I think Spider-Man was the first superhero who really grabbed me when I was a child. I don’t know what it is about him, the costume, the pathos, the colourful villains, the hot girlfriends (I have always been a Gwen Stacy guy and I always will be), something about the character seems to engage an awful lot of people. The three movies were as popular as they were in large part because they got huge parts of the story, setting and characters just right.

The most I’ve ever paid for a single comic-related book was $100.00 for The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, collecting the entire initial run of issues by creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. To my mind, those are about the 38 most perfect superhero comic books ever. Sure, some issues are better than others, and they were the product of increasing conflict between Stan the Man and Sturdy Steve, but all these decades later, those comics hold up as a fascinating snapshot of the comic book industry at the time they were created, and visceral, fun storytelling that has never been matched by anyone else crafting stories about Spider-Man.

So, somewhere around 1972 or so, I got hooked on Spider-Man, then in the hands of Gerry Conway and Ross Andru. I was there for the first “Clone Saga,” and I pretty much stuck with the character and his many titles up until around the time Todd McFarlane arrived — nothing against Todd in this particular case, I just stopped reading most comics around that time, so I missed out on the debut of Venom (who I pretty much hate as a character, nonetheless) and only really came back once the second Clone Saga had begun in the 1990s. See, I remembered Peter Parker throwing his clone’s corpse down that smokestack, and I sure was curious to see how they were gonna work their way around that particular point.

Well, as you are probably aware, they got around it as they performed every creative act during that era, with fists of ham and rape dollars in their eyes. The 1990s were a very, very bad time to be a Spider-Man reader, or hell, to be Spider-Man himself, whoever he happened to be in any given week. Marvel went a long way toward erasing a lot of the bad memories and ill-will of that time when they brought in the creative team of J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr., who started a new era of Amazing Spider-Man that was actually pretty good, the torpid 9/11 issue notwithstanding.

At his best Straczynski has a gift for plotting long-term storylines, and Romita’s artwork never looked better. It all went to hell, however, when Romita left the title and Straczynski introduced the most vile Marvel backstory ever, proposing that Gwen (my sainted, sainted Gwen) had slept with Norman Osborn, gotten pregnant, and given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, all without Peter’s knowledge, in the months before she was tossed off that bridge by Osborn in his other identity as the Green Goblin. As if all that isn’t ridiculous and sensational enough, Straczynski wrote a scene in which Peter and Gwen’s daughter shared a long, soulful kiss; it would seem romantic and thrilling until you realize that in Marvel time, the daughter, who had had her physical form artifically advanced, was in fact less than 10 years old. There isn’t a blanket thick enough to suppress the cold chills that scene gave me. Icky, gross, disgusting, and most of all ludicrous and stupid. It was a sad way to end a run of issues that had started off with great promise, but wait, it didn’t end there, things got even worse, blah blah blah Civil War, and then Peter and Mary Jane made a pact with the devil, because that’s what their established characters would do, of course, and Christ, by this time even Straczynski himself had to quit in disgust.

And so ended the Spider-Man I had read for all those decades, although by then I had long abandoned the character and all his various money-grubbing titles. But when the Let’s-Make-A-Deal-With-Satan storyline One More Day led inevitably into the hand-waving of Brand New Day, a new era in which decades of backstory had been changed, but no one really seemed to know precisely how, except that Harry Osborn was alive again and Pete and MJ’s marriage never happened.

I can’t even tell you the levels of indifference that Brand New Day inspired in me. I’d browse through an issue from time to time, but never bothered buying any of them, and never saw any reason to think I was missing anything at all. After all, somewhere between Straczynski coming on Amazing Spider-Man and his abrupt departure (spurred by creative disagreements over One More Day with editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, who had to finish writing the godawful story himself), Spider-Man as I knew him had ceased to exist.

Well, I’ve finally read an entire storyline in the Brand New Day era, and it’s Spider-Man: New Ways to Die by writer Dan Slott and artists John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson. Slott has written for Marvel for some years now, but was an unknown element to me. I’ll admit that my entire attraction to this book was the fact that it was a Spider-Man story drawn by Romita Jr., whose artwork has a definite appeal despite his unusually limited box of tools, and more importantly because it was inked by Klaus Janson, who I hold in the highest esteem as the best inker ever to work in the corporate comics division-of-labour assembly-line system.



The good news is, the story is highly readable. Slott has a gift for Marvel-type dialogue, and despite the fact that the story is centered around Venom (both the current and previous hosts of the alien symbiote), Spider-Man feels like Spider-Man and looks absolutely fantastic in the hands of Romita Jr. and Janson. The art is moody and energetic, and the plot, driven by the machinations of Norman Osborn (who remains dead since Amazing Spider-Man #122 to my mind, and I can’t make it think otherwise), makes enough sense to be followed from beginning to end.

The bad news is, although Spider-Man feels like Spider-Man, as a reader with a lifetime invested in the character, his world and his environment, it just isn’t Spider-Man. The entire story is grounded in the recent (as of 2009, when this was published) ridiculous events of the Marvel Universe, and the presence of Osborn and the Thunderbolts, and worst of all Harry and all the remaining questions about what did or didn’t actually happen in the wake of the deal with the devil make it very hard to wrap my brain around this story and immerse myself in it as a lover of good Spider-Man comics.

I understand at this late date that I’m just a curmudgeonly member of the vocal minority, but there’s a part of me that really wants some talented new creators to bring in a new broom and sweep away all the crap that’s been heaped upon this character and his world for the past decade or so and give me back the real Spider-Man. And yes, I understand that that was the purpose of Brand New Day, but for me the entire era has failed to meet its goals, Spider-Man as a concept remains in a sad, broken limbo of creative nullity, and the minor thrills provided by this book don’t do a thing to remedy the situation. Slott’s not a bad writer, but he’s being asked to write under bad circumstances, and so Spider-Man: New Ways to Die feels to me like the very pretty fruit of a poison tree.

— Alan David Doane

Buy Spider-Man: New Ways to Die from Amazon.com.