Didn't I say I was going to talk about this? Well I did, and I am.

Okay, let’s cover some stuff so I don’t make a liar out of myself.

So, Amazing Spider-Man #627 by Roger Stern and Lee Weeks- the first thing you should know is that this isn’t a contemporary creative team, these are a couple of guys who’ve been around the block a few times, specifically doing extended runs on Spider-Man from at least the 80’s. In fact this comic, with the title “Something Can Stop the Juggernaut” is supposed to be a sequel of sorts to the acclaimed Amazing Spider-Man #229-230 “Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut” (I think that was the title of one of the issues anyway) which was done by, you guessed it, Roger Stern and Lee Weeks.

I’m not too impressed with the blatant desire to capitalize on famous storylines from over two decades ago- not to say this isn’t a great comic (it is) but that idea just rubs me the wrong way, especially with how misleading it is, to sell this as a simple rematch story about Spider-Man soundly defeating Juggernaut like this is Rocky II or something.

I’ve just got two more negative things to say and then it’s all positive from there- and these things aren’t even really about the comic.
I was concerned going in about the characterization for this one Carlie Cooper person- she’s a new love interest for old Spidey and in an interview with Roger Stern it sounded like he LOVED Carlie, was going to spend a lot of time building her up, and so I was worried that she would turn into a Mary Sue character for this story. Although Spidey does sing her praises in about three short “thought boxes”- that’s it. Carlie was portrayed as a reasonable friend, and Peter thinks “hey wow, that was nice, she’s pretty great.” I’m incredibly okay with that.

This is contrasted to how most characters (but especially women) are written in relation to Peter- as shrewish and unreasonable. Even during all the time Peter Parker was married to Mary Jane Watson the above rule still applied because it’s an easy (lazy) way to create drama. If we were to look back a few issues into the past we could see a scene where Carlie berates Peter for standing her up on a date, all the while he’s sitting there in full bandaged regalia from getting beat up. Does that make sense? With the POSSIBLE exception of some guy who goes to an underground fight club every night, I don’t care how often you see a guy get beat up; you’re not going to get desensitized to it and start yelling at him. A more plausible response is to check in on Aunt May and make sure she isn’t abusing him- that’s the Aunt May who will routinely have a heart attack from some stressful program on the news (the Parkers should probably invest in some specialty channel featuring 24 hours of paint drying television for her sake) so no, she isn’t really up for abusing anyone, but that would be a far more realistic reaction than to just yell at Peter.
Yeah, I kind of went on a bit about that… but it’s a systemic problem with the creation of the Spider-Man supporting cast, and it wrecks a lot of fun stories.

Okay, what was the second thing I didn’t like… I’ve kind of forgotten… nope, I’ve definitely forgotten. I guess everything else just kind of fades away when compared to the lazy characterization… which wasn’t even a problem for this book…

Well, this issue does take place in something of a vacuum relative to other Spider stories, it makes only the most basic references to key plot points we had otherwise been following up to now- the big one being Peter getting blacklisted from the photojournalism community, a move I’m not a fan of, because the writers wanted to tell the story of a Peter Parker down on his luck with no money to get by on… basically the exact same position he’s been in for years. So you get scenes here of Peter working as a photographer with only the dialogue to inform us that he’s just using the camera as an excuse to get close to the action and see what’s what.

I know this is a fill in story, probably written and drawn up long before the idea to leave Pete unemployed (for REAL this time) became written in stone- but that’s just all the more reason to not mess with the job. So much of selling these comic characters depends on how succinctly you can describe their world and how it’s different from every other caped wonder out there- take the Flash over at DC: for years he’s been played by a guy with no real life outside of the super hero biz and has been hard to nail down because of it. You know early on in his series he just up and won the lottery? And had wacky adventures because of it? And if you wonder why the Flash has had trouble getting a movie made about him, that’s why- they don’t know how to get this guy across. However, they’ve just changed it up, replaced that latest Flash with the previous model, Barry Allen- forensic scientist and superhero. I don’t have to tell you (I will though) that that guy was ahead of his time during his tenure between 1961-1985- so of course he’s being brought back now with all the cop shows and especially the CSI’s on the air. I say give it two years now at most before we hear about a Flash movie proposal that stresses the CSI aspect of his identity. Which bugs me because of how blatantly bottom-line-lets-make-money it is.

I seem to have gotten off track from Spider-Man. My apologies.

A word about the art- not only are the backgrounds incredibly detailed throughout, not only is everything well paced and suitably dramatic and action pose oriented, but there’s a bare minimum of… what would you call this- straight on shots? The camera is very rarely sitting parallel to the ground and looking straight at Spider-Man. What we’re given instead is a lot of high and low angle shots that remind us we’re reading about a guy swinging around a bunch of skyscrapers- an act of remembrance which draws us in. This is pretty amazing! It sucks that so often we just take for granted some really cool ability, like we just expect a character to lift a car over their heads or fly around the clouds. If I can feel the wonder of those imaginings, especially after the amount of time I’ve spent with Spidey over the years, than that is something being done very right.

Okay, I was going to move onto some other topics (well, okay, I could still mention the use of the “thought boxes” and their relative strengths and weaknesses to traditional “thought balloons” and THEN stop talking about Amazing Spider-Man #627) but I’ve kind of gone on too long.

Oh, hey, Spider-Man uses a web hang-glider in this comic, and that’s old school awesome. Yeah, sorry, okay, I’m done.