Amazing Spider-Man #8 – Review

The first story features the title “Adventures in Babysitting,” of which I was a bit concerned, thinking that the “baby” it would be referring to the new Ms. Marvel. The opening page even hint at the way Ms. Marvel can’t handle a supervillain smack-down. With a turn of the page, however, Ms. Marvel reveals the heady giddiness of a young hero who relishes her first official “team-up,” and the baby in the title turns out to be the McGuffin that brings our team-up together.

In fact, despite my initial concern, pretty much every character gets to be honored in their appearance here, even the random henchman that happens to be one of the main characters in a recent Amazing Spider-Man spin-off series Learning to Crawl. Spider-Man himself shines as the experienced mentor here, showing off his powers, his humor, and even his ingenuity. He caps it off by acknowledging that his company Parker Industries, and by implication, his experience as a tenured hero, gives him a different kind of “power” with no less different kinds of responsibility.

In entirely unrelated sequences, we get to see Silk/Cindy Moon in her new status quo, new costume, and her sudden declaration of how she “felt like time for a change.” Okay… well, since every time we see this character it’s a new change, I’m not quite sure how to really care about this latest iteration. Thankfully, the costume is more visually engaging than Ramos’ initial design, but on a purely narrative level, there is very little to engage with regarding Silk. I can feel bad that she’s lived her life as a shut-in, I suppose, but that doesn’t really impact her life, emotions, or motivations, so it’s a non-starter. Every other element is pretty much taken from the Giant Generic Superhero Trope Checklist. It’s a shame that Silk is sharing these scenes in between a much more engaging new character of Ms. Marvel– the handling of these to characters and their story potential cannot be any more different, and clearly Ms. Marvel is the winner here.

The second story here features the return of a fan-favorite, the original Spider-Girl from the MC2 line of comics way back when. It’s a decidedly different tone, returning to the near-horror story of a relentless vampire-y Morlun cutting a path of destruction and killing off what’s sure to be some fans’ favorite iterations of alternate-Spider characters. May Parker/Spider-Girl manages to escape with her baby brother, into the “to be continued” of Spider-Verse.

All the art supplements the different stories beautifully. Ramos’ kinetic pencils lend themselves well to the momentum of the hopelessness of the characters, and Delgado’s glows and lights make it vibrant but ominous at the same time. Camuncoli’s provides excellent sequential storytelling, and Ms. Marvel’s stretching powers are fun and dynamic. Interestingly, there are only a few times when Camuncoli will adjust the perspective of the layout– using a worm’s eye view or bird’s eye, for example, and thus it comes across as fairly static despite the wonderful action. I guess I prefer a variety of layout choices, such as when Ms. Marvel elongates her legs as she carries the baby away from the battle– that was a quite effective choice. Ramos, of course, has a variety on almost every other panel, adding to the dynamism of the story.     

-Danny Wall