Scarlet Spiders #1 of 3 Review

Scarlet Spiders is out now and contains two of my favorite Spider people, so naturally I’m going to review it! How does the first issue go? Read my review and find out!

The comic opens up and follows the thoughts of Jessica Drew, the Spider-Woman (Black Widow now) from the Ultimates Universe, as she, Ben Reilly, and Kaine venture to the world where the clones came from. The city is beautiful, in contrast to a villain like you would expect from Doom. But they can’t exactly go out looking like they do, even if they are cloaked from the Inheritors.

Kaine fetches some smocks for them and they discuss the invisibility suit before they run out and meet a bunch of clones. The disguises don’t last three pages before they suit up again and get into a tussle with the security forces after the fighting spills out. Ben fights with grace and banter, Kaine goes with rage but restraint, and Jessica is the trained fighter of the group.

The fighting ends when Iron Man shows up, and Ben forgets they are on a villain controlled world. So he gets blasted into unconsciousness for two hours while they stripped Tony Stark of his armor. It turns out this Tony is a insufferably smug kiss-up which makes even the Superior Iron Man looks good, and that’s saying something, so they take his armor and use it to infiltrate the Baxter Building.

There Jessica breaks free and acts as a distraction while the other two go on ahead, but they get stopped as the comic ends by alternate universe Johnny Storm.

Okay, review.

In this issue we get more introspective into the different cloned spiders. Kaine beats the hell out of anyone in his way and lacks Peter’s smarts, but he’s been trying to be a hero to live up to his rep and has to temper his strength, which is greater than the others by a fair margin. Black Widow as the most training and strategic mind, while Ben still has Peter’s intelligence and witty nature.

All and all it’s not a bad start and I like the artwork. We’ll call it a 5 out of 5.