By: John Layman (writer), Lee Garbett (pencils), Mark Pennington (inks), Fabio D’Auria (colors), Clayton Cowles (letters), Ellie Pyle (assistant editor), Alejandro Arbona (associate editor) & Stephen Wacker (editor)
The Story: It’s alternate universe time as Spidey (and Deadpool and Hulk) are sucked into an alternate universe.
What’s Good: This is just a fun alternate universe story with the basic premise being that our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man gets pulled into an alternate reality via an accident at his new job at Horizon Labs. As with any alternate universe story, the fun lies in seeing what’s the same and what’s different as compared to our world.
We learn much of this through the eyes our Peter Parker as he is forced to fill in for his counterpart as The Spider. The big difference we find is that The Spider is THE superhero of NYC and is beloved by everyone. As good as Peter’s life is in our reality, he has in WAY better in this other world (including having the companionship of a people who are dead in our reality). Hmm… Maybe he should just stay there??? Of course, there will end up being a few tiny little problems with this world and you’ll have to discover those yourself, but the plot twist at the end is pretty neat.
Not a whole lot of Deadpool and Hulk action in this issue. Surely their stories will be front-and-center in their respective annuals.
I really enjoy Lee Garbett’s pencils. He was the primary penciler at the beginning of Batgirl’s current run and he brings that same strong linework to this issue. There is nothing flashy about the Garbett/Pennington team, just very strong story telling and great character work. If you colored this comic with flat colors, you could have something that wouldn’t have looked out of place back in the 80’s (and I mean that as a VERY strong compliment).
What’s Not So Good: Well, it’s a disposable alternate universe story (almost certainly) and I just don’t have a lot of patience for those any more. At this point in my life, I’ve read a lot of Spider-Man stories and I just don’t find alternate reality tales very interesting anymore because they don’t even have the tease of being “important” or a “story that matters”. True, most regular issues of ASM don’t “matter” either, but there is at least that tease with every issue that something could happen! And, Spidey’s current status quo is so compelling and has so many cool things going on (being on two Avengers teams, the FF, the new job, the new girlfriend, etc.) that it just makes this story seem light. Not to mention that we already have an alternate reality story going in Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine.
I also really don’t appreciate this idea of smearing an Annual story across 3 separate properties. I don’t read Deadpool and I dropped Incredible Hulks a few months ago. This is a slightly amusing story, but do I really want to pay $7.98 ($3.99 X 2) to see what happens? Hint: The answer is “no”! And, what about the poor schmucks who only read Deadpool? Are they really going to be happy getting issue #2 of this story and having to track down this ASM annual? Stupid publication strategy.
Conclusion: Really strong linework and a fun story can’t save me the thought that I wasted $3.99 on this issue. The story presented in this issue is neat enough if you just want a fun, unencumbered Spider-Man story, but you’re going to have to buy the Deadpool and Incredible Hulks annuals to read the ending. Boooo!
Grade: C-
– Dean Stell
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