Secret Wars: Spider-Verse #2 - Quick Review

Written by Mike Costa. Art by Andre Araujo. Color by Rachelle Rosenberg.
Published by Marvel Comics: June 10th, 2015
Rating: 3.5/5
Worth Your 3.99?: If you've already bought issue #1 and love these characters, yes, but otherwise wait to see how the rest of the story unfolds and go for the trade.

We pick up with Gwen Stacy Spider-Woman right where we left off, discovering a secret room in Oscorp with a most epic hostage, The Amazing Spider-Ham. Caught by Norman Osbourne, Gwen must now figure out what to do, kidnap Norman to get some answers or rescue Peter Porker?

THE GOOD
This team of Spiders (or the Sinister Six as Osbourne refers to them) is just an awesome line up. Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham, Spider-UK, Anya Corazon, and Spider-India... I'll basically read anything that brings this team together. The variety of backgrounds and voices at work while they are all still Spiders is just plain fun. It's serious fun reading some of this dialogue out loud as I go (my brooklyn accent for Spider-Man Noir is pretty solid and my Indian accent for Paviitr Prabhakar is solid, but my English accent for Spider-UK is pretty atrocious I'm sure).

I especially enjoyed Noir in this book. Costa has effectively given him a sort of Punisher-esque attitude and it's great played against the non-violence of Gwen and the others.

It's also cool seeing some familiar faces around. Carnage, Tombstone, and the (actual) Sinister Six gathering at the tail of the book are fun. Seeing familiar faces in Secret Wars is fun, although the first two seemed to be interchangeable name checks of Spider-villains.




THE BAD
This story here is just kind of... meh. Not bad really, but nothing exciting. By the end, I felt like I hadn't gotten a full story, just a piece of one. I know it's just one chapter of a larger story, but I align comic issues with TV episodes more than chapters of a book. While it's fine (and I want) the titles to have arcs that span issues, each individual book should also have some sort of arc contained in it's pages. This is where Spider-Verse #2 falls short. It's the middle of the story and that's kind of it.

Other than finding each other (which they kind of did in issue #1), not a lot happens. Nothing new is revealed, characters don't grow or change, or even begin to find anything new about themselves. They just restate the situations we kind of figured out they were in from issue #1. Getting from 'Gwen rescues Ham' to 'team forms' to 'Sinister Six appears' could have happened in half as many pages as it does here.

OVERALL THOUGHTS
Cool characters at play here and some great moments. But without driving the story forward, it falls into just a filler issue. Getting the team together means that next few issues should hopefully pick up the pace a little bit and turn this into something really cool.

Pull File: June 10th, 2015

Five chapters of Secret Wars, 3 Spider books. So many books I can't wait to read this week! Here's what I'm reading. Look for updates and some full reviews to come later today.

Secret Wars: Spider-Verse #2 - A middle chapter of a decent Spider story. Unfortunately doesn't drive the story forward much and felt like a filler chapter in a story only four issues long.

Secret Wars: 2099 #2 - The creepy dystopian world of 2099 continues to get creepier, as the corrupt Avengers 2099 mystery builds. Who is out to kill Captain America?

Secret Wars: 1602: Witch Hunter Angela #1 - Definitely a cool little kingdom to explore if you like Shakesperean era drama that involves superpowers. More fun revelations of the 616 versions of certain characters, keeps this fun.

Secret Wars: Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps #1 - In the to-read pile.

Secret Wars: Inhumans: Attilan Rising #2 - The more I read of this series, the more important I think Secret Wars story. Also (no spoilers), there's a very popular new Inhuman who makes an appearance in a most badass way...

Silk #5 - Another great chapter in this series. Stacey Lee returns and Silk's story take a big step forward. Left me eagerly anticipating the next chapter.

Spider-Gwen #5 - A chapter of Spider-Gwen's story that continues to build the drama in her life in great ways. This might be the strongest issue yet.

Secret Wars: Giant-Size Little Marvel #1 - Review

Written by Skottie Young. Art by Skottie Young. Colors by Jean-Fracois Beaulieu
Published by Marvel Comics, 6/3/2015
Rating: 5/5
Worth the $3.99?: Yes. Absolutely, yes.

This may have been one of the funniest week's of Marvel books in recent memory. The star of the show was Skottie Young's "Giant Size Little Marvel." What was it? Basically a Saturday morning cartoon version of the Marvel Universe.

It even starts out with a opening tune that sets up the Kingdom's place in the Battleworld (you can bet I sang it out loud as I was reading) and keeps that absurd tune throughout.
Where the original Avengers vs X-Men involved fights, death battles, and an all an out violent match between Marvel's two premiere super-teams, this story has the Avengers and the X-Men going head to head.... to win customers for their food carts. It's basically  a one upsmanship contest between Captain America and Cyclops.

This book is basically the most self-referential Marvel story ever written. It comes down to the details. Daredevil orders the "Diablo Nachos" (while facing the wrong direction, of course). Deadpool and Spider-Man complain that the Storm pulled off a "make it rain joke" even though Spider-Man thought they "were the funny ones." And Tony Stark meets the new kid, Spider-Gwen, but gets called out by her on how it's creepy for a kid to have a goatee.

And I would be remiss if I didn't give Mr.
Young credit for the high quality of the bad puns throughout the issue. Cyclops gets an eye pun and Thor gets some "hammer time." It's fantastic.

