The Spider-verse continues!
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter David
Art: Will Sliney
What They Say:
SPIDER-VERSE TIE-IN! Picking up where Amazing Spider-Man #10 ends, Miguel O’Hara is finally back in the year 2099! But no time for nostalgia! Spider-Man 2099, Lady Spider, and the six-armed Spider-Man are on the run for their lives from the dangerously ravenous Inheritors!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having touched upon the Spider-verse storyline in a couple of books so far while not reading the main event series itself, I’m certainly enjoying it in a way because it’s a slew of different kinds of Spider-Man characters across timelines, times and genres. We’ve had some of this over the years, but they’ve gone all out in a multiverse kind of way here that’s fun. That said, it hasn’t drawn me to read the main story because I’m not invested in the Spider-Man books out of the 2099 one. And having the last issue, this one and the next two of a new series like this invested in it makes me wary in general and reminds me why I had fallen out of the Big Two for so long. If four out of the first nine issues deal with a crossover, how much of the main launch story is really going to be covered?
Thankfully, Peter David and Will Sliney keep it at least interesting to watch here while lightly touching on some of the main events of the series itself. The book has thrown us to the 2099 year on Earth-928 where we see how Tyler Stone is enjoying having sent Miguel back to 2014 just an hour ago and the kind of triumphant nature of it all. The problem of time travel though is that when you come back, you can largely pick up where you left off, which is what Miguel has done here while in tow with Spider Lady, a steampunk style 1890’s incarnation, and a six-armed Peter Parker that went quite wrong. So when Stone sees that and panics, it’s understandable. For Miguel, he knows how this time period works and uses it to his advantage, visiting his brother Gabriel so he can get what he needs to deal with the threat at hand.
That threat being one of the Inheritors known as Daemos, which is hunting them down to suck all their spider-essence out of them. While Miguel probably hoped for a bit more time before having to deal with it, Daemos gets in there quickly and the book largely turns into an action romp across the future. It’s a good mix of what it does where the three Spider-characters interact with each other, at least until they start dying, and Miguel puts a plan into motion to try and deal with Daemos that has him clearing the slate with Stone along the way, which is a surprising move in and of itself. Daemos doesn’t have much to do here beyond just trying to be scary and we see that he causes fear within the Spider-characters. There’s a nice twist with Spider Lady along the way, making me like her in general with her interactions with Gabe, but mostly it’s a long and extended fight sequence. What it does next, hopefully in this book, in showing us what else happens in 2099 could be interesting, but we’ve got two more issues of the Spider-verse to deal with first.
In Summary:
I’m not hating the Spider-verse storyline in the slightest as an event, but I’m not investing in it either. With a young book like this, all I can hope is that it draws more readers to it and the series itself continues on afterwards because I like the adventures of Miguel, either in 2014 or 2099. But preferably in 2014 to work through what was being setup in the first four issues. This book lets Sliney have fun with a couple of different characters going at it over the 2099 landscape and to give Stone a bit of time as well so we can touch on some of the events there. Daemos is an empty threat at this point as it’s all power and hunger with nothing deeper to make him interesting, but he serves his purpose well. It just doesn’t do much for me.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: November 26th, 2014
MSRP: $3.99
