Spidey and co. face down the wannabe god of death the Emissary in a final battle. Also revealed at last is what happened with MJ - how did she suddenly get a family separate from her relationship with Peter? All this and more in the second and final part of Dead Language.
Zeb Wells and John Romita Jr’s surprisingly decent run on Amazing Spider-Man hits another bump with Volume 6: Dead Language Part 2, and I wouldn’t put the blame squarely on them - Marvel has a horrible habit of throwing Spidey into one crossover and event after another, and that’s happened again with this book.
The actual book I wanted to read - Spider-Man comics written and drawn by Wells and JRJR - wasn’t bad. Peter desperately works with Norman Osborn, while putting his friendship with the Fantastic Four on the line, to do the necessary and make it back to MJ in that other world, and it’s not boring.
The backstory of how MJ got a family was similarly engaging with surprise art by Kaare Andrews. Andrews can’t help himself and draws MJ and Paul like ‘90s pin-ups, but otherwise it’s enjoyable visually.
The final confrontation with the Emissary plays out predictably though the ending is confusing - Kamala seems to have developed new powers since I last read her (back when G. Willow Wilson was writing the title).
That issue does go on for a bit and, not having kept up with my comics news, it was surprising why - though if I’d taken in the back cover and contents page more I’d have been able to guess pretty easily. The back cover has Spidey in the by-now cliched image of a famous superhero grimly holding up the unconscious body of another superhero, with the contents page listing an issue called Fallen Friend.
So yes, this book also includes the bumper memorial issue commemorating the death of Kamala Khan aka Ms Marvel. It’s split into three chapters with three creative teams who wrote the character since 2014 taking turns writing a chapter. The G. Willow Wilson/Takeshi Miyazawa chapter was easily the best, producing poignancy very effectively. Unfortunately from there, the chapters quickly become trite, dreary and repetitive in the hands of Mark Waid/Humberto Ramos and Saladin Ahmed/Andrea de Vito. It’s especially impressive how quickly Ahmed manages to make his chapter corny in the small space he’s given - that’s how weak a writer that guy is.
I can’t get too mushy over Kamala’s “death” given the history of superheroes and death - as the saying goes, nobody but Uncle Ben stays dead, so I fully expect Kamala to miraculously return to life in some event story a year or two from now (plus I’m fairly sure she’s “died” once before in one of the tie-in issues to Hickman’s Secret Wars and then promptly returned back to life). It’s weird that Marvel decided to kill her off now though, given the timing of her big screen debut in the recent The Marvels movie. So if any new comics readers watching that movie felt inspired afterwards to pick up a Ms Marvel comic, they wouldn’t be able to get anything current - hmm. Not great synergy, Marvel.
The book closes out with more non-Wells/JRJR fare (boo) in the Annual featuring pointless, unmemorable stories. MJ’s aunt goes coo-coo because of the X-Men (I stopped reading X-Men shortly after HoX/PoX so I have no idea why); there’s more Dark Web garbage involving Hallows’ Eve and Chasm and one breaking the other out of fantasy jail - nobody caaaares; and finally Spidey and Black Cat go to a wedding party in Omaha where Spidey discovers that, har har, Omaha isn’t like New York! Wow. It’s crap like this that makes me appreciate Zeb Wells’ writing all the more - Marvel are lucky to have him and it’s no wonder why he got put onto their flagship character.
The Amazing Spider-Man, Volume 6: Dead Language Part 2 is bloated with too much detritus to make it as good as the other books in the series - it’s down there with the Dark Web crossover volume unfortunately. Reading the second half of Dead Language is worthwhile if you liked the first part though it plays out unsurprisingly and the Fallen Friend and Annual chunks are easily skippable dead weight. It’d be nice to live in a world where you picked up Wells/JRJR’s Spidey and only got their issues instead of being lumbered with all this useless side product at the same time, eh? I guess that’s what omnibuses are for, but, in the meantime, we’re stuck with crummy collections like this stuffed with filler.
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