New Warriors #4 Review
The final issue in the opening arc of New Warriors has arrived and with it the team is all together. Let’s do this review!
The comic opens months ago when the last surviving Evolutionary and the Lord High Evolutionary are compelled to Ethiopia by a being that tells them that their blasphemy in trying to artificially evolve humans and defend mutant-kind by wiping out humanity isn’t doing the trick. Whoever this mystery person is tells them to start working together so that when the Celestials come humanity will turn into something great.
In the present the Evolutionary has had enough after Nova came back to get himself caught, idiot, and tells his partner in crime that they won’t stop until they’ve destroyed everything. He ultimately agrees and tells him to do it quickly since their sins aren’t of their own making. Sanctimonious douche-bag thinks he’s above good and evil as long as humans survive, but at least he’s less of a douche-bag that the sub-human in a blue suit..,
Anyway, that’s when the rest of the New Warriors arrive and they gloss over how with the use of a nameless magician using a magic spell. Lazy, lazy, writing….and why the hell isn’t the Inhuman wearing a shirt? That outfit is horrible.
Anyway, Justice opens with diplomacy but when Nova tells him that he’s going to kill mostly everybody the fight gets rolling. The Evolutionary, still sore about the X-Men turning on them after M-Day, goes straight for the only Mutant of the group, but Justice handles him and tells Sun Girl to free the rest. She hesitates when she thinks Kaine is Spider-Man, Otto really disappointed her, but her aim somehow manages to not hit them and Aracely is giddy to be fighting alongside actual heroes because that means she gets to be one too.
The fight breaks out with Namora giving Aracely some tips, Nova and Speedball double-teaming some mooks while Kaine tells Justice they need to split, and Sun Girl is hiding behind Mark…who turns into some kind of Sabertooth Dragon Beast after absorbing enough energy and starts chomping down on more mooks.
The High Evolutionary decides to cut his losses and activate a machine that he fed the samples of their DNA into. Turns out it’s designed to kill anyone with powers or inhuman-DNA and cripples most of the team (and would have killed them outright if he had Nova’s helmet) meaning only Sun Girl is left unharmed. The High Evolutionary makes it clear he’s not enjoying this, but for humanity to survive the coming of the Celestials the rest need to die.
She tells him to screw himself, blast through him to get to the machine and destroy it. He’s mad, for once, but cuts his losses again as he and the Evolutionary Leader leave. So it counts as a victory and Justice says the New Warriors will stop them if they start again, to which every single one of them says no except Aracely.
The comic ends with the High Evolutionary feeling this was only a setback, but because they are the samples this was meant to be and they would eventually succeed by killing the New Warriors. The second Evolutionary War had begun.
Okay, Review time….
No complaints overall. It wrapped up the opening arc beautifully. There was some good moments and funny moments, and despite my harsh tone I really did like it.
5 out of 5.
Amazing Spider-Man (2014) #1 Review
After taking his body back from Doc-Ock Peter Parker now has to pick up the pieces of his life in the aftermath of the Superior Spider-Man. Read on about my review of the first issue in the relaunch of the Amazing Spider-Man!
The comic opens to a flash-back of that faithful day when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Only this time it reveals that before it died it managed to bite someone else. Meaning that all this time there was someone else with Spider-Man’s powers but not active in the series…so we’re just going to pretend they didn’t copy this idea off Miles Morales for Silk, huh?
In the present we have the animal-themed cosplayers stealing jeweled eggs. One of the bystanders who just moved here wonders if it’s an event when he nearly gets pushed over and his baby almost crushed. Luckily he gets a web-line to pull him upright as Peter is on the case, chasing them down while naked with the exception of his mask and webbing-underwear, much to chagrin of everyone (with the exception of one woman who takes a photo for later). How did he end up in this state?
It started four hours ago when he held a press conference announcing that he’ll no longer work for Spider-Man (technically speaking it isn’t a lie since he’ll be making it for himself) and Peter is over his head with all this. He just learned he’s the owner of a company, his aunt doesn’t need some cane to walk again (which he states he’ll owe Doc Ock for), and he’s just unfortunate enough that Anna Maria found the wedding ring and note asking her to marry him. Yeah, this won’t end well.
Technically speaking he’s probably going to run the company into the ground since Otto was a genius in cybernetics and he gets confused looking at their big rollout project. Considering that he has more people who depend on him now, and these poor bastards are terrified of him at that, this a different set of responsibilities to go with his robot butler and doctor degree. He quickly decides to get back to something familiar, namely patrolling New York where he’s hated and feared by many.
It’s here he runs into the rabbit woman and her new flunky, Skein, who can control fabrics and threads. Before she could turn them into some kind of deadly weapon or whatever she was going to say he knocks her out since he’s got a secret identity to protect. Unfortunately he ends up nude and has to cover his privates in webbing in public, meaning this gets put on twitter and everyone sees it.
