One And A Half Spider-Men: Spider-Men #1 Review

Back in July 2005, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Joe Quesada said that, if the classic Marvel Universe ever crossed over with the Ultimate Marvel Universe, it would mean that Marvel was “officially out of ideas.” It is now June 2012, and by Joey Q’s own metrics, Marvel is officially out of ideas. Say hello to Spider-Men #1.

This is the first time that the 616 has mixed with the Ultimate Universe (Think a Resse’s, your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter deal except ram-fed full of anticipated marketing dollars), but it’s not the first time that the Ultimate Universe has crossed over, even at the hands of Spider-Men writer Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis was one of the writers of Ultimate Power, which crossed the Ultimate world with Marvel’s other alternate world of Squadron Supreme, back in late 2006, or about four months after Quesada announced that such a crossover would equal an utter dearth of ideas. That crossover event led to Nick Fury leading Squadron Supreme, that book eventually quietly disappearing, the Ultimate Universe being almost destroyed by Magneto, the reboot of the Ultimate Universe (But, but Marvel doesn’t reboot! And their crossovers are always well-conceived and executed!), and, ultimately (get it?), the death of the original Ultimate Spider-Man.

My point is, when it comes to Ultimate universe crossovers, Spider-Men is facing a bar that is comfortably low. So the big question is: does Spider-Men make it over that bar? Well, considering this is the first issue of a Bendis miniseries, the answer must be: how the fuck should I know? Almost nothing happens in this comic. This issue is all set-up.

We open with Spider-Man (The Peter Parker, 616 Spider-Man, and I can already tell that what with having to constantly delineate the differences between the Peter Parker Spider-Man and the Miles Morales Spider-Man, just writing the reviews for these comics is going to give me carpal tunnel syndrome) simultaneously breaking up a robbery and giving an internal monologue about how much he loves New York City. Then he meets Mysterio tending some strange power source, gets zapped by the power source, winds up in New York in daylight, stops a mugging, and meets Spider-Man (The Miles Morales Spider-Man. Goddammit…) on the last page…

And that’s pretty much it.

On one hand, this could be a trigger for me to start ranting yet again about decompressed storytelling, and how Bendis has a tendency to just dither about sometimes and stretch things for the sake of hitting that sweet trade paperback length, but it’s actually not as bad as it sounds. Yeah, there’s a ton of “I Love New York” soliloquy that will inevitably be used as a trigger for Parker to want to come home to the 616 (Because it’s not his New York, you see), but by attaching that internal exposition to Spider-Man thwarting a high-speed chase, it’s not in any way dryly presented.

There are also some nice bits of business around how Parker Spider-Man is viewed in the 616 compared to how Peter Parker’s posthumously viewed in the Ultimate universe. At the end of the book’s opening robbery… thwarting? Thwartage? Thwartgasm? Whatever. Anyway, as usual, the NYPD shows up and tries to put the arm on Spider-Man. Contrast this to when he stops a mugging after being zapped to the Ultimate New York City (As a Bostonian, I believe the Ultimate New York City is a smoking crater in the ground, but you know what I mean) when the victim gives Parker a hint that here, Peter Parker is widely known as a hero, and we have a setup for Peter having to come to terms with how widely he’s mistrusted back home. All of which hints to some potentially satisfying character work to come… but the “Ultimate Peter Parker is viewed as a hero” plot point happens on pages 20 and 21 of a 22-page story, and Bendis needed that last page for a splash revealing Miles Morales (With the tantalizing and enigmatic character-building dialogue of, “No way,” so there’s no immediate payoff to the moment beyond the tease of character moments to come.

Look, there’s a lot if potential here. Bendis lays in good character elements that I have faith will pay off in future issues, and clearly, the man knows how to write Peter Parker, because even the internal dialogue captions are entertaining:

Seriously, if this city was a girl, I would date her. But if this city was a girl, she would —

“Out of the truck!”

Yeah, this.

But it is all potential. I don’t really even have an idea as to what the larger story behind this miniseries is yet, Will it be to defeat Mysterio in some master plan? Will it be to simple get Peter Parker home? Based on the promo image for the next issue of Miles and Peter gently unmasking each other, will it be hot, sweet, Spider-Man on Spider-Man action? We’re a fifth of the way into the story, and I have no fucking idea.

Sara Pichelli’s art is working better for me here than it did in the first couple of issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, and other than some fairly egregious storytelling issues in those issues, I liked it just fine. Her art is detailed, with a fine line and significant detail packed into each panel. Her facial expressions continue to be excellent, when you can find them; I’m guessing facial expressions aren’t going to be that big contributing factor to quality in a book featuring two heroes and a villain, all wearing face-obscuring masks. Further, she does some of the better Spider-Man webslinging images I’ve seen in a while; she does some wide angle images of Spider-Man swinging that are really, really impressive. And most importantly, she doesn’t introduce any of the double-page spread confusion she did so often in the early Ultimate Spider-Man issues. She has a couple of double-pagers here, but there are clear, top-of-the-page visual cues to clarify to the reader where they are supposed to look. Further, her stuff has enough detail that there is almost a three-dimensional look to it here. Simply put, this is a damn good looking comic book.

There is a lot to like about Spider-Men #1; the groundwork is set for an interesting character study of the 616 Peter Parker, and it is a beautiful looking book… but that’s about all we can tell about this series at this point. What’s the conflict? We don’t know. What’s the heroes’ or the villain’s motivation? Got me, Jack. What does anyone here even want? Fucked if I know.

This is a potentially decent opening chapter to a good story, but if you want my advice? Leave it on the shelf and maybe get it when the second issue drops, and we maybe have some idea as to what the hell is going on here.