Spider-Gwen, v. 1: Greater Responsibility

Collects: Spider-Gwen v. 2 #1-6 (2015-6)

Released: May 2016 (Marvel)

Format: 136 pages / color / $17.99 / ISBN: 9780785199595

What is this?: Gwen fights Lizards and learns what has happened to Peter’s Lizard serum; ol’ pal Harry Osborn returns, seeking revenge for Peter’s death.

The culprits: Writer Jason Latour and artists Robbi Rodriguez and Chris Visions

I didn’t like the first Spider-Gwen book, Spider-Gwen, v. 0: Most Wanted?, but I wanted to give the next book a chance to see if the series improved. Unfortunately, Spider-Gwen, v. 1: Greater Power isn’t an improvement.

Given how well received the series is, though, I had to figure out: what is it that made me dislike the series so much?

The easy answer is still the color palette. I find Spider-Gwen a series that’s physically hard to look at: the pinks, purples, and greens that dominate the book are unpleasant on the eyes. I’m not sure what colorist Rico Renzi is going for in the book. Is he using the colors usually associated with villains to show us this is a world gone wrong? Is he trying to undermine Gwen’s heroism with villain colors? Or is this a battered world, and the shades of bruised flesh are the only hues that can properly portray it?

The story itself doesn’t give an indication of which of those is correct. Instead, writer Jason Latour gives us a world and a hero who are enigmas.

And that’s my main problem. The hook for Spider-Gwen is a classic What If? hook: What if the radioactive spider had bitten Gwen Stacy instead of Peter Parker? What would be different then? Apparently, the answer is, “The world would have a Spider-Woman instead of a Spider-Man.” Not much else changes, and I understand how for some people this is enough. The reasons may vary from un-refrigerating Gwen Stacy to increasing the presence of women heroes in comics to merely wanting a beginning-of-career Spider-Man-type book or something else I haven’t thought of and could never think of, because liking is a much more complicated and yet simple (private) emotion that we generally believe.

And that’s fine. It’s more than fine, in fact. I hope Spider-Gwen lasts as long as its fans want it to. But what I’ve seen in two trade paperbacks (covering about twelve issues) is not enough to retain my interest.

Everything feels like a mere reshuffling of continuity; the elements of Spider-Man are just redealt, with Peter and Gwen switching spots. Spider-Woman is a vigilante hero whose secret identity jeopardizes her only guardian, whom she leans on for moral guidance and emotional support. She runs into the same villains Spider-Man did: the Vulture, Kingpin, and Frank Castle in the previous book, the Lizard and Green Goblin in this one. Harry Osborn’s grief leads him to become the Green Goblin. Jean DeWolff and George Stacy are still cops. (Ben Grimm is one as well, which … sure, OK, that’s a little different.) Even the trade’s title is there to remind readers of Spider-Man.

Sure, Gwen has her drumming, although she doesn’t do that in this book; that sets her apart from Peter, who was too busy for hobbies. But that raises questions about what she’s doing with her time. She’s not in school, and her job lasts a negative amount of time.

What has changed in Spider-Woman’s world? Not much. Tony Stark never gave up his warmongering, and he has a coffee franchise called Starkbucks, which is not a good name at all. (It just emphasizes the company is a rich man getting richer, whereas the coffee company was at least named for the chief mate who tried to avert the Pequod’s disastrous end in Moby Dick.) Frank Castle is a cop instead of the Punisher. Captain America is a black woman, but she still gained her powers during World War II, missed most of the intervening time, and reports to a one-eyed spymaster she served with during World War II. The Kingpin is Matt Murdock instead of Wilson Fisk, although that might be because Fisk is in prison. (In #5, Latour and artist Chris Vision even refer to the recent Mark Waid / Chris Samnee run by giving Murdock a “I’m not the Kingpin” shirt, which recalls Murdock’s “I’m not Daredevil” shirt in Waid / Samnee’s run. I’m not against references to other stories; hell, I love them, and celebrate them. But the story making the allusions has to differentiate itself from those stories somehow.)

The only new character is Bodega Bandit, a hold-up man who looks like the Hamburglar. Well, I suppose Gwen traversing universes to talk to her mentor, the main Marvel Universe’s Spider-Woman, is different as well, but I try to block out anything that refers to Spider-Verse, a crossover I hated. Also, “dimensional travel” doesn’t really fit in with the rest of Spider-Gwen, which is a book about a street-level crimefighter who plays in a band and hangs out with friends when she’s not web-slinging.

