The Amazing Spider-Man #671 Review

 The race for the cure is reaching its climax, and the Queen’s had enough! Will Spider-Man be able to stop her and the Jackal from contaminating the whole planet with Spider-Creatures?

“SPIDER ISLAND part 5: A New Hope”

Written by Dan Slott

Illustrated by Humberto Ramos

Inked by Carlos Cuevas and Victor Olazaba

Colored by Edgar Delgado

Lettered by VC’s Joe Caramagna

THE PLOT: Reed Richard’s serum is tested on Sanjani Jaffery, and though the Queen attempts to accelerate her mutation, she’s eventually cured. Having lost contact with both Steve Rogers and Jaffery, the Queen panics. Jackal sends Tarantula a.k.a. Kaine to Horizon Labs in order to contaminate the serum and release the Spider-Island virus on a much wider scale.

LONG STORY SHORT: The people at Horizon Labs are visited by Madame Web who tells them to take down their frequency jammers so that she can once again be connected with the Web of Life. The scientists oblige, re-activating Peter’s Spider-Sense. Knocking Kaine into the vat of the cure, Spider-Man is told that the Queen is the mastermind behind it all. Queen herself is enraged and murders the Jackal because of his continuous failure. Madame Web panics because the lack of the frequency jammers have overloaded her precognitive powers, while also strengthening the Queen’s abilities. TO BE CONCLUDED.

MY THOUGHTS: Well…it was better than the last issue.

I’m struggling here because at this penultimate issue in the arc I am so over Spider-Island and am willing to start fresh with  new story. I’m used to my feelings on Slott’s writing and really had no expectations of them when I started reading. The dialogue’s campy, the characterizations are oversimplified, the exposition is less than subtle…it’s all par for the course now.  I can’t hold it against the issue too much because that’s the nature of the run. How do I grade this then? Do I base this on its own merits solely whether I liked them or not? Do I base this on my enjoyment? The answer is my enjoyment should be informed by the issue’s merits, so let’s see what it had to offer.

Right up front, the cover is a bit of  lie. It was a lie in the same way that #669’s cover was kind of a lie, but then again it kind of wasn’t. I suppose It played on fans of Mary Jane’s expectations, as they most certainly saw the cover and instantly assumed her using her newfound Spider-Powers would maintain the bulk of the issue. Not so much. Going back to all of the covers of Spider-Island, they are very 90s in the sense that they do reflect an aspect of what goes on in the issue but not in specifics. #667 didn’t have the heroes dress up as Spider-Man, Peter didn’t battle the Jackal in #668, the fight with the Shocker was under different circumstances than what the cover suggested in #669, J. Jonah Jameson wasn’t crusading as a Spider-Mayor in #670, and Mary Jane gets all of two pages in the opening scene before we move on to the plot. This isn’t the most damning of offenses, but it is explotative in a sense. It’s either Slott or Ramos messing with the reader in increasingly bigger ways. Seeing how the guy can interact with fans online, it influences my concern over the cover teases.

The scene itself I disliked, mainly because Mary Jane is talking aloud to herself and no one else while she’s battling monsters. It really is ridiculous, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why Slott prefers to write this way. Narration captions are so much more personal and convey the person’s inner thought more seriously than speaking out loud to no one but themselves. Speaking out loud to one’s self is only good for Shakespearian style soliloquies, and since Mary Jane isn’t Lady Macbeth, it doesn’t work. The content of her speech is really annoying and doesn’t ring true either. “Hate to admit it but I get it now. I really get it.” It’s going off the idea of OMIT where she told Peter she couldn’t take the danger of being with him, but it flies in the face of every time she dealt with it before, as OMIT did as well. I understand the rushes of adrenaline she has to be feeling, so the general idea of that line makes sense. For her to say “Hate to admit it” just makes her sound petty, as though she had to put up with Peter’s sense of altruism for all those years and never had a clue before about why he remained Spider-Man. Especially when you factor in the fact that Peter’s sense of responsibility if what attracts Mary Jane to him, this scene renders itself mis-characterized for MJ.

