Scarlet Spiders #3 (Tie-In Final Issue) Review

A hero dies in Scarlet Spiders #3 (Tie-In Final Issue)! Read my recap and review below!

The comic begins with an overview of Ben Reilly’s life, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about who’s going to bite the bullet. Kaine is the Other and Jessica is part of the only Ultimate Universe series still active, so she’s not going to die in an event that doesn’t tie in there. Anyway, he’s a Spider-Man, so he’s suffered every pain imaginable, but he earnestly believes what is right and just will prevail. That being said, things look grim as, despite him and Kaine wailing on the bastard, Jennix doesn’t go down easy.

Eventually Kaine decides to break out the stingers and start tearing into the Inheritor since, unlike Ben, he realizes this is a fight of extinction and he refuses to be slaughtered like some animal. Jennix instantly awakes from a clone and then gets shot by a turret that Jessica hacked. Ben wants her to shut it down for two reasons: If they regain control of it then they’re all screwed, and they don’t kill.

Jessica and even Jennix point out the futility of upholding that rule in this circumstance of this, but he instead states that it’s also pointless to keep killing him over and over since they need to trap him. Jessica happens to be at the receiver that sends the signal to wake the clones, but she runs into the Human Torch as an obstacle to doing that… and then she knocks him out in like three seconds flat to go and help the boys.

Ben thinks back, while nursing a concussion, about how he had always done right in the past and it was Peter who lost everything in his world while even getting the acceptance Peter didn’t. But things aren’t looking so hot here, and Jennix makes it clear he has thousands of these facilities, so it was all pointless. But, being a science expert himself, Ben realizes that the signal comes from this facility and tells Jennix he’s going to destroy it to stop them from coming back.

He succeeds, buying the other spiders time to run, but the act apparently kills him in the process with only his torn mask left behind. While Jessica tells Kaine not to let the ugliness of his death poison him, Kaine promptly gives into the Other, using it as fuel and hijacking a portal to Loom world to kill them while they can’t revive themselves.

In the end, they won but it wasn’t without sacrifices.

Okay, review time…

I loved the tie-in, but Ben Reilly dying was still hard. I mean, you could see it coming, but it still hurts because between the cynical Kaine and realistic Jessica, we see that the optimistic one was the one that bit the bullet. Other than that it was a pretty solid tie-in.

The issue and series gets a 5 out of 5.