End of The (Web) Line: Amazing Spider-Man #700 Review

Editor’s Note: Better Yet, with my unparalleled genius — and my boundless ambitions — I’ll be a better Spoiler-Man than you ever were.

I hated Star Trek: Generations. Yes, I know this is a review of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, but just bear with me for a second.

The climax of Generations featured the death of Captain Kirk. If I’m remembering correctly (and if I’m not, screw it; I’m not watching that pile of shit again), a bunch of scaffolding collapsed on Kirk, killing him slowly due to internal injuries. “It was… fun,” Kirk said. “Fuck this bullshit,” I said.

The problem wasn’t that Kirk died. The problem was the way that Kirk died. Sure, he went down fighting evil, and he did it even knowing that no one would ever know that he did what he did, and that’s fine… but there is no way on God’s Green Earth that James Tiberius Kirk dies due to shitty construction and a bad step. It is wrong, and it is anti-climactic.

You want to kill Jim Kirk? There is only one way he dies: he goes down with the ship.

With that let’s turn an eye to The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

There is a lot in this comic book that writer Dan Slott does reasonably well. He shows two mortal enemies locked in battle, and demonstrates that at least in terms of intelligence, they are pretty evenly matched. He clearly spent some time thinking about Internet gutter wits (Hey Mom! I’m on the Internet!) looking for plot holes and preemptively plugging them, and gives a reasonable explanation for how and why the combatant who survives will act in the way he must for the ongoing conceit to even remotely have legs. And he gave himself an out for the new status quo… which I think we all know isn’t really the new normal. After all, let’s remember that , in the past five or six years, Marvel has killed and resurrected Captain America and Thor twice each. Big name characters in the Marvel Universe get killed and rise from the grave so often they make Jesus look like D-Man.

And yes, someone does die here, however temporarily. And Slott does his best to make that death emotional and moving, and succeeds up to a point. Problem is, that death doesn’t feel earned… and it is the equivalent of dying in a Goddamned scaffolding collapse.

So who dies, and is it all worth it? Well, let’s talk about that after the jump, with one warning: after that jump, there will be spoilers.

The Amazing Spider-Man #700 opens with Doctor Octopus still in control of Peter Parker’s body, with Peter trapped in Ock’s rapidly dying carcass. Peter has made good his escape from Ock’s prison cell with the help of Hydro-Man, Trapster and Scorpion, and is trying to stay alive long enough to put a plan into motion to switch his consciousness back with Ock’s before the body goes tits-up. Meanwhile, Ock is continuing to enjoy the fruits of being Peter Parker – including Pete’s access to a certain red-headed former supermodel – all while planning how he can enrich himself while in his current circumstances. With the clock (and organs) running down for Peter, he uses Ock’s supervillain resources to make one last attempt to make things right…

…and he loses. By the end of the issue, Peter is dead, Ock is firmly ensconced in Peter’s body and life, and thus ends fifty years of Spider-Man history. The end!

Nah, not really. But what it does mean is that, for good or ill, we are looking at at least several months of Doc Ock pretending to be Spider-Man… and frankly, given how this sequence of events comes about in this issue I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that. Because if you take a step back, this thing is all over the place.

The main story is about 48 pages long, which makes it almost three times longer than a normal single comic story, but given that this is ostensibly the final Spider-Man story, it should be long. But it’s amazing how much of it just seems to meander. We go from Ock trying to lay into Mary Jane, to Peter getting shocked into a vision of heaven where Uncle Ben tells him it’s okay for him to stop being Spider-Man, to a Jonah Jameson press conference to Ock collecting all Peter’s friends and family to one place to… and on, and on, and on. It’s 21 pages before Ock and Peter face each other, and even then it’s over Skype or something. The two aren’t in the same room until three-fifths of the way through the story, for Christ’s sake. As a final battle between two arch-enemies, it is surprisingly battle-free.

And when we do get to the final battle, it all concludes with Peter trying to kill Octopus – sure, it’s a murder  / suicide kinda deal, but it is attempted murder. And when the simple, old school “push Ock out the window” attempted murder fails and both guys are then outside, Peter then tries to re-switch Ock into a body Peter knows from firsthand experience is gonna be dead in about fifteen seconds. Okay: Peter has the means to switch bodies with Octopus on the premises… why leave it outside again? Why is Plan A “Kill Ock With Gravity?” It’s out of character and out of place, particularly since Slott has spent years showing us Peter Parker proudly using, “No one dies!” as a motto.

