artist of the four stories to draw both parts of the story. Perhaps it’s that or perhaps it’s the intimate confrontations Peter and Octavius have gone through recently, but this feels the most pertinent of the four stories. It’s simple as far as origin stories go (Doc Ock shows up and suddenly disappears forcing Peter to try and figure out his origins as he stops the first of his masterplans), but Caramagna and Seeley definitely make it work as they set up the grand tapestry of hero/villain conflicts to come.
Last, but by no means least, is a story titled ‘Sandman’, but it’s neither about the origins of Sandman nor is it really about Sandman himself. Sure, he shows up and his origin gets a brief, half-page explanation, but the focus here is still on Peter as this story culminates his arc. Using each villain as a piece of a larger puzzle that Caramagna explores as Peter accepts his part in his uncle’s death is kind of genius, actually, as it both explains the anthology format and provides one of the best examples of it working. Scott Koblish returns here, but this time gets to draw both parts of the story and shows that having two artists draw the two halves of the story probably worked better in theory than in practice. This story feels much more cohesive than the first as while the art shift was subtle, it becomes much more noticeable in retrospect.
So, for a Spider-Man anthology that re-tells not only Spider-Man’s origins but the origins of some of his classic villains as well, somehow Joe Caramagna and the art team pulled off the impossible and made it work. Not only did they make it work, but they made these some of the best examples of re-tellings of these stories. That’s largely due to the fact that Caramagna was able to weave a thematic narrative throughout each story that echoed the arc Peter took in early Stan Lee-written stories as he comes to terms with Uncle Ben’s death. That positions this to be the perfect companion piece to some of the stuff Dan Slott is doing as anyone who (somehow) didn’t know of the comic origin of Spider-Man could be easily pointed here before seguing in ‘Learn To Crawl’ or even the new “Amazing Spider-Man” series.
Final Verdict: 7.8 – While there may not be as much here for anyone familiar with Spider-Man, this is a good an entry point as any into the character.