The new Captain America has the most worrying implications. I admit: a black, female Captain America is a nice twist, and it can work. But we never see the world around this character change. Would America have accepted a black, female supersoldier during World War II? I have my doubts. I also doubt an African-American woman would have been allowed to be a candidate for the role of Captain America, given that neither women nor African-Americans were allowed to serve with white men. I have even more doubts that a newsreel narrator would use the phrase “ready to fight for freedom at home, abroad” while describing her; the line is too close to the Double V campaign (“Double Victory — at Home, Abroad”) used by African-Americans during World War II. (The campaign wasn’t exactly popular among white folks, as you might imagine.) So this world must be different than ours — different, and at least in one facet, better. But we never see any evidence that it’s different in the book; most of the characters are still white. This is the same ol’ world.

The best parts of book are the mere glimpses of Gwen, Peter, and Harry before Peter dies. The dynamic is something we haven’t seen before, and Peter’s bitterness, his desire to be more than he is, is heartbreaking. Harry’s acceptance of who he is is encouraging, even if it’s undermined by his future actions. But those interactions take up less than four of the book’s 136 pages.

What is the timeline for this book, anyway? The Spider-Woman task force is geared up to search for Spider-Woman because of Peter’s death, which seems to be a recent event. But Harry Osborn, who was there the night of Peter’s death, has been gone for two years. I’m beginning to think George Stacy was replaced as head of the task force because he’s not very good at his job. And whether it’s been weeks or years, Gwen has been completely unable to protect her secret identity, which means someone should be ending up dead or arrested soon.

I haven’t talked about the plot of Greater Power, which mostly involves further use of the serum that turned Peter into the Lizard, or the art, which is by Robbi Rodriguez (#1-4 and 6) and Chris Visions (#5). I didn't like either of them, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that after two trades, it’s clear Spider-Gwen has the legs of the average What If? story: entertaining (at least for a while) if you buy into the continuity tweak, but quickly becoming dull if you don’t have an attachment to that change. Like Mutant X, for those of you who remember it, but with more coherence.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Green Goblin: A Lighter Shade of Green

Collects: Green Goblin #1-13, Web of Spider-Man #125, Spectacular Spider-Man #225, and Amazing Scarlet Spider #2 (1995-6)

Released: August 2011 (Marvel)

Format: pages / color / $39.99 / ISBN: 9780785157571

What is this?: Daily Bugle intern Phil Urich runs across some Green Goblin equipment and tries to decide whether to help himself or others.

The culprits: Writer Tom DeFalco and Terry Kavanagh and artists Scott McDaniel, Joshua Hood, and others

Marvel’s decision to reprint the 1995-6 Green Goblin series in Green Goblin: A Lighter Shade of Green was a curious one. Theoretically, with the Green Goblin being Spider-Man’s archnemesis, a Green Goblin series should have been important. It wasn’t, though; it was a mid-‘90s series about a newspaper intern, Phil Urich, who stumbles across the Osborn Goblin gear. Green Goblin wrapped up just before Onslaught gave Marvel the freedom to do some excellent work with new or lesser-known concepts (Thunderbolts, Deadpool). Neither the writer, Tom DeFalco, nor the main artist, Scott McDaniel, are “hot” or “new” or “critic’s darlings.” As a final nail in the commercial coffin, the character crossed over with the ‘90s Clone Saga.

I suppose Phil becoming the latest Hobgoblin, a recurring villain in Amazing Spider-Man, at the end of 2010 was the impetus for the reprint. Still, that’s a slender thread on which to hang a $40 reprint of a little-remembered, unlamented series like Green Goblin.

Green Goblin is a series that relies heavily its protagonist narrating his thoughts, which is a problem: Phil is a teenager, and when middle-aged white guys write “hip” teenagers, the results always lack verisimilitude. DeFalco seems to have picked up all his teenager dialogue from bad TV shows that were also written by middle-aged white guys. Although Phil does have a distinctive voice, I don’t believe anyone has ever spoken like him in the history of mankind — unless, by chance, some grunting caveman or cavewoman accidentally strung together the same syllables Phil used. I was a teenager in the ‘90s, and I can guarantee none of my friends ever used phrases like “Scarlet really ups the gear” or “she’s mint, sexy, and all that!” I didn’t either — or at least I don’t remember sounding like that. Might explain my social life if I did say those sorts of things. Slammin’!

