Spider-Verse #1 Review

Marvel has a really bad habit of giving their event tie-ins confusing and redundant titles. Spider-Verse is the name of the overarching crossover that just kicked off last week in Amazing Spider-Man #9. It's spawning a number of spinoffs and tie-in comics, one of which is also called Spider-Verse. Because reasons.

All you really need to know about this particular tie-in is that it's an anthology book that focuses on various versions of Spidey from throughout the multiverse. Some of these tales offer origin stories, while others showcase how a particular Spider-Person is recruited by the growing resistance against Morlun's family. Essentially, there's no difference between this series and the recent Edge of Spider-Verse comic except for the focus on shorter vignettes over full-length stories. What matters is that the same charm and sense of adventure is still present.

Spider-Verse #1 features six different story segments. Three of these are shorter, humorous little tales from Amazing Spider-man writer Dan Slott and various artists, while the other three are slightly longer and more in-depth. Fans of the Mangaverse Spider-Man will be pleased to see that Peter Parker return. Unfortunately, creator Kaare Andrews isn't present. Instead, writer Skottie Young and artist Jake Andrews continue this Spider-Man's story one year after his last adventure. This segment proves to be the one real weak link in the issue. Young goes through a lot of effort in sending Peter on a journey to confront his heritage, only for it not to matter much in the end. The art style is also underwhelming, coming across as more Avatar: The Last Airbender-lite than something truly manga-inspired.

THE VERDICT

Spider-Verse #1 doesn't deviate from the format of previous tie-ins. It doesn't even contribute much to the larger Spider-Verse conflict. But it does offer a fun selection of stories that play with the familiar Spider-man mythology in new and interesting ways. The three core features are balanced out with some delightfully twisted short stories from Slott, leading to a well-rounded Spider-package.


Get full review from IGN here

Spider-Verse Team Up #1 Review

The Good
I’ve always had a soft spot for extra-dimensional stories. When done right, they can show characters you know and love in different ways with completely different stakes and continuity, ensuring that the idea that everything will work itself out by the end is off the table. Spider-Verse has been a terrific opportunity for just that, but with an overall narrative leading to the same place, it keeps the stakes high.

There are a lot of concepts to toss around and characters to meet, but this story is overall one of fun and about establishing these characters, which it does fantastically and with an incredible economy of space. The next story’s a little different and the less I reveal about it the better, but suffice it to say: it’s written by Roger Stern, it features the six-armed wallcrawler and Spider-Man Noir and is surprisingly touching in its conclusion. Spider-Verse can be a pretty grim event, all told, so seeing happy endings to some of these stories is a breath of fresh air and Stern writing one of the most scientifically minded Parkers teaming with one of the least is also a delightful juxtaposition.

The Bad
In both cases, the art looks great when the characters are still or conversing, but the action is stiff and feels overly posed. The first story in particular is full to the brim of splash pages that lack a sense of force or dynamism and the bulky characters don’t suit their acrobatic moves. The level of detail also varies wildly as some panels look great and others almost wind up looking like storyboards with color more than actual panels.

The Verdict
If you’re already invested in Spider-Verse, this one’s a no-brainer. It presents more of the spiders that we’ve already met and even introduces us to one or two more. This series is beginning to feel like a real love-letter to Spider-Fans, and this series looks to be the fan-service-est of them all. If you’re on the fence about the series, or the main characters, this won’t do anything to change your mind, but if all you want is more, this delivers.

Get full review from Comic Vine here

Edge of Spider-Verse #5 Review

It’s hard for me to look at this week’s Edge of Spider-Verse #5, by Gerard Way, Jake Wyatt, Ian Herring and Clayton Cowles, without just seeing that it’s a tokusatsu-inspired take on Spider-Man that simply isn’t the one I want it to be. It took a lot of effort to get past that — effort that was mostly motivated by how great last month’s “Spider-Gwen” issue was — but in the end, I’m glad I made it. It might not be the book I wanted, but it’s definitely pretty fantastic in its own right, even if it suffers from a distinct lack of dirtbikes.

Really, that shouldn’t have been surprising. I was one of those dudes a few years ago who clowned Way for making the jump to comics from the world of highly theatrical pop music, and ended up having to stand there dumbstruck when the first issue of Umbrella Academy came out and I had to admit that it was actually really good. He’s got a knack for scripting, and more than that, he’s almost always paired with phenomenal artists who can make the most of their collaboration, and Jake Wyatt knocks this thing out of the park in this one. The visuals in this book are incredible in pretty much every respect, from the design of the SP//dr robot suit to the little Easter egg cameos of anime characters.
The visuals alone would make this issue engaging, but like the rest of the Edge of Spider-Verse stories, the real success comes from the way that it twists the Spider-Man formula into something that feels familiar and new at the same time.


Way and Wyatt are working with elements that are so easy to understand that they’re able to do an entire story’s worth of character introduction in the span of the first few pages, barreling through it with the confidence of people who are pretty sure their audience knows what they’re hinting at when they throw the mopey teens from Evangelion into the background of a classroom scene. The entire book is made up of hints at what Peni and her world are like, delivered with rapid-fire precision to the point where, taken as a whole, you already know her story by the time a talking cartoon pig shows up to tell her that she’s needed in a crossover.

That, I think, is the key to what Marvel’s been doing with Spider-Verse, and even beyond that with Superior Spider-Man. We know Peter Parker’s story so well at this point that seeing it twisted and applied to other ideas has become exciting and thrilling in a way that very few other characters can really match. That, even more than the characters and ideas that are being explored on the page, is what works in this comic, and it’s done with an economy and skill that makes me wish I could read about these characters every month.


Get full review from Comics Alliance here.