Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 1) #551 Review

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #551
TITLE: “Lo, There Shall Come A Menace!!”
WRITER: Marc Guggenheim
ARTIST: Salvador Larroca
COLORIST: Stephane Peru

PLOT:

Spidey evades the fuzz with Jackpot’s help, and they direct the pursuit towards the Apollo, where councilwoman Parfrey screams in Menace’s clutches. An aerial battle ensues, and a rookie mistake by Jackpot cause’s Menace’s stray glider to veer into and kill the councilwoman! Jackpot cries and Menace slinks away.

Last issue, Jackpot revealed her real name was “Sara Ehret”, so Spidey visits Ms. Ehret’s white-pages-listed address to cheer her up. The woman he meets there denies being Jackpot and seems genuinely surprised at Spider-Man’s arrival. When our hero presses her, she says, “I’m sorry but … you really should keep out of this” and shuts Spidey out. The webhead looks perplexed.

THOUGHTS:

The idea for a Mary Jane look-alike super-heroine really insulted me when last year’s Swing Shift introduced it. It reeked of something out of an eleventeen-year-old’s fan fiction, and it also threatened to lose what makes MJ such an interesting supporting character. She completes Peter Parker and keeps him human. Turning her into another clown in tights destroys a lot of what anchors the main character to reality.

Now it looks like Jackpot is someone separate from Mary Jane, or, if she is Mary Jane, then something unexpectedly complicated is going on. I sincerely hope she isn’t Mary Jane, not because I still find the idea insulting, but because Jackpot is such an interesting character on her own merits that I want BOTH her and Mary Jane to be regular fixtures in the series.

Parfrey’s killing shattered Jackpot’s naive romanticism of the Super Hero lifestyle, so she’s the only character to undergo any sort of development since One More Day. Kudos to Guggenheim for injecting some emotion into what has so far been a soulless romp.

Then there’s Menace. Who is he? Who cares? I’ve never seen a more generic Spider-Man bad guy. I wish his first arc did more to establish his personality and motivations, because Guggenheim gives us nothing to latch onto with this guy. He doesn’t even seem like much of a physical threat to Spider-Man.

The action in this issue would have been more exciting if Larroca had better conveyed a sense of scope and altitude. Figures against a plain sky backdrop don’t accomplish that. Another storytelling glitch occurs when Spidey somehow escapes between panels from three cops with guns leveled point-blank at his skull. I wish I knew how he managed that.

FAVORITE QUOTE:

SPIDER-MAN: “I bet Captain America doesn’t have these kinds of problems. Then again, he’s dead.”

RATING:

3.5 webheads out of 5. The past three issues didn’t tell a complete story, so I can’t in good conscience declare this arc better than Slott’s, but I do enjoy Guggenheim’s writing style more. He nails Spider-Man’s voice and mannerisms better than pretty much every other writer from the past decade, and that earns him some credit no matter how lame his pet villain is.

REVIEWED BY: CrazyChris