It’s also troubling artwise. I’ve said before how inconsistent Ramos has come off to me in Spider-Island, especially considering that I am a fan of his style. This issue I felt was one of his weaker ones again, but I had a hard time figuring out exactly why. Then I read the credits and saw that he had two inkers, which is always a recipe for trouble for a penciller. Multiple inkers rarely work, and if we’re going by chronological credit with the story, then I’d blame Victor Olazaba for the second half where I really couldn’t tell how the fight between Spider-Man and Tarantula was going. As it is, it’s hard to see for the most part. From what I gather, the fight scenes use a different inker than the scenes of normality, thus making it very difficult to read. I’m glad it does seem to be the multiple inkers, because I’ve never had a problem with discerning a Humberto Ramos fight scene before.

The issue in broad strokes is similar to last issue and the arc as a whole. The exposition really drags it down, not because it’s exposition but because of how unnatural and cliche’d it feels. Mr. Fantastic thanks Sanjani for volunteering to be the first test subject for the cure as he is administering it to her, which is the first we learn of this. Ideally he wouldn’t be saying that unless no one told him who would be the guinea pig until the very last second. Firestar and Gravity exposit to Spider-Man that they know how to fight bad guys due to their respective times served of superhero teams and holding positions of power in the universe, as though Spider-Man doesn’t know that already. Imagine reading a Batman comic and a gang war has broken out. Batman swings toward the Batmobile in order to regroup his thoughts and swings over Robin and Nightwing fighting gangsters. He asks if they need any help, and the two respond with the following:

Nightwing: “We have this! Know why? Because we’re not rookies. I’ve been a Teen Titan, an Outsider and a Justice League member.”

Robin: “Yeah, and I was trained by the League of Assassins. Got that? The League of Assassins.”

Batman: “‘Nuff said. Carry on!”

It just begs the question if the scene was done for anything other than exposition purposes, and exposition should always be doubly written. Otherwise it comes off as awkward, plain and simple.

The best part of the issue for me was the fight between Spidey and Tarantula/Kaine, but I had issues with it as well. Spider-Man knows that the Jackal could have a hand in this somehow, yet he wonders why he’s already signed into his lab. Really? He’s really not going to deduce what’s happening? He can still be gotten the drop on, but him saying “Huh, that’s weird!” makes him look like a moron. Him showing off, not using, showing off his newfound Kung-Fu was dumb. Like Mary Jane at the beginning, stop talking and punch the guy already! “I have moves! Moves like you’ve never seen!” Shut up and get the job done. Wasting your breath while trying to stop a monster from infecting the world with a mass virus is not conducive to victory.

Going back to what I had said earlier about Slott playing on the readers’ expectations, I was genuinely surprised in this issue twice. Once when it was revealed that Morbius was #6. That was legitimately unexpected, and it’s rare that comics can catch you off guard these days so that was cool to see. I also liked how low key of a scene it was, though I laughed at loud that he had his 1970s costume on. The other scene which got me was when Spidey regained his Spider Sense. There’s been discussion on the fact that Slott full-out lied to people by stating in interviews that as long as he was writing ASM, Peter would never regain his Spider-Sense. Honestly, I would do the same thing if I was a comic book writer. I’m not going to let readers  start expecting things, and in this Age of Information that we currently are all in, it’s easy for expectations to not be met when we can guess the outcome to so many stories. If Peter loses his Spider-Sense again, it would be weird but I was honestly glad to see it return in a clinch, even if it was deus ex machina-ish.

There is a bit of a plot hole with Kaine at the end. Both Spidey and Jackal say out loud that the pool of cure would remove someone’s Spider-Powers. Kaine falls in, returns to his clone-y self but somehow says that he still has his powers. I hope that will be explained, otherwise it’s a big hole. Kaine’s now the front-runner for the new Scarlet Spider, and I wouldn’t mind that in the least. But this contrivance of him keeping his powers needs to be explored ASAP.

The ending was mixed. On the one hand I loved seeing the Jackal definitively fry in front of the page. When the Queen showed irritation at his bungling I literally thought to myself “You have no reason to keep him around anymore, just kill him.” And she did! She killed him! That was awesome. There is a sense of resolution lost in that Peter never squarely faced off against Warren, but the guy is so annoying, I could care less. Although there are still a number of Warren clones running around…anyway. The last panel was very corny, very comic booky and questionable. The Queen now “has the powers of a God!” How many times has that card been played? I’m sure she’ll get a slap in the face in the next issue and either die or be sent to supervillain jail. There’s only so many ways that Spider-Island can end now, that I wish my excitement for the next issue were seeing how it resolves rather than watching it resolve on the fact that it’ll be over.

2.5/5 webs.