Rating: 5/5- All of your favorite Spider-Men in One Place!
by ComicSpectrum reviewer Gabe Bustamantez.
Dan Slott is a master of setting up large storylines. Hidden in panels and seemingly innocent dialogue are little teases and hints of larger events that will trouble Peter Parker’s life. A lot of times those future storyline hints are being set up and revealed during other long term story arcs. The Spider-Verse conflict has been slowing getting established since the Free Comic Book Day Guardians of the Galaxy issue and has touched many other issues and has caused Superior Spider-Man to get 2 more issues after we thought that series was over. Slott loves rebranding established stories and characters and bringing them around full circle, as we saw during The Superior Spider-Man series– lots of tiny tidbits were planted about Spider-Verse starting with the return of Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099) which continues into the new Spider-Man 2099 series. Recently the mini-series “Edge of Spider-Verse” help introduced new Spider totems and lays the groundwork for the big Spider-Man event of 2014.
Which brings us to Amazing Spider-Man #9, where the core of the Spider-Verse story has finally began. This issue is the first essential issue of the Spider-Verse storyline. Everything in this issue is very important to the overall story; we see Morlun and his family, the inheritors, travel to other universes with the intent of killing the Spider-Man of those worlds, Peter and Silk get saved by Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham. It’s very exciting to see so many versions of Spider-Man running across multiple universes scared for their lives and having to gather more and more versions of Spider-Man to try to gather the power to stand against Morlun.
The story is unbelievably well crafted and easy to follow, considering all the universe hopping and all the different Spider-Man versions we have to keep track of. Every version of Spider-Man that’s introduced to us is given a quick blurb to help us stay in touch with who is who and from where they’re from. There is even a funny tagline when Spider Gwen is introduced that got a nice chuckle out of me. Olivier Coipel’s art in this is great to look at. He did a great job creating dark and bleak scenes that goes along with the somber story. Every Spider-Man looks like a war torn soldier and shows the signs of being on their last legs. Each character is drawn to look abused, tired, and run down from all the fighting and from seeing version of themselves murdered in front of them.
Dan Slott loves Spider-Man it is taking all of his Spider-Geek knowledge to hold down this much story. I highly recommend Amazing Spider-Man #9 is the perfect jumping on point for anyone that is at all curious about Spider-Verse and may have missed the Edge of Spider-Verse issues, or any other tie-in issues because this issue has everything you need to catch up. It provides the drama and the suspense to feel invested in the a story where Spider-Man after Spider-Man is murdered, this is the first, of hopefully many, big pay off issues in the Spider-Verse storyline. All the hints and teases start to take form in this story, which is basically a Spider-Man version of a “getting the team together” story. So, check this issue out and get ready for some big adventure with high end art.
Reviewed by: Gabe Bustamantez
(gabe@comicspectrum.com)
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