Casual Encounters: Spider-Men #4 Review
Editor’s Note: Seeing double? I got two spoilers, one for each of you.
You ever run into an old high school or college girlfriend that you broke up with? I have, and man, it sucks. There’s that whole moment of cognitive dissonance where your brain tries to match the person you knew years before with the older face and new haircut you’re seeing right now, and then you plaster on the fake smile and exchange overly loud and jocular greetings and exclamations of surprise at how long it’s been, and then you exchange stories of who you are now and the things you’re doing, and you promise to keep in touch while maybe exchanging email addresses that you know full well will never be typed into any browser, all the while dealing with the guilty knowledge that the reason it’s been so long is because you told her that you needed space… space to try to chuck the meat to that skank from UMass with the big knockers and the full liquor cabinet in her dorm room. And then you wander away feeling like you’ve had low-voltage elecro-convulsive therapy, and you spend the next day or so kinda moody and fucked-up, trying to get yourself back to normal equilibrium where you don’t feel like a long-term asshole. It’s a terrible experience; it’s one of the primary reasons you will catch me dead before you catch me on Facebook.
I know what you’re thinking: “Rob,” you’re thinking, “What in the ripe fuck does any of this have to do with comic books?” Well, all this emotion I’m describing comes from seeing someone you merely hurt by breaking up with them. Peter Parker, however, in The Amazing Spider-Man # 121, at best failed to rescue Gwen Stacy, if he didn’t accidentally kill her himself in a botched rescue attempt. So when Peter meets and interacts with the still-living Ultimate Universe version of Gwen in Spider-Men #4? I simply didn’t buy it. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
There is no action whatsoever in this issue of Spider-Men, with writer Brian Michael Bendis taking almost the full 20 pages to explore the 616 Peter Parker’s interactions with the Ultimate Gwen Stacy and Aunt May. This is an intimate issue, taking place almost exclusively in May’s Queens home, with people basically talking around a table, which a cynical man might say means that Bendis is playing on his most familiar and well-trod turf.
Now, on paper, there is the potential for serious emotional dynamite in about three different directions here. First, you have May, Gwen and Mary Jane able to come face-to-face with Peter, the Ultimate Universe version of whom died with a lot left unsaid. On the other side, you have Peter able to talk to Gwen Stacy, who at best died terrified at the hands of the Green Goblin and at worst died by Peter’s own hand in the normal Marvel Universe. But almost none of it feels like is has the weight that such interactions would if they could actually happen.
Sure, we see May pass out when she sees Peter, and we see her disbelieving that Peter’s actually Peter, but the height of the direct emotional contact between the two is when May says, “We lost you and we didn’t get to say goodbye,” before the conversation turns to the fact that Ultimate Peter was dating Kitty Pryde, and Peter’s reaction to that. And we see Peter dancing around in conversation with Gwen that she is dead in the 616, but then the conversation turns to that fact that Mary Jane is a supermodel in the regular Marvel Universe. The most realistic reaction we see to someone encountering someone who they have accepted as dead is when Mary Jane simply runs when she sees Peter, unwilling to face the situation, which is the reaction I need to fight when I run into old flames, and which is why I wear a hoodie and wraparound shades whenever I’m forced to go to my childhood hometown mall. But this isn’t about me, It’s about Spider-Man.
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