A second problem with Phil’s narration is that Phil is not an intrinsically likeable person. Phil is one of those slackers DeFalco had heard so much about, a college dropout working as an intern for his uncle, Ben Urich, at the Daily Bugle. Having dropped out of college, Phil doesn’t know what he’s going to do with his life, and when he gets the Green Goblin equipment, he’s not sure how he wants to use it. He doesn’t instinctually aid others, but he usually ends up being helpful. He has vague ideas of gaining fame, acclaim, money, and women, but his plots are badly thought out, and they lack ambition. Also, Phil’s a bit skeevy about the women; he notes when Lynn, the girl he has a crush on, “jiggles into view” and thinks about “all the butter [he] wanted to spread on Lynn.” It’s no surprise that when he gets some money, he spends it on a suit and flowers and expects Lynn to fall into his arms, despite his lack of charm and her general lack of interest in him as anything but a co-worker and source of info.⁹²

DeFalco does a good job choosing sparring partners for Phil to fight, mixing established villains with new ones. Hobgoblin is a no-brainer, considering he was, at the time, the only other living link to the Goblin legacy. Arcade is always a good choice for a beginning hero. Yes, it stretches credibility that Phil would be able to defeat the Rhino early in his career, but in issue #2, the hero needs a victory, and in a battle between two lunkheads, I can buy that the first person with a good idea would win. The new villains are a mixed bag; Angel Face is the most competent and has a real reason to keep after the Green Goblin, and the Steel Slammer has a nice design. Purge, a generic assassin, and Jonathan Gatesworth, a “virtual reality” creator, are forgettable.⁹³

Even beyond DeFalco’s failed attempts to emulate the youth slang of the day, Green Goblin is marked pretty solidly as a ‘90s comic by DeFalco working current events of the comic-book industry into the background. At one point, recurring villain Angel Face robs a tycoon named “Berinutter,” which sounds like DeFalco’s way tweaking the nose of or taking his frustrations out on Isaac Perlmutter, who was chairman at the board at Marvel at the time. DeFalco also makes “Larson Toddsmith” and “Marc Portaccio” the unscrupulous heads of Compuboot, a game company; the names are obvious references to Image Comics founders Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, and Whilce Portacio.

Marvel’s financial situation was worsening at the time, and DeFalco has some opinions on how business and creative pursuits should intersect; in #9, he puts these words into a villain’s mouth: “[We] would be in Chapter 11 if not for [our] financial wizardry and … marketing magic! Creativity is fine … in its place … but the business people transform vague ideas into profits!” Later in the issue, he puts the opposite view into Phil’s mousy potential love interest, Meredith Campbell: “Corporations don’t think like us regular folks! No matter how much profit they generate … it’s never enough!” The joke was on DeFalco, though, as Marvel filed for Chapter 11 in December 1996, a few months after Green Goblin was cancelled.

The book includes three Spider-issues. The best is a crossover between Amazing Scarlet Spider #2 and Green Goblin #3, which is part of the Great Game storyline. Phil gets a crush on the amoral Joystick, who fights in the Great Game, an international gladiatorial contest. Joystick is in town to fight the Scarlet Spider, but her plans are loused up by one of her previous victims, El Toro Negro. DeFalco had an excellent chance to contrast the attitudes of the thrill-seeking Joystick and responsible Scarlet Spider, especially since the Scarlet Spider doesn’t have Spider-Man’s cachet as a moral center of the superhuman community. Instead, DeFalco treads too lightly on the question, having Phil reject Spider-Man’s ethos without seeing his own similarities to Joystick.

Web of Spider-Man #125 and Spectacular Spider-Man #225, which immediately follow Green Goblin #1 in this volume, seem like the traditional attempts to boost a new character’s profile with an appearance in a Spider-book. Unfortunately, the two issues serve as poor attempts at promotion, since the Green Goblin in those books little resembled the one who starred in his own book. Web #125, written by Terry Kavanagh, is the worst offender, as Phil’s motivations for being in the Clone-Saga story are weak at best and nonsensical at worst. Spectacular #225 is written by DeFalco, but Phil’s reasons for being out in costume are not in line with his development in his own series; Phil sees himself on a “grim mission” when he hunts down a man setting fire to homeless people, which is quite heroic for someone who hasn’t decided what to do with his new powers. His inexperience does show in his battles with the villain and Spider-Man, though.

