CREDIT: Marvel
Rating: 3.5/5 – Great Art, but a Strange New Feel.
By ComicSpectrum senior reviewer Shawn Hoklas.
Silk has taken a strange turn. Since the “Spider-Women”crossover with Spider-Woman and Spider-Gwen, this book hasn’t felt the same to me. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just a shift in tone that feels different from what’s come before even though we’re getting the same creative team of Robbie Thompson and Tana Ford. In issue number twelve, Silk and her two friends have entered the Negative Zone to try and find her parents. That doesn’t sound so strange on its own, but the fact that Cindy Moon would take her friends who have no powers whatsoever into a dangerous alien dimension is just one example of where the writing had me scratching my head.
Let’s talk about what’s great in this issue first, and that’s the art. With each issue Tana Ford works on, I’m liking her art more and more. Her style is very organic with plenty of soft edges. Her character work and backgrounds are wonderful in this issue and her style works for the Negative Zone. There’s a great opening double-page splash that has Silk and her friends walking over a path of floating rocks with an eerie green background and kirby-dots filling the empty space. It really is a fantastic piece of art. The group eventually comes across a fantasy world within the Negative Zone where Ford gets to draw knights, dragons and more, so she definitely got to show off her range.
While the art was great, the fact that there is a fantasy world full of dragons within the Negative Zone also seemed strange, but it doesn’t stop there. Add in the fact that her friends seemed not only OK with it, but excited about, and it felt even stranger to me. There’s also a part in the story where Silk is able to weave costumes out of her webbing for her two friends. If the costumes looked like webbing that’d be one thing, but it looked like normal clothing with insignias and all. It just seemed as though if she could do this, she’d almost have powers similar to a Clayface or Chameleon since the created costumes were so real looking.
I know this is a comic, but there were several things about it that broke my suspension of disbelief and made the whole thing seem unrealistic, even though I’m fully aware that it’s a comic. With Silk number twelve the direction has changed, not necessarily for the worse, but not for the better for me as a reader. I’ll have to see where this book goes in the next issue or so to see if it’s something I still want to read. I’m hoping it gets back on track since I don’t want to miss out on Ford’s art.
Reviewed by: Shawn Hoklas
(shawn@comicspectrum.com)
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