The Avengers figure he’s back to normal since only this could happen to him, Johnny Storm laughs his ass off, and Mary Jane is probably glad she broke up with him now. The humiliation continues after he rounds up his last bad guy and gets told off by an old lady about public indecency.
He makes his way back home to find Anna Maria there. And guess what, she knows he’s Spider-Man because Otto was getting busy with her while in his body. And the main comic ends there on a damn cliff-hanger.
Following it are a series of short stories involving the Black Cat, Electro. Kaine, and Miguel O’Hara. It shows how they’re going to be involved in the story and what they’ve been up to since Otto’s gone.
Electro was tired of being a joke and decided to try and free the inmates from prison to gain some respect. He lost control and killed a good portion of them before blacking out, due to what he believes is the modifications Otto made to control him in the Superior Spider-Man Team-Up series. Cue revenge planning.
Likewise Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, was arrested and beaten by Otto. She lost everything because of him and is constantly verbal harassed by an inmate who clearly intends to do her harm. Apparently the lady didn’t also know that her powers involved luck and pissing her off makes you unlucky. She learned this as Electro’s attack fried the power dampeners and then her, while Felicia escapes unharmed and is going to fuck Peter over pretty bad next issue.
Meanwhile Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099 is making himself home and doing the hero-thing when he comes across a young woman about to get capped. He makes short work of the assailants, but learns that the population of the Marvel universe in this decade is ungrateful as she berates him. Gee, you think she wanted to die (foreshadowing, anyone?) but that’ll have to be picked up in his on ongoing series in two months.
We then go down to Huston Texas, where Peter is searching for his clone brother Kaine. The woman he interviewed describes that he transformed into a spider-monster, which Peter notes is because of The Other. If you read then you know he got killed off by some Werewolves and came back because he made a deal with it….seriously, go read the Scarlet Spider series.
Doctor Meland approaches Peter and pegs him immediately as Kaine’s brother and tells Peter how Kaine was in pain and anger about never stacking up to him and tells him to ask around about him. Peter learned Kaine came down there to get away from the life of a spider, only to fight crime. He wanted the power but none of the responsibility, but he took it on anyway. He had friends, a city that counted on him, and was as much a hero as Peter was. It ends with a shot of Kaine fighting alongside all the other New Warriors against the evolutionaries which hasn’t happened yet in their series.
Then there’s some alternate reality thing that I lost interest in, and thus will gloss over, and the comic ends.
Okay, review time.
Since I really only started reviewing and reading spider-man when Otto took over I find that this relaunch is right up my alley for the most part. It’s picking up right where superior left off, but that also means if someone skipped the series they are going to be confused about what transpired. Peter is realistically screwed over and has so many responsibilities now because he doesn’t have Otto’s level of genius in that particular field and the enemies Otto made.
People seem to notice he’s not the same as he was for the last few months, but it should still be addressed by him telling the Avengers Otto was wearing him as a meat suit for a few months and then asks why it took them that long to put two and two together. I mean, really? Months? As much as I loved the series it shouldn’t have gotten that far if the Idiot Ball wasn’t being passed around.
For the most part my main concern is Anna. The man she loved is gone, and I am fond of her. How is he going to explain all of this without coming off as an asshole (technically he was the victim, but he has a shoddy record when it comes to explanations)? And since she knows his secret identity, will the writers go the route of Carlie and MJ and have her leave the stage or will they pull a Gwen Stacy to make Black Cat unredeemable?
On another note, I can’t wait until Spider-Verse comes into play. Miles Morales in 616, all is right with the world unless Marvel somehow screws it up.
Issue gets a 5 out of 5 and is a must buy.
New Warriors #2 Review
The second entry into the newest incarnation of the New Warriors series is out and I’m here with my review of the comic issue. So let’s start shall we?
The issue picks up with an Inhuman riding a train in New York that comes to a crashing halt. Naturally he had nothing to do with it, but this is the Marvel Universe so he’s automatically to blame. He flees before they can gather a lynch mob to get him, only to run across Sungirl facing off against the evolutionaries to defend the mutants that were under attack last issue.
At the same time in New Salem, Vertigo and Justice are under attack by the same force. They explain that they once defended mutants but were betrayed by them, just as Speedball and Brutacus show up. Brutacus gets taken down fairly easily and they get ready to take him in for gene-sampling when Justice takes off the kid gloves and levels the mouthy evolutionary, asking for answers to what was going on as they retreat.
In Mexico, Scarlet Spider starts a fight with Faira on the assumption that she was responsible for the slaughter. She kicks his ass quickly and is about to drown him when Humming Bird does her fear thing and calms the situation down long enough for her to explain the situation. Atlantis was in the middle of a fight with Deviant forces when the evolutionaries showed up and started slaughtering them all, so she came to the surface for heroes and he started attacking her. Scarlet Spider wants nothing to do with things, but naturally the bad guys show up at that moment deciding to get the Clone (Kaine), Demigod (Aracely), and Atlantian (Faira).
