Superior Spider-Man #33 (or the fourth part of the Edge of Spider-Verse event), sees the villain Karn taking on the assembled might of multiple Spider-Men from across the various universes. But Karn’s strange past catches up with him as two of his siblings appear and the three duke it out. There’s also a backup story included that looks into Karn’s motivations.
So I got suckered into buying another issue of Superior Spider-Man, still believing in the brand’s quality but realising that Marvel are just using it as a cheap (as in shameless, not price - this issue was $4.99!) ploy to unload more of their crappy Spider-Verse comics.
I suppose it’s cool seeing the various incarnations of Spider-Man like Spider-Monkey from the Marvel Apes series and Spider-Man Noir from the Marvel Noir series, but other than that, this issue sucks!
Christos Gage just isn’t much of a writer. There’s lots of bad exposition from the start followed by pages of pointless, unexciting fighting which ends in the least satisfying way possible: a sudden retreat. It was like Gage was saying “that’s your lot for this issue - more crappy fighting to follow in the next issue, and so on until this thing is done!”. It’s pointless because Karn (KAAAAAAAARNNN! - I bet you someone says that) can literally get stabbed in the chest and have no effect on him - there’s no consequences to anything.
The backstory is mystifying and yet also boring. Karn and his weird family - are they vampires or something? - are in some chamber where the Master Weaver is (a spider guy who creates life and destiny or whatever) and they fight him because Gage doesn’t know how to write comics any other way than one dumb fight scene after the other.
This leads to him getting a weird diving helmet welded to his head and quantum leaping everywhere until he kills all the Spider-Men in every universe. Karn may be the worst Spider-Man villain in quite some time.
Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art is quite good throughout because if there’s one thing this guy knows how to draw, it’s Spider-Men. But really, it’s not enough to elevate Gage’s pitiful script or make this a worthwhile comic to justify the price.
I really liked Dan Slott’s Superior Spider-Man and recommend that to any comics fans who haven’t read it yet, but these new Gage-scripted issues revolving around the Edge of Spider-Verse event really aren’t worth your time or money. They add nothing to the existing Superior storyline, they barely feel like Superior comics anyway, and they can quite easily be skipped.
Superior Spider-Man #33 is a well-drawn but very poorly written comic that totally fails to interest the reader on any level - avoid!
No comments:
Post a Comment