Welcome True Believers and Spiderophiles, as I, your great Clone Saga Apoligist/Spider-Girl fan am now embarking up
on my latest endeavor in reviewing, known to you as the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN FAMILY title, the officially official home of the newly titled, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-GIRL title. But that my friends will not start until Issue Five in March. Until then, I’m taking the reigns over from my esteemed friend, George Berryman. Now, until this point, this was the only title that was not regularly reviewed on this site. Berryman, to his credit, wrote the review out of protest, in fact, so much so that he personally sent the BND story pages back to Steve Wacker. I do want to address that I did indeed encourage him to do so. But in type of book this is, we’re getting all of the corners of the Spider-Man Universe, something that few other characters that are a single character, get. It’s something very unique to the Marvel. Thusly, I will insure that this title will be reviewed completely objectively. So no Mr. Wacker, I will NOT be send you my clipped pages of the BND’verse story. I will also be splitting the stories up. I also will largely not review the reprints in the back of the book. Why? It’s simply because those books should be better reviewed elsewhere. Besides, who wants to listen to me gush over SSM 200, or badger over ASM 300. So without further ado, I give you,
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #3
“The Punch”
J.M. DeMatteis
Val Semeiks
“Mr. & Mrs. Spider-Man: Common Ground”
Tom DeFalco
Todd Nauck
“Amazing Spider-Ma’am”
Abby Denson
Colleen Coover
“Bridge and Tunnel”
Moore
Semeiks
Story 1: This story is set in the early days, when Peter really wanted to punch out the ever loving bully Flash, who eventually became his best friend mind you, and how it was effective in the real world. Peter Basically knocks the hell out of a mugger, who is a lowlife who is inspired by Spidey after he sees him save countless amount of people.
THOUGHTS: This story wasn’t much. I love JMD. He’s great writer. But if you see the story at the end of the issue, SSM 200, and you read this, you cannot tell me that you’d automatically think it’s the same guy. Granted, this guy has not written spidey since the dark days of the Reboot, but it seemed really really flat to me, and I wasn’t impressed. Largely, I think that this story gets a D from me.
Story 2: Aleksei Sytsevich AKA the Rhino runs into Peter and MJ at the Hospital while MJ and Peter are waiting for May to get seen by the doctor. Peter goes and tries to prevent a fight on his hands. Rhino’s aunt is sick and he’s trying to get money. He even tells Peter not to tell Spider-Man, which we all know that Peter is Spidey. We also get a backhistory to Rhino. We also get more and more the feeling that dispite where these two come from, you also get the feeling that we may see Horn’d one in SSG soon.
THOUGHTS: I don’t know what to think about this story. On one hand, I went back and read the big guys bio, and got two different names. Alex O’Hirn is the other alias that he’s used, but trusting DeFalco, we get his real name here. One thing that troubled me is that Alex’s grasp on the English language. It’s probably one of the most inconsistent things that we see with any character in the Spider-Verse. So, I’m trying to give him a pass, but I can’t shake these two glaring issues. To me, it wasn’t spectacular, and therefore it get’s a C.
Story 3: Aunt May knows Peter’s Spidey. She uses his costume to scare Burglars. Rhino makes another appearance, somehow up in the air, and complains that Peter smells like his grandma.
THOUGHTS: If I were to clip out anything from this issue, it would be this story, mailing it was a simple note:
‘Dear Marvel:
Please remove this garbage from my comic. That is all.’
Epic. Failure. F.
Story 4: Bridge and Tunnel is your simple story that is set in the BND’verse. Basically it was him chasing a thug though the subways late at night. It ends when Peter saves the said thug and helps him to get to the Police. Or something like that.
THOUGHTS: This story was strictly filler. It seems like it was thrown in at the very last second to fill pages. It’s not very good in my opinion, as there wasn’t much room for anything to happen. But in the case of filler, I give it a C.
The Reprint of the month is Spectacular Spider-Man 200.
That get’s an A.
Overall the Art was good thoughout. So the Artwork in the book get’s a solid B.
FINAL GRADE: Adding up all that is in this book, the ‘MA’AM’ story drung this book down.
Completely, I give this a C+ for a couple of reasons:
1)Two solid C’s give this book some lift.
2)The First story is a D. It was boring. So we’re sitting at a D+ overall.
3)After the Failure that is the Ma’am, we’re at a F.
4)The final new story is a C, so we’re still at a D.
5)Spec. 200 is A. Period, so we’re at a C.
6)The artwork is good. On that basis alone, we’re at a C+
Not a great start for the ASMF tenure, but I’m looking forward to 4 and 5. Cheers folks!
Spideydude.
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Again it’s made of SUCK.
And Met’s, I’ll try next ish to find a different scoring system. But this Ma’am story that makes me hurt inside, it drug the book way way down.
Amazing Spider-Ma’am…
… good lord.
Personally, I think scores should reflect the overall enjoyment of the reading experience. If “Ma’am” is in the package, then it is part of that experience and should factor into the scoring process. That doesn’t mean I agree that averaging individual scores is the best way to do it, but if there’s a story in there that makes reading what you bought from cover to cover less enjoyable, then I think lowering the overall score is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Considering that Marvel usually charges three bucks for 22 pages worth of story, shouldn’t a book with a much higher pages per dollar ratio be graded by a different standard than the average of its content?
It seems unfair to me that this issue would have a higher grade if the “Ma’am” story were replaced entirely by advertisements, as without it, the book still has a better pages per dollar ratio than the usual issue of Amazing Spider-Man.
JM De Matteis is worth reading.
“‘Dear Marvel:
Please remove this garbage from my comic. That is all.’
Epic. Failure. F.”
… this is why we love you. Heh. =)
I’m going to have to disagree with Spideydude on this review. I really, really like the JMD story. It was basically an untold tale, but I like the them about the first punch and it’s impact. JMD is just a great writer and hope he continues to write more Spidey short stories.
The Mr. & Mrs Spider-Man was a cute little story. I do agree that the Rhino seemed off in this.
Spec #200 I hadn’t read in a good 10 plus years and I didn’t remember it that well. It’s an “A” all the way around. However, I now find it amazing that Pete wouldn’t question Harry’s return sooner.
For a second, I thought “maybe I should lift the ban and pick up this title”. Thanks for curing me, `dude. I’ll have to pull out Spec200 with it’s holofoil cover. OOOOOOOOOOOO, sparkly!