Post-Foreplay, Pre-Climax: The Superior Spider-Man #7 Review

superior_spider-man_7_cover_2013The Superior Spider-Man is not sustainable. It has never been sustainable. We have known this from the beginning.

Let’s face it: The Superior Spider-Man only works for as long as you accept that there’s a megamaniacal supervillain who talks like Ming The Merciless on a coke bender and kills more people as Spider-Man than he did with his pre-body switch Death Satellites pretending to be Peter Parker… without anyone noticing. Including the readers. I have been able to suspend my disbelief on my that plot point for a while, but the entire time I have been reading this book, I have known in the back of my mind that if I called someone a “dolt” more than three times in a month, my friends would demand to know what was wrong… and if I used the term “pilfering parasite” more than once in, well, ever, my own parents would hold me at pitchfork-point until the DNA results came back clean.

The cracks in this whole Doc-Ock-As-Spider-Man conceit are already beginning to show. In the current Marvel crossover event Age of Ultron, which was written by Brian Michael Bendis months ago, Spider-Man is pretty clearly Peter Parker… which caused writer Dan Slott to have to produce last week’s The Superior Spider-Man #6AU (AU for “Age of Ultron”), which tried valiantly to shoehorn Ock’s version of Spider-Man into the event… even though only a reader who uses the cover of an issue of Age of Ultron to roll a fat one would believe that Otto Octavius has a wisecrack in him that doesn’t include the word “pusillanimous.”

Thankfully, Slott seems to know the limitations of the body-switching gag. Because just over three months into the whole deal, he is simultaneously showing Peter beginning to show a modicum of control over his Otto-infested body, and Spider-Man’s teammates on The Avengers are finally convinced that something isn’t right with the guy. And while all this is happening with what feels like a fairly contrived situation just to show the extent of Doc Ock’s newly-found moral relativism, it’s good to finally see the noose tightening on this whole gimmick.

Otto has been on somewhat of a rampage, using more and more violent methods to bring super-criminals to justice – including cold-blooded murder in the case of Massacre – but even a Randian nutjob with a surveillance fetish needs a nap now and again. During said nap, Peter, who continues to monitor Ock as a spectre, learns that he can exert at least rudimentary control over “their” right hand… although considering he is only able to use it to write in a manner consistent with someone who has been administered a partial lobotomy, I’m guessing yo-yo tricks are still somewhere in the far future. Anyway, Ock is awakened by an alert that Cardiac, a superpowered vigilante who is stealing to stock an underground hospital for the poor, has broken into a government warehouse to find a piece of equipment needed to save a child with brain damage. Otto intervenes with threats of extreme violence, even while Peter tries to intervene, with growing levels of success. Anyhoo, Ock fucks it up, as Ock does, but is heartened by an Avengers priority call to action. He is less heartened when he discovers that the call is to demand that Spider-Man go through a complete examination to prove that, in light of his recent behavior, he is Spider-Man. And then there is violence.

I’m gonna start here with what didn’t work for me in this issue (because a lot of the issue actually did work for me), and unfortunately, it’s the main conflict with Cardiac. This whole conflict really exists to show that Doc Ock is willing to use unnecessary levels of violence to combat even the most innocuous of threats. It’s effective in showing Ock’s sudden moral relativism (moral relativism by way of mimicked behavior: Ock clearly figures that if he is a superhero, than anyone who breaks the law is a villain who must be smacked down. Like a guy who learned how to be a cop from Dirty Harry movies), but the conflict requires three pages of pre-credits setup, including old-fashioned through balloons, to establish the whole scenario. And while it succeeds in showing that Ock is ready and willing to use unnecessary violence in the apprehension of criminals (making him uniquely qualified to chase down The Blues Brothers), the whole sequence felt a bit forced and set up. It works to establish Ock’s myopia about how to deal with crime, but I could really see the Man Behind The Curtain during the fight.

However, what was more effective was The Avengers, and how someone in a universe filled with magicians and cosmic warriors and people who can change shape at will is finally not just noticing that something is wrong with Spider-Man, but taking proactive steps based on the initial hypothesis that whoever is under that mask isn’t actually Spider-Man. This has been a moment that I have been waiting for, and it really shows to me that Slott has a handle on eventually resolving this whole Doc Ock situation. Over the course of months, we have seen friends and family members of Peter showing doubts about “his” behavior and wondering what might be wrong with him… but a team of superheroes that includes a guy whose brother is the Trickster God and another woman who’s a master Soviet undercover spy, many of whom were recently replaced by Skrulls? Yeah, they’ll start out under the default setting of Body Snatcher infestation. After months of seeing subtle suspicions and dumb wonderings as to why Peter Parker is suddenly a douchebag with a vocabulary that includes the liberal use of the word “vainglorious,” it was awesome to see someone finally take for granted that whoever Spider-Man is, it ain’t Peter Parker.

What this final sequence with The Avengers does is tease an endgame to this whole Ock-As-Spider-Man plotline, and that the timing actually makes some sense. Look: the idea of a supervillain taking over a hero’s identity is almost as old as superhero comics – Bizarro and Reverse Flash weren’t born in a vacuum – but three months is about the longest stretch of a specific hero body switch story I can remember beyond the ephemeral paranoia surrounding Secret Invasion four or five years ago. Realistically, The Superior Spider-Man is the kind of story that, back in the day, would be told and resolved in a one-and-done. So to see things start to go wrong and move toward resolution in this relatively timely manner is encouraging, and it shows that Slott has a real – and realistic – plan for where things are going. It was just the sign I needed to build my confidence that good stuff might be in store, and in the immediate future.

Humberto Ramos’s art, well, hell. His stuff is just not my favorite. Like I’ve stated a million times, he works in a very manga-reminiscent, cartoony style that is generally just not to my taste. His storytelling is pretty clear (except for one mistake – Slott has Peter crowing about how he has control over his right hand… while clearly showing his left hand moving), and his loose, not-particularly-realistic style works for the loose and limber moves that Spider-Man makes, but it all looks unrealistic and, well, cartoony. Your mileage may vary, but it’s just not to my taste. Look: at this point, Ramos has drawn probably dozens of issues of Spider-Man comics, and you’ll know if you like the look. For me? It’s well-executed for what it is, but it’s just not my thing. Besides, Spider-Man’s right sock on that cover looks like he has someone’s dong stuffed into the big toe.

The Superior Spider-Man #7 isn’t perfect. The main battle, while perfectly satisfying superhero action, seems forced to prove a point about Otto’s black-and-white attitudes toward handling criminals, and while its good to see Peter exerting some control over the whole situation, Christ it’s taking forever for it to make any concrete difference whatsoever. But it was damn good to see some superheroes seeing what’s been right in front of their faces and taking action in a way that superheroes who have seen giant purple men threatening to eat Manhattan would. It feels like we’re moving toward an endgame that has been inevitable since The Amazing Spider-Man #700. And unlike the last time Marvel jammed some other dude into Spider-Man’s identity (hi, Ben Reilly!), it feels like there is a climax that we’re approaching.

Making a bad guy Spider-Man is a gimmick. Making the bad guy leave Spider-Man’s body is a conflict. We’re finally into the conflict. I’m looking forward to the climax.