By Mark Waid (writer), Paul Azaceta (art), Dave Stewart (colored art)
The Story: Power to the People, Part Three: Spider-Man is rescued from the wreckage of the Thinker’s lab by the NYFD, but he might have found something that will help him against a juiced-up Electro. In the meantime, Electro traps everyone in the Daily Bugle building and goes after Dexter Bennett. Spider-Man has to convince Mayor Jameson that they need to play together to save the Bugle and stop Electro. You can imagine how that conversation goes…
What’s Good: This is good, old-fashioned Spider-fun: a wisecracking, melodramatic, never-catch-a-break Spider-Man adventure. Waid does beautiful work on Electro. Max Dillon, despite being hyper-powered, is still the bitter, petty schlep he’s always been, looking for a quick score, an easy fix, and taking a jab at those who’ve pissed him off. Same thing with Jameson’s blustering anti-Spider-Man vitriol and his prideful worry over the newspaper that no longer belongs to him. And Spider-Man is in top form, talking to himself, throwing sarcastic pop culture references and stepping up to the plate when a bad guy is in town.
Azaceta and Stewart do a fabulous job on art. Electro is wildly angry and you could follow the moods even without dialogue or text boxes, a sign of great graphic communication. He’s crackling and sparking and arcing all over the place, scaring pedestrians and frying poor Spider-man, with dark, gritty lines and subdued colors. The action panels would also do Jack Kirby proud. The exaggerated postures to make the figures more dynamic are on every panel, but do check out Electro emerging from the computer monitors and Spider-Man swinging on his web just before crashing through the window of the Bugle. Classic dynamic art from Marvel.
What’s Not So Good: This was a great story with great production values, so all I’m left to nitpick on is the physics of Electro moving around. Now that he can convert his body into electricity and travel through electrical wires and burst out of outlets and so on, there are a few quibble points to make. So, if you’ll permit me to nerd out for a second, Electro shouldn’t be able to jump out of a flat screen monitor. Electricity doesn’t conduct through that kind of screen – only behind it and in relatively low (compared to even a table lamp) amps. Second of all, the current any given wire would have to carry to have Electro travel through it is far beyond what any reasonably set fuse could bear. He’d be stopped by the first fuse he tripped, because he really shouldn’t pass through a non-conductor (you may want to point out that lightning travels through air, and I’d be willing to concede that as a special case, but non-conductors do exist and they heat up a whole lot when you force charge through them). Lastly, the sheer *size* of the energy load that would have to travel through the wires to carry Electro is staggering. Figure that to convert Electro into energy, you have to use the formula E=mc². Figure Electro weighs about 80 kilos. I didn’t bother with the math, but Hiroshima converted a lot less than eighty kilos into energy to make that explosion. Now, while we can gleefully pick at the physics, we also have to remember the old saw that “In the real world, the laws of physics are unbreakable, but the laws of morality are flexible; in comic books, the laws of physics are flexible, but the laws of morality unbreakable.”
Conclusion: This was a really fun issue and it’s still priced at $2.99. Pick it up!
Grade: B-
-DS Arsenault