I can’t imagine that Kieron Gillen was super excited to be assigned writing duties on Journey Into Mystery. A comic that’s nothing but Thor retitled following Thor’s “death” in Fear Itself, at face value this is a book designed to do nothing but park the title until they’re ready to bring Thor back properly. This is a book that is designed to have no future, and getting the assignment had to feel like getting a gig at a VHS tape factory. Or at a newspaper. Or on a non creator owned J. Michael Straczynski ongoing title.

So it would have been easy for Gillen to treat the book as what it is, write himself a good old middle of the road Thor-ish story and bide his time for a more lucrative assignment, like Scarlet Spider’s Pal: Jimmy Douchebag, or perhaps Ultimate Boom-Boom. Instead, he’s cutting loose with some of the zaniest, most fun comic writing you can currently buy. When it comes to pure fun, you’re not gonna find anything better than Journey Into Mystery #634 on the shelves this week.

Scarlet Spider is going to be a hard book for anyone who read comics for a long time before the Spider Clone saga to read with any level of objectivity. I’ve just now written and deleted a bunch of reasons why that is, but what it comes down to is that if you spent your 1980s adolescence reading books like The Dark Knight Returns, Mage: The Hero Discovered and Watchmen, the logic in the 1990s was simple: if ($_spider + $_clone) {($_comic == shit) && ($_comic_dollars_spent == 0)}. Sure, there are people crawling out of the woodwork now defending the Spider Clone saga, but there were also people who begged for conjugal visits with Ted Bundy; we call whose people cranks on a good day and apeshit crazy on a bad one, and we don’t generally entrust either with important things like firearms, or the editors’ desks of major comic books.

Long story short: I have not been looking forward to Scarlet Spider.

So I was prepared a few weeks ago to pick up the first issue, summarily review it and probably discard it… except by the time I got to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I’m such a hotshit writer about comics how come I don’t rank free advance review copies, it was already sold out… and this was by Wednesday evening. Which proves that despite my personal prejudices, someone was looking forward to this book.

So this week, I was able to get my hands on Scarlet Spider #2, and even at face value, I wasn’t excited about it – I mean, look at that cover. The center focus is the hero’s crotch with a bisected stone behind it, making it look like Scarlet Spider either has The Thing’s wang or that he is literally shitting a brick.

With all that said: Scarlet Spider #2 is actually a decent comic book. The character work is engaging, and I actually enjoyed it… even if I think it’s all presented in a way that isn’t going to be sustainable in the long term