By: Zeb Wells (writer), Joe Madureira (art), Ferran Daniel (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), Ellie Pyle (assistant editor) & Stephen Wacker (editor)
The Story: Spidey and Red Hulk team up to fight a subterranean threat.
Five Things:
1. The team-up is BACK! How is it that Marvel can publish ~100 titles a month an none of them is the spiritual successor of Marvel Team Up? MTU was such a treasure back in the old days. It gave you a way to sample various heroes from the Marvel Universe and it featured some great creative teams. So, it’s nice to see the team-up come back. The back matter explains that this title is to explore Spidey’s adventures mostly with his Avengers teammates, but might dip into other areas of the Marvel Universe. Wonderful! The only negative is that they ditched the done-in-one format that made MTU special. MTU exposed you to 12 different heroes in a year. If they do ongoing stories in this title, we’re going to get 6 or fewer. Fix that and you’ve got a great concept!
2. Joe Mad is back! Beyond the fact that this was a Spidey book, the big draw was seeing Joe Maduriera’s name on the cover. He’s been away from comics for awhile after a great run on Uncanny X-Men back in the 90’s, but there probably isn’t a better place for his stylized art than on Spider-Man. If you like Humberto Ramos… I think Joe Mad is like Ramos on speed. Now…..I will say that I’ll be highly surprised if this title can maintain a monthly schedule for long because this art is too complex for that, but given that these stories aren’t vital to the ongoing Spider-stories being told in Amazing, that really won’t matter. Joe Mad is one of those rare artists who gets the “Take all the time you need. Just let us know when it is finished.” treatment.
3. Very poor digital implementation. Marvel made a big deal out of giving away a free digital copy of this issue with a print copy. I’m a huge fan of digital comics on my iPad, so I was curious to see how Marvel implemented this. Part of what makes Marvel’s iOS app so beautiful is it’s simplicity: You tap the “buy” button, input your App Store password, confirm that you want to buy and you’re reading your comic. The whole process takes ~5 seconds. What Marvel did here really sucked. You had to go to a special webpage, log into Marvel.com (trying to remember my Marvel password), input a ~15 character code (“Is that a 0 or an O?”), say what comic shop you bought your comic at, agree to accept emails from your comic shop and then go to your device to read the comic. This is not a process that will win many converts to digital comics because the beauty of digital it its simplicity!
4. Entertaining story. Funny. One page summed up the sense of humor in this issue. Spidey and the Avengers have just taken down some mega-robot, but Spidey needs to get back to NYC for his job and he’s begging someone to please take him back to NYC. The Avengers quickly bounce past saying “Not it.” (except for Thor who says, “Nor I.”) before the duty falls to Red Hulk. Spidey says, “How should we do this? I could web up a backpack….” before Rulk seizes Spidey’s entire arm in his meaty had (“..or you can pretend you’re my abusive boyfriend – ?”) and jumps away with him. I can accept that titles like Avengers can’t always be funny, but this title should be funny.
5. Too many double page spreads! For a title that was supposed to be a kinda showcase for Marvel’s digital offerings, it features WAY too many double-page spreads. While the DPS works nicely on a computer because of the screen orientation, no one wants to read digital comics on their computer. Folks want to read on their tablet devices and the DPS fails on the tablet because it shrinks the page so what was supposed to be a BIG DRAMATIC scene ends up being small and puny. At some point, editors need to throw themselves in front of this train and say STOP! Even if print sales are dominant now, if anyone sees this artwork again in 10 years, it’s going to be on tablet devices.
Conclusion: A few quibbles aside, this was a very well done and welcome return for the Spidey team-up book. Keep it up!
Grade: A-
-Dean Stell
Follow Dean on Twitter.
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