And frankly: what the hell kind of epic showdown ends with the bad guy winning because he wore a fucking helmet? Seriously, that’s what this issue finally comes down to: Peter can’t take his body back because Ock wore a helmet. This issue has been sold as an epic final battle between two legends of comics with the highest-possible stakes, and yet it just feels so small. Imagine that epic Steve Ditko splash from The Amazing Spider-Man #100 of Spider-Man lifting the debris despite insurmountable odds. Now imagine replacing that spread with a panel of Spider-Man saying, “Wait a second… this debris is carbonadium! Oh well, nothing to be done…” and then he drowns. Yeah, that’s how the conclusion to this story feels.

And then there’s the little “heaven” interlude. Now, I can understand Slott wanting to show, in what we’re all going to pretend is Peter Parker’s final story, that Peter can die peacefully, knowing that his Uncle Ben feels Peter owes Ben no further debt for allowing the robber to escape and eventually kill Ben. That’s nice and it gives us all a warm fuzzy feeling, except that I don’t think there is a comic reader older than five years old who thinks that Peter is permanently dead. Which means that Ben has just told Peter he doesn’t need to be Spider-Man anymore. Which would be powerful and give things a feeling of earned finality if I believed a fucking word of it.

And that, ultimately, is the biggest problem with this issue: I just don’t believe it. There is no way on God’s Green Earth that Axel Alonso or Ike Perlmutter would allow Dan Slott to devalue the intellectual property that is Peter Parker by killing him permanently, so we have a bunch of crap here that will, eventually, go away… and that Slott or whoever takes the peak seat from him will need to explain away. And having that understanding just takes the wind out of a story that was already bogging itself down by jumping around without getting to the money shot.

And while the explanation that Slott used to at least push Octavius onto a path where he will try to be heroic makes enough sense to keep me in the book to see where things go, seeing both Peter and Ock taking on the characteristics of their host body’s personae was a dead giveaway that the “new normal” ain’t gonna stay normal… and speaking of the host bodies, hey Slott! At least three times in the last two issues, you’ve had Peter remarking that he can feel his organs failing. As a 20-plus year heavy drinker, let me tell you this: if it were possible to feel your liver and kidneys failing? I would know. That is all.

Humberto Ramos’s art, frankly, was not a particularly good match for a life and death story of the type that Amazing Spider-Man #700 was aspiring to be, but that is not Ramos’s fault. As I’ve remarked before, Ramos has a manga-styled, exaggerated look to his art. Which I think is a pretty decent match for a standard, action-packed Spider-Man story (even though I am generally not a fan of manga art), but which is simply too cartoony and light to carry a story about the death of the Goddamned title character. Still, his pacing and storytelling are generally pretty clear, and his facial expression easy to read (despite some people having the giant roundeyes of Sailor Moon)… but his style is just wrong for a story of the import that this on purports to have.

Look, I don’t have a problem spending a little time watching Doctor Octopus frittering around as Spider-Man, and probably ending up stuck into a robot body or some other kinda weird damn thing. And I don’t even have a real problem with Peter Parker being killed, particularly since in the Quesada / Alonso era of Marvel, I know that no one is gonna stay dead for more than a couple of years or until their movie opens, whichever comes first. But to kill Peter this way, in a story that takes forever to get to a direct showdown, takes away Peter’s main motive for even being Spider-Man and makes Peter attempt murder before trying a real solution, just feels wrong. Peter Parker doesn’t go down this way.

Like Star Trek: Generations, this comic book contains a death for cheap emotional impact and to further a story idea that some new writer came up with since the dead guy was created. And like in Generations, the writer either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what a good death for that character is. And finally, like Generations, The Amazing Spider-Man #700 is ultimately a failure… hopefully a failure we can use to say, “Fine: this had to happen to get to the next story, which was actually pretty good. So it’s a thing that happened; let’s move on.”

And for the record? If Peter Parker ever really dies, it’s stopping a simple burglar from injuring someone’s father. And I’ll fight any man who says different.