DeFalco keeps bringing up Phil’s struggles with his identity: is he a hero or someone who merely exploits his abilities for personal gain? An ambitious man or slacker? Ladies man or creep? Although Phil arrives at the place you expect him to by the series’ end, it is sometimes hard to follow his developmental path. He eventually overcomes his fear of the neighborhood thug, Ricko the Sicko, but he still fears the Hobgoblin’s wrath. He rejects Lynn not because he finds a woman whom he is more compatible with but because he realizes Lynn isn’t that interested in him. His heroism is motivated as much by a desire to impress Lynn as his nascent conscience, despite advice from Daredevil and Scarlet Spider. Only the Onslaught crisis forces him to answer the questions, and then the series ends.

The primary artist for Green Goblin, Scott McDaniel, has a blocky, exaggerated style that works best in the ‘90s. The Green Goblin costume and mask lends itself to exaggerated touches, and I like the Steel Slammer design, but he has a little trouble with Phil’s quieter moments. (McDaniel’s Pittsburgh youth shows up when he has Phil wear a Steelers jacket, even though Phil’s a fan of the New York Smashers.) McDaniel penciled #1-4, 6-7, and 9-10, leaving a lot of space for fill-in artists. Most of these are unremarkable, with the occasional glitch; for example, Keven Kobasic draws Judge Tomb as a tall, powerful young man with single tufts of blond hair on his head and chin in #5, while McDaniel goes the more clichéd route, depicting Tomb as a small, old man with a fringe of white hair on his head in #6.

Joshua Hood drew the last three issues. Hood’s distorted, elongated faces are off-putting, making the characters look almost deformed. He draws Angel Face’s scars as far more disgusting than McDaniel did, robbing her of some of her humanity (which DeFalco’s writing doesn’t compensate for). In #12, though, his Sentinels aren’t bad, and the final image from that issue is impressive.

Green Goblin grades out as mediocre — not groundbreaking or very memorable, but it’s not offensive either. Poking around these forgotten corners of the Marvel Universe is always its own reward, but on the other hand, it’s not a reward worth paying $40 for (or $30 new at Amazon). If you are an archaeologist of Marvel or ‘90s pop culture, Green Goblin might be worth it if you can find it at a reasonable price. Otherwise, let it go.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Spider-Man: Spider-Hunt

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #432-3, Sensational Spider-Man #25-6, Peter Parker: Spider-Man #88-90, Spectacular Spider-Man #254-6 (1998)

Released: June 2012 (Marvel)

Format: 272 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785160519

What is this?: Spider-Man is hunted for a bounty after being accused of killing a man.

The culprits: Writers Howard Mackie, J.M. DeMatteis, Todd DeZago, and Tom DeFalco and artists John Romita, Jr., Joe Bennett, Tom Lyle, Todd Nauck, and Luke Ross

Spider-Man: Spider-Hunt — as well as Spider-Man: Identity Crisis — came at a strange time for Spider-Man. Between the end of the disastrous Clone Saga but before the almost / soft reboot of the Next Chapter / Chapter One, Marvel had to figure out what to do with Spider-Man. This could not have been an easy task.

For about a year, the Spider office laid low. Aunt May was dead — almost three years dead by the beginning of Spider-Hunt — but that didn’t stop anyone from plugging Mary Jane’s Aunt Anna into a similarly shaped hole. Norman Osborn was back from the dead; obviously, he became Spider-Man’s main adversary, pulling Peter’s strings in costume and at the Daily Bugle, which Osborn has bought into. And Spider-Man kept plugging along.

Spider-Hunt was Spider-Man’s first big crossover after the Clone Saga. The idea is a good one: Osborn, at some point before Spider-Hunt begins, has put a bounty of $1 million on Spider-Man’s head, causing Spider-Man to become the target of amateur and professional bounty hunters. The police join in after Spider-Man is framed for killing a low-level street punk. To make sure Peter can’t stay off the streets, Osborn’s grandson is kidnapped by a non-Osborn Green Goblin. None of those three plots needlessly ratchet up the stakes — the bounty is a normal sort of villainous plot, the frame-up seems like something Osborn would try to increase the pressure on Spider-Man, and the kidnapping is an interesting complication. Dirtying Spider-Man’s reputation works because Osborn is trying to become the hero in their fight; he simultaneously works to salvage his own reputation, threatening Ben Urich to make Ben recant the book that accused Osborn of being the Green Goblin.

