The Ex-terminators, Part 1 by: Fred van Lente (writer), Pepe Larraz (art), Andres Mossa (colors) & Clayton Cowles (letters)
Jackpot: Double-Edged Sword by: Marc Guggenheim (writer), Sana Takeda (art) & Dave Sharpe (letters)
The Story: An MJ and Black Cat team-up in the main story, plus the conclusion to Jackpot’s mission to avenge her husband’s death in the back-up.
What’s Good: The main story features a team-up between MJ and Black Cat that shows why Web of Spiderman exists. I think WoS is a lot like a comic I reviewed yesterday: Batman Streets of Gotham. Spidey has a pretty big rotating cast of characters and WoS attempts to touch base with them. I like that because it makes Spidey’s universe feel more alive when these other characters don’t seem like toys that go back in the closet as soon as they are done being played with by Spidey.
And, the story for this team-up is pretty fun as Spidey is missing, leaving only his phone behind. MJ finds all the raunchy texts that Black Cat has been sending to Spidey and uses those to get in touch with her so she can hire Black Cat to find Spidey. As you can imagine, there is lots of catty banter between the two ex/recurring Spidey-girlfriends and that makes the issue kinda fun and the story ends with the pretty good cliffhanger.
The art on this story is a mixed bag. I generally like it a LOT, but Larraz draws his characters with a really big jaw. It generally isn’t that big of a problem, but looks a little funny from certain angles. Still, I’m putting his art in the good category because it was generally positive.
What’s Not So Good: I have nothing nice to say about the Jackpot back-up story. I don’t really care about Jackpot and I don’t really consider her to be a classic Spidey character, so I’d rather see them use this back-up space to provide a little background on Doc Ock’s next nefarious scheme or something like that. It doesn’t help that Jackpot is facing off against Mr. Negative who is my absolute least favorite Spidey-rogue. The art on this back-up is often a real mess including one prolonged sequence where Negative holds Jackpot in the air by her neck, only it looks like his hand isn’t really touching her. It reminded me of playing with action figures as a boy when the little dudes’ hands just wouldn’t bend to allow you to do certain things with them. Jackpot is also making almost the exact same face in every panel of this story whether she is being choked, talking, shooting a gun, happy, etc.
Conclusion: Buy it for the first story if you’re a Spidey completist, but the lack of execution on the Jackpot story makes this very skipable.
Grade: C-
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion