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.




Whose your favorite Spider from this issue? Is your favorite missing? Will you continue reading this series? Sound off in the comments!