With Great Power Comes Great Bedsores: The Amazing Spider-Man #699 Review

Editor’s Note: Hey Amanda – have I done the “Amazing Spoiler-Man” gag for a spoiler warning yet? No? Jesus, how the fuck have I left that one on the table? No, I’m not gonna do it NOW, I gave it away already! I’ll just tell people that this review is loaded with spoilers. Right after I pour another whiskey.

Here’s the problem with hype: ever since The Amazing Spider-Man #699 was available in stores yesterday morning, Dan Slott’s Twitter feed has been ablaze with cries of “Oh God! You bastard! That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen!” and “I threw up when I saw IT,” and “Follow me for slutty cam vids!” Okay, that last one might have been from Twitter pornbot Diane’s Slot, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, if all you have to go on it the online hype, you would think that Amazing Spider-Man #699 was a bloody slugfest in the final battle before the book goes tits up in favor of Superior Spider-Man at the end of the month, but that’s not the case. Make no mistake: that moment that people are shrieking about is in the book. And it is… yeah, we’ll go with the adjective “disturbing.” But I won’t spoil the moment here, because despite the hype, it isn’t germane to the story. Which is actually a pretty solid middle part to a story that Marvel promises will “change Spider-Man forever,” or at least until three months after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 shows up in movie theaters and reminds people that there’s money in the character the way he’s always been.

The story opens, as predicted a couple of weeks ago, with doctors resuscitating Doctor Octopus after flatlining at the end of the last issue, which is a good thing because Peter Parker’s mind is stuck in Doc Ock’s brain. The doctors make it clear that this is a temporary measure – Ock’s / Peter’s body is shutting down in a matter of hours – so Peter makes the leap in logic that if Ock has Peter’s memories, maybe the reverse is true. Which turns out to be the case, allowing Peter to filter through Ock’s memories (some bad, some… icky) to discover how this happened to him, along with several escape contingencies, one of which Peter puts into motion to try to save himself…

So let’s talk about what this story isn’t: it’s not a punch-em-up, it’s not a gorefest, and it’s not another twist-laden gotcha-party like issue #698 was. What it is is a solid middle issue of a major three-part story. It answers some of the bigger questions from the last issue that left a lot of fans in a screeching hate frenzy, like how this happened and, more importantly, when it happened, which is a good thing because I was gonna give it until this issue before I started pawing through old issues of Spider-Man, New Avengers and Avengers Vs. X-Men to find scenes to prove that Slott was a lying douchebag.

But most importantly, it puts Peter back in the game, and gives him a possible out from the whole situation. I’m speculating that a lot of fans took the events of the last issue to mean that we were going to spend three issues watching shocking twist after shocking twist of what amounted to Peter getting beaten, chewed and fucked by the situation before dying like a feeb in his own wastes, but instead, even trapped in a dying body, Peter is still fighting. Which is far more satisfying than, say, spending two issues watching him get teabagged by security guards while nurses Instagram the Abu Ghraib-style photos like a lot of people probably feared might happen.

But more importantly, Slott subtly introduces a story point that complicates the whole situation beyond bad-guy-steals-good-guy’s-body, in the form of The Lizard. Slott has Peter and The Lizard converse, with Lizard confiding in “Doctor Octopus” that he is, in fact, Curt Connors, simply trapped in the body of The Lizard. Peter’s first reaction is horror, and his second is to offer Connors a chance at redemption… which raises a serious question as to how Peter will ultimately react when and if he gets the opportunity to switch bodies back with Octopus. If we believe what we saw in the last issue, Ock is using Peter’s body to apparently make an effort to live well as both Peter and Spider-Man… so if that is the case, will Peter choose his own life over Octavius’s potential redemption if Ock is given the chance to live as Spider-Man? Or will Peter, who has been vowing for months that “no one dies,” instead sacrifice himself in Ock’s body to allow Ock the chance to redeem himself? This is purely speculation, of course, but the cool thing to me is that these questions are there, and they are there thanks to the fate of The Lizard, who Slott put in his predicament almost six months ago. Between that, and the explanation as to how Ock originally got access to Peter’s brain (which dates back far, far further), and it seems Slott has been really playing the long game here. It’s damned impressive.

If I have an issue with the book, it’s the art by Humberto Ramos. Part of that is personal; I’ve never been the biggest fan of Ramos’s art as I find it a little manga styled, with big eyes and exaggerated facial features, both of which are evident in this issue. Which is fine if you like that style of art, but this is a story that, for the most part, takes place on an extremely intimate scale: in Peter’s head. And the stakes of the story, while being life and death, are still small, in that Peter is worried about quietly shitting out his pancreas as opposed to taking a pumpkin bomb to the face. And while if there is an American superhero for whom Ramos is almost tailor-made to draw, it’s Spider-Man (I’ve actually enjoyed his look in some issues), the cartoony look just didn’t match well for me in a story about a dude in a hospital bed, fighting valiantly to avoid bedsores.

However, one thing that Ramos’s art did inadvertently accomplish was, by giving the book a familiar look (considering how many issues he’s drawn recently), it actually reduced the level of anxiety that I felt compared to issue #698. It subliminally gave me the sense of, “Okay, this is a Spider-Man story. Spider-Man always wins. So this will work out in the end.” Whether that was the intended effect of giving Ramos the assignment is a another question. However, in general Ramos’s panel layout is clear and his storytelling easy to follow… with the exception of a double-page spread where yet again, the artist chooses to put the first panel ending close to the spine, making it difficult for the reader to easily tell if they need to read across or down. God, I wish artists would stop that shit.

So yeah: despite what you might have been led to believe by the online hype, The Amazing Spider-Man #699 isn’t a thrill-a-minute violence fest packed with twists. But what it is is a pretty damn solid second part to this story arc, that answers questions that readers were demanding explanations for, that introduces some real ambiguity over the nature of being trapped in a body and the nature of redemption that could really pay off in the finale later this month, and that, most importantly, puts Peter back into the fight in his own book. It shows that Slott has had plans for this story much more involved than getting shitfaced one night and waking up with “Freaky Friday” scrawled on a cocktail napkin, and it really makes me excited to find out, when presented with the choice of reclaiming his body and killing Octopus versus allowing Ock the opportunity to redeem his life, what Peter will do. It’s a hell of a second issue, and if the last issue infuriated you and you were on the fence about whether you wanted to continue, trust me: you should.

And yes: there is something damn disturbing in the issue. You’ll know it when you see it. And while it won’t topple Stephen King off the top of the charts, you will know horror.