Going back to Speedball and Justice, they arrive at the Avengers Tower in New York to search their database to learn about the enemy. A general overview of the past encounter with the X-Men is given and Cyclops warns that they should be considered an extinction-level threat. An alert then goes out requesting help due to an incident in the subway and they decide to jump in.
In the subway, the evolutionaries stop their slaughter for a moment to try and reason with Sungirl by stating they only want to protect her kind (humanity) by eliminating….well, everything else. She’s a hero so she can’t let that happen, so they are left with no choice but to attack her when the Inhuman from before, Mark, shows up and eats their energy blast. Then Justice and Speedball show up, so the evolutionaries decide to retreat.
As the comic ends, we find Nova in a containment field with the High Evolutionary, who states he intends to have him help cleanse the earth of all impure beings before the Celestials return.
Okay, review time.
No complaints overall, it’s a solid issue that picks off where the previous one left off. The art is nice and crisp, while the plot is progressing nicely with no wasted panels. We have a general idea of what’s going on and we can see the future team coming together nicely, with more of their personalities fleshed out.
You can see how Sungirl is still new at the hero thing, while Justice is clearly the most experienced. Mark was basically just thrown into things, but he didn’t hesitate to help stop a kid from falling when the train stopped or helping Sungirl. Kaine is still a hot-head with a potty mouth while Faira makes it clear she’s a rather skilled combatant and Aracely is playing peace-keeper.
It gets a solid 5 out of 5 and I recommend it for purchase.
Superior Spider-man Team Up 2 & Scarlet Spider 20
Twice the Spider-Man, hold the responsibility.
This review encompasses two different comics I enjoy crossing over: Superior Spider-Man & Scarlet Spider.
For those of you who don’t know, the Scarlet Spider series follows Peter Parker’s surviving clone, Kaine. He, like Otto, was a villain who murdered and killed for profit and other reasons. When Peter stopped his original cell degradation, he stole a stealth suit from him and disappeared so that he wouldn’t be arrested by the Avengers until he ended up in Houston and robbed some human traffickers of their money.
Since then he’s fought primordial beings, a guy who can make flames snakes, and Carnage, been killed by werewolves and resurrected by the Other, given an evil side that considers just about everything other than him prey, and fought alongside Wolverine to kill a bunch of assassins by assassinating them. He was basically the predecessor to the Superior Spider-man, with his tagline being “All of the Power, None of the Responsibility” and so far he’s ridden with guilt that he shouldn’t be alive as a clone and a murderer.
In the first part of the arc, Kaine comes to find out why Peter is acting like…well, him. Seeing as he’s Peter’s clone, the spider-sense doesn’t work on Kaine and Kaine doesn’t have his spider-sense anymore. Otto, remembering the fact that he got beat down and killed by Kaine, decides to repay the favor and they fight.
Kaine is stronger that Peter and soon overpowers him, but then comes the clones. Lots of fighting and Kaine saving Otto later, Jackal comes in with his clones and they pair get captured.
Jackal was the one who made the clones and sees Kaine as a disappointment, while Kaine wants to kill him. He breaks free of the chains made specifically to hold him, kicks some ass, and frees Otto. Otto then causes an explosion to prevent his DNA from being used to create more clones, which he was a hatred for, and leaves Kaine to die. Kaine escapes, lectures him, and tells him to start acting like a hero.
To this arc I say, despite being a firm supporter of Otto, FUCK YOU, OTTO! CLONES ARE PEOPLE TOO!
Otto is a fucking hypocrite to call him out on pretending to be a hero when he’s been doing the same thing. They both have a supervillain body count and dark past that is nothing to scoff about. Considering Otto actually stole Peter Parker’s life and derailed it, this makes him arguably worse. And for him to hate clones, isn’t he cloning the Sinister Six to form his new team?
Unlike Otto, Kaine actually makes an effort to redeem himself without going for glory after rescuing a girl called Aracely, who was at the human trafficking robbery, left to die among corpses from people who were smuggled into the country inside a storage container. Also she may have a Mayan God stuck inside of her, seeing as a cartel wants her dead to unleash it.
When it comes down to it I like Kaine more because you don’t hear about wanting to leave his own legacy behind, just a guy trying to atone for his past and live up to Peter’s legacy. Kaine has suffered for being the good guy compared to Otto so far, he’s died because of it twice and gotten himself a monster inside of him because of it the second time. Otto disappointed me here.
And, Marvel help me, if I find out he’s the one who kicked started Kaine’s degradation again, I’m rooting for Peter to come back. Personal feelings aside, these issues get 5 out of 5.
Twilit Dreams Circle 