The execution of these ideas doesn’t deliver, for several reasons, ranging from the mundane to the intrinsic. Most damning is that Spider-Hunt does not contain a complete story. The bounty is issued before Spider-Hunt begins. I don’t have to see that, but some context or footnotes would be nice; from the dialogue of page #1 of the first issue, it sounds like the bounty — and the “spider hunt” — has been going on for some time. How long? I don’t know. I would rather see Osborn issuing the bounty than the second issue in Spider-Hunt, Spectacular Spider-Man #254; the issue has an awful “Spider-Man confronts his personal demons while under the control of the villain” A plot, but unfortunately it has too many important subplots to excise it from the collection.

More damningly, however, Spider-Hunt does not have a resolution for two of the three parts of the setup. The Spider-Hunt continues after the four-part “Spider-Hunt” storyline and ten-part collection ends: Little Normie is rescued by the end, but Spider-Man still has a price on his head and is still suspected of murder. Spider-Man makes almost no attempt to clear himself in Spider-Hunt, except to briefly consult with Arthur Stacy. He makes no attempt to discover who the murdered man was or to use his press contacts to find anything about the killing. Peter complains he’s “not the world’s greatest detective,” but Spider-Man usually blunders in the right direction with some convenient breaking and entering. I understand Spider-Man is being hunted, but there’s nothing preventing Peter from poking around. I understand that a murder mystery might seem a little complex, something to be avoided after the Byzantine twists of the Clone Saga, but Peter acts like an idiot in Spider-Hunt.

Presumably the murder and bounty plots will be wrapped up in Identity Crisis. The last four issues of Spider-Hunt are a trailer for Identity Crisis, with Spider-Man concealing his identity in some way or another in each issue, consulting with Prowler on new costumes, and unveiling two of the four identities he will use in Identity Crisis.

In any event, there’s not much time to wrap up these plots or any of the subplots, such as the identity of the new Green Goblin or how Punisher gets even with Norman Osborn; the subplots were mainly jettisoned by the time of the Howard Mackie-written relaunch that came later in 1998. (It’s hard to believe that many Spider-fans were optimistic about Howard Mackie writing the two surviving Spider-titles, but I remember it clearly on Usenet and the Web at the time. It took about two months for everything to turn to Spider-shit and for Mackie to forget what “simplified” and “not using past continuity” meant. But I digress.) For those of you wondering who Osborn’s successor as Green Goblin is, keep wondering; we’re meant to think it’s former Hobgoblin suspect Flash Thompson, but it’s never confirmed.

The actual Spider-Hunt is disappointing as well. Most of the people chasing Spider-Man are nitwits with guns — some high-tech guns, sure, but mostly just people who are good with guns. There are exceptions; I have a soft spot for husband-and-wife team Aura and Override, not the least because Aura has the sense to wear a wig to conceal her identity. And the three-way shootout at the end of Spider-Hunt, part 1 (Sensational Spider-Man #25), is kind of neat. But even though Joe Bennett isn’t bad, I wish a more action-adept, established artist had drawn that first double issue. (Which is odd, because in general I enjoy looking at Bennett’s clear, clean art more than John Romita, Jr.‘s grittier, faces-as-series-of-planes work.) And there should have been more of these yahoos getting in each other’s way; it happens once more in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #89 and Spectacular Spider-Man #255, but given that two of the parties are organized crime goons and Punisher, the resulting conflicts seem old hat. There should be mutants and old enemies trying for the reward, Spider Slayers and obscure characters from the past and … well, it’s $1 million. Think big. (No, bigger.)

It’s a crossover, so we get divergent art styles — not as variable as usual, though. Romita, who draws all of the Peter Parker: Spider-Man issues and Amazing Spider-Man #432, is as good as usual; I like Bennett, but his work lacks heft. Tom Lyle (Amazing Spider-Man #433) shows promise but has occasional lapses, especially in faces and women’s chestal regions. Todd Nauck’s style in Sensational Spider-Man #26 is off-putting, with occasional disturbing conceptions of human skeletal structure. Luke Ross has a steady and solid hand on Spectacular Spider-Man, but if I ever see Spider-man with his mask but no shirt again, it will be too soon.

There are moments that I really liked Spider-Hunt. Unfortunately, those moments can’t conceal that this is a half a story in many ways — lacking a payoff and lacking full commitment to hits concept. Paired with Identity Crisis, this might be a fine story, worth rescuing from a time I thought Marvel was trying to forget. Without having read Identity Crisis, though … well, my guess is that it’s skippable.

Rating: <
(2 of 5)