Amazing Spider-Man #795 Review: The Bogenrieder Perspective

Loki– the Sorcerer Supreme! Spider-Man! Poor again! Together they are!… absolutely nothing.

Amazing Spider-Man #795 

“Thread Level Red, Pt 2: The Favor”

Writer: Dan Slott and Christos Gage

Artist: Mike Hawthorne

Inks: Terry Pallot

Colors: Marte Gracia

Editors: Nick Lowe and Devin Lewis

Plot:

It’s poor Peter Parker once again, having freshly broken up with Bobbi Morse and becoming his own man again! However, he receives a summon from the Sanctum Sanctorum at the Daily Bugle. Only there’s a slight twist when Peter arrives as Spider-Man… Wong is replaced by Zelma, and Stephen Strange has been replaced by God of Mischief Loki! (Say it with me, friends! SYNERGY, just in time for Infinity War!) And as somebody who has read the new Doctor Strange, Loki is up to his own shenanigans. Peter, in recalling Mephisto, knocks over a vase full of magical wasps, and the two set out to fix the mess.

In the chaos, Peter learns that his touch is poisonous to the wasps, and saves everybody sans one random guy, including Bobbi and Aunt May, who were having a post-break-up lunch nearby. Peter cashes in his favor from the JMS run and turns back time to save the man who died. As Spider-Man swings off, Loki reveals that he manipulated Spider-Man into releasing the wasps, so that he would cash in his favor and not have it on call in the coming crisis.

Elsewhere, our friend Stormin’ Norman pops open the Carnage Symbiote, and he lets it consume him. However, the Carnage mania consumes him, and the Red Goblin is born, I guess.

Thoughts:

If you pay attention to my reviews, I usually have asides and quips in the mix between the summary of the issue. It’s to provide something funnier than the comics I’m reviewing.

I didn’t provide them this issue because I didn’t care enough to provide anything. It’s telling that when Slott is at his extremes, it’s more entertaining than just plain sloughing through absolutely nothing. Even the art screams painfully mediocre and is painfully a representation of how Slott is just checking boxes out of obligation before he makes his final swing in Go Down Swinging.

There are things to appreciate in this issue. Most notably, drudging through the past to recall the JMS saga and the favor that Loki owed Peter for helping him save his daughter. It’s obscure parts of Spider-Man and bringing them back into relevance that makes one of my favorite pastimes, and while I’ve criticized Slott for doing so in the past, this is a plot thread that’s been kind of dangling over Spider-fans’ heads for years now, and getting some resolution to it is welcoming.

That said, I’m not exactly proud of how Peter used said favor, especially since it would have provided an excellent back-door to restoring the pre-OMD continuity in some capacity. On the other hand, manipulating Spider-Man into saving lives and using said favor for something relatively small scale is in line with what Loki would do, at least as far as I’m concerned. So, at least some characters are written in character.

What utterly baffles me is how quickly Mockingbird is out of the picture. Not only was she abruptly shuffled out of the series in time for Slott to leave the series, but it was the in-universe admission that they have absolutely nothing in common that makes me wonder what the point was when they got together in the wake of Secret Empire. Status quo shift? Just pointless shipping bait? We’ll never know, and while I’m kind of glad, it’s a weird void in the Slott epic that I find absolutely pointless.

The art is… fine. Nothing too offensive, but also nothing to write home about. Regardless, it kind of ties into the rest of what Threat Level Red is shaping up to be when it wraps up; wheel-spinning until Slott gets off the title. So, for all that wheel-spinning, where will the quality of Go Down Swinging end up on the Neil-rate-o’-meter? Probably really low because Slott thinks I live to be pissed off.

Final Grade: C-