snap judgments

Long time no see as, not only do I have a BIG THING I’m doing going on right now (that I sadly can’t talk about right now due to a non-disclosure agreement), but for awhile, I just read comics I liked.  Read this blog long enough, you probably already know the pull list and I thought to myself, ‘Do people really wanna hear me gush about Marvel Adventures: Avengers’?  Nothing important, no big segments from events, nothing to write home about.  Then I got called out.

You see, I stopped reading One More Day when the little girl showed up on the last page of the second issue.  Thanks to the internet and the general disposition of the EiC, I honestly just want this whole affair to be over and for Brand New Day to start so Spider-Man can get back to fun and adventure.  I don’t want to see the marriage break or even stand at this point, just get me to the main event.  But… as a co-worker pointed out to me, this is important.  This is Marvel event history here.  This is something that is going to change the face of a major character and there’s a certain amount of responsibility to keep abreast of the situation in order for me to exert any amount of power in regards to being a self-proclaimed Marvel aficionado… I got to know these things.

Whether I like it or not.

So, let’s read this thing, shall we?

For the record, I got the ‘Variant Edition’ cover, that has a rather depressed Peter Parker expertly painted by Marko Djurdjevic.  That’s it, just Peter with a mopey face.  If you can judge a book by its cover, I’d say this one will look awfully pretty, but read rather boring.

Right.  Inside, we start out with a suspicious little girl.  Setting aside the act that I hate that plot device, she seems to know SEEEECRETS about Spider-Man who seems awfully tired by this point.  Don’t worry, Spidey!  Just a issue to go, right?  The little girl seems to alude that she might be Peter and MJ’s kid (comments about taking after her dad’s smarts and mother’s beauty) while Spidey’s either totally falling for the oldest trick in the book (evil disguised as a little girl) or so out of it by this point with rage and hate and angst and years of bad books, he’s just sleepwalking by this point.  The little girl turns around, calls him selfish and an idiot for focusing so much on his own problems and stomps off towards a dark alley.  Spidey follows after her because it’s not safe for a little girl (oh yeah, sleepwalking through this one) and runs into a HUGE NERD HA HA reading Atlas Shrugged.  MOre sleepwalking through the obvious when the nerd explains that the people that get into his job of working in video game design are escapists.  People looking for the chance to be a hero in a fictional world because they didn’t get the chance in real life.  If the nerd had the chance to be a real super-hero, he’d be grateful.  Spider-Man sleepwalks from this revelation to the next and gets a ride from a guy in a limo.

There’s a weird line about Spider-Man not being a drinker (”It’s not that I don’t drink.  It’s that as a rule I choose not to.”  Doesn’t that mean he doesn’t drink?) and the guy in the limo gets in his guilt trip on Spider-Man by saying that being rich and inventing a bunch of things didn’t make him happy because he never got the girl who really loved him.  The next creepy conversation is with a shadowy woman in red (Ghost of Spider-Yet-To-Come?).  And here’s where we go back to something JMS seems really fond of: the moment where Peter’s bitten by the Spider.  This ever-so crucial moment has made two major points that I can recall in his run on the book (his first major theme on the book and, your favorite and mine, the Other), so here we are again, wondering what would have become of Peter Parker should he have not been bitten.

The previous guys?  Totally Peter from alternate realities sans spider bite.  OH SNAP.  The Woman in Red reveals that without the spider bite, Peter always ends up alone.  OH SNAP AGAIN.   The Woman in Red?  Totally Mephisto.  OH SNAPITY SNAP!  Marvel’s semi-Satan doesn’t traffic in souls anymore, so Peter can just put that away.  No, now Mephisto is into misery, souls in pain and boy howdy!  Jackpot right here.  Looks like he’s asked both MJ (stashed at the motel that’s been right next to them) to give up their marriage to save Aunt May.

Peter wakes up and is on his way to telling Mephisto, the most helpful and honest of Joes to shove it when Mary Jane Watson-Parker stops him so that they can hear Mephisto out.  Thanking her for the chance to continue his dramatic monologue, the terms are basic (marriage or Aunt May), they get 24 hours to make the decision.  Anticipation is low because again, I read up on things on the internet and have been anticipating this announcement like Quicksilver watching an all stuttering Spelling Bee.

After this new content is a reprint of the Mephisto entry from the latest Official Handbook (six pages?  Wow.) and Silver Surfer #3, the first appearance of Mephisto where we see that he has a thing for ordaining, hurting women you love and striking some awesome dramatic poses.  I mean, it’s neat to read and some great art, but I could have kept the $1 extra the book cost and just settled for the main story.

Was Sensational Spider-Man #41 good?  No, not really.  I don’t want to punch it on the stands (something I witnessed a disgruntled fan do and will now remain my standard of comic reading despair), but the opinion I had of the book hasn’t changed after reading it.  Now, I’ll admit I went into it biased to blue blazes and it would have taken a Hail Mary pass to change my opinion, but JMS’s admission that this is all following orders is no surprise.  The concepts of meeting less-successful and rather bitter alternate selves isn’t what I read Spidey for.  This should have been over and done with a lot sooner than this and considering how vocal Quesada’s been on how much he doesn’t like a married Peter Parker, it seems all rather over and done before it started.