But perhaps the part where my gut was most busted, was the last page. They stop when they see that someone new has moved into "the old Richard's house." At this point, the two teams stop to see if the new kids on the block are (as Wolverine puts it) "Mutants? Science Freaks?" At this point they spin around to see....  the Maximov twins. And as Cyclops and Captain America both call "dibs" I wet myself a little bit from laughter. It's that voice of being self-aware of the audience (and their knowledge of the comics and movie versions of these characters) that really made this book shine.

One moment worth noting in terms of the larger Secret Wars. Across all the books that I've been able to read, there has been a distinctive lack of the Fantastic Four. Thanks to the main Secret Wars story (**SPOILERS FOR ISSUE 3 AHEAD**) we know where the 616 Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Reed Richards are, but we've seen no alternate versions of these characters or Doom. In this safe little world, the Richards' house has been abandoned (presumably for a while since it's referred to as "the old Richard's house") so they're not here either. Was that something Doom did? Did he round them all up? Kill them? It stands to reason that he would want to snuff out his biggest rivals and so this line created an odd darkness in an otherwise lighthearted book.

BOTTOM LINE

This book is funny. It's well written, drawn in a great silly style that we've gotten used to after seeing Skottie Young's drawing grace the variants of basically every book in the Marvel catalogue. If you're up for something that doesn't take itself seriously in any way, shape, or form, then this book is for you.

Secret Wars: Spider-Verse #1 - Review

Written by Mike Costa. Art by Andre Araujo and Rochelle Rosenberg
Published by Marvel Comics: May 20th, 2015.
Rating: 3.75/5

Spider-Verse (the original one) is one of my favorite stories in the past few years. So, naturally, if Marvel was going to use it's previous events as titles for it's various side stories, Spider-Verse was a logical place to go.
comic book events of all time. So, yeah, I was going to buy this book from the moment it was announced. Looking back, the various spiders that showed up from across the Multiverse seems like a pretty clear test run for Secret Wars. So many examples of the same basic superhero, boiled down and applied to different characters. It was brilliant and it was

With Dan Slott covering the "Last Days of Silver Surfer" and "Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows" runs for Secret Wars, Marvel turned to Mike Costa (writer of Spider-Verse's "Scarlett Spiders" books) to give us a tale following a team made up the most popular Spiders to come out of the event. Billy Braddock aka Spider-UK, Anya Corazon (Spider-Girl), Paviitr Prabhakar (Spider-Man India), Spider-Man Noir (who doesn't appear in this issue except as a photo), Peter Porker the Amazing Spider-Ham, and, easily the most popular new spider, Spider-Gwen. Sound like an awesome team? You're damn right.

The story really focuses in on Spider-Gwen, who since Spider-Verse has had her own very successful solo book. What I really latched on to in this book, like many in this week's wave of Secret Wars titles is how it's providing us just a few more details into what it's like to be a resident of Battleworld. Though we're not sure exactly which realm this is in (my money's on Arachnia), it's definitely a convergence of Spider-themed characters.

The bigger reveal is that most of the people of this world appear to have had their memories wiped, though no entirely. This is absolutely our Gwen Stacy, but she doesn't remember anything about the stories we've seen her in. Not the original Spider-Verse, not her recent battles with Lt. Castle, not the Vulture, not even her band The Mary Janes. Tunes slowly seep through her subconcious, so we know those memories are buried in there, the question will be what it takes for those to come out.

We also run into Pavittr, who has a similar memory loss, though as a scientist, he's trying to figure out why he has vague memories of these people. Paviitr and Gwen show an interesting flip from their emotional places in Spider-Verse. Paviitr was originally seen facing an existential crisis because of how he felt like a pale shadow of Peter Parker-616, whereas Gwen was confident and sure of herself in battle. Fighting was something she knew and she was able to act along that. Here their roles are somewhat reverse. Paviitr is at home when he's studying something, trying to reason out the science, but outside of kicking some butts Gwen doesn't know what to do with herself. Add to that the fact that the universe mashup results in her visiting her own grave and it's definitely her turn for an existential crisis.

It was nice seeing Anya and Spider-UK still swinging about together, since we didn't know what happened to them after Spider-Verse, other than that they were traveling together to help right the Inheritors wrongs (also an interesting addition that Spider-UK doesn't have spider-senses, which I hadn't realized before)

The ending has a nice twist, although since Peter Porker is on the cover, it's not really that big of surprise. Gwen discovering that Mayor Osborn has deemed this Spider-Team the Sinister Six, which is an awesome little snippet. Just more evidence of the fun the writers can have with these books.

As for the art, its nice. It's simple in a good way, not overpowering the characters or what's going on in the scene.

Overall, the book was really only as strong as the characters. I was excited to see each and every one of them again, and that made it fun to read. That being said, the story here was a little inconsistant at best. It seemed more like just a series of cool encounters and reminders of who these characters are and where they are mentally on Battleworld as opposed to a cohesive story. That said, you can tell Costa is building something and there was enough here that I will definitely be back for issue #2.

Also: there's a mini at the back where we get to see Spider-Ham in a tale "Pig in the City" (because of course). It's cute story, in which, at one point, Peter is a food photographer and blogger. Yes, they went there.... because they could. While I give main story 3.5, this story I would give 4.5/5, which is why the rating at the top has that insane 3.75/5.