The Amazing Spider-Man #14 (Spider-Verse Tie-In) Review
This is the climax of Spider-Verse! Read my review on Amazing Spider-Man #14 as we draw this crossover to a close.
It picks up on the streets of Loomworld, where Spider-Woman and Spider-Gwen have to deal with a plethora of goblins from across dimensions. Peter’s group arrives as they wrap things up, but it turns out that the Inheritors made off with Silk, meaning they have all three and can begin the ritual.
With the life-eaters, they are having a moment of bitter sadness as they mourn the death of their father, especially that asshole Daemos. Never thought him to be such a daddy’s boy, but he does take comfort in the fact that Jennix has a crystal that has what amounts to his soul so they can resurrect him once everything is done. Morlun then starts the ritual, ordering the others to stop the spiders from getting in.
His cut into Kaine that stains the Great Web with blood ensures that the Other can no longer find a host, though I can’t tell if Kaine is dead, and Morlun drops hints to Silk being special beyond merely being The Bride. Her blood, however, makes it so that no more Spider Totems are born by accident, like Peter getting bitten by chance. Morlun then moves to kill The Scion, which would stop any more from being born completely, but the Spiders intervene.
Peter takes Morlun, Otto gets Daemos and then Mayday gets her turn looking for vengeance. Uncle Ben appears to run away, and then Karn shows up to fight alongside the Spiders and free every world from their grasp. Morlun realizes it’s a distraction too late, as Uncle Ben had taken The Scion with him and left Spider-Ham in his place.
As beatdown continues, Leopardon arrives with Miguel and Lady Spider, Morlun states they have only delayed the inevitable. Otto agrees and decides to take out the one thing that will ensure their survival. By that, I mean he just murders the goddamn Master Weaver to solve that problem… which means he’s just screwed up the entire fabric of space and time to an extent. That won’t end well, at all.
The battle ends at that point with Peter dumping the Inheritors in the toxic world and telling them to get to the shelter, stating that they should make it. The comic ends there abruptly, with the fallout yet to come.
Okay, review time.
Most of it is done now, and it was decent, but there are questions I still have that will have to be answered in the epilogue in two weeks. But seriously, why the hell did they let the Inheritors live? Daemos would have cleared out the Unlimited Spider-Man’s world if Jennix hadn’t shown up, and even he points out that it doesn’t make sense. Leaving them to die a slow and painful death by starvation may be just desserts, but being quicker about it and simply tearing their heads off make more sense so they don’t return by chance after one of them cannibalizes the other.
Anyway, I still have to say that to this point it was a much better crossover than AXIS or Battle of the Atom. My main regret is that once they pull that Secret Wars bullcrap reboot, most of it will be for nothing. Didn’t Marvel learn from DC and the New 52?
5 out of 5.
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.
Scarlet Spiders (Spider-Verse Tie-In) #2 Review
The Scarlet Spiders Spider-Verse Mini-Event continues in issue #2! Here’s my recap and review!
The comic picks up with the evil Johnny Storm realizing something is wrong with this scenario only to get knocked out while he’s Flamed-On. Ben has to abandon the Iron Man suit because Kaine points out that the suit probably has fail-safes on it and Jennix would be able to pull him in and peel him out of it like a sardine. Their cover is blown, which Jessica doesn’t like since her plan ultimately hinged on her being the decoy rather than them, so they have to wing it.
Ben and Kaine get into where they keep the clones. It turns out Jennix has about a thousand clones divided into levels for him and his siblings. When one dies their consciousness is transferred into the body and then released. Kaine votes on destroying the entire building, but Ben doesn’t want to since it means everyone else would go with it, so that means they’ll have to try a little harder than that.
Meanwhile, Jennix isn’t paying much attention to the fight since he has other things to handle. He tells Dr. Warren to simply keep monitoring the situation and if they make it to the special projects then he’ll run interference. It shows he’s both cocky and delegates his workload like a proper mad scientist should.
The spiders split up with Jessica playing the spymaster until she can get somewhere to interfere with the counter-measures, Kaine goes to deal with the main power cells, and Ben stays behind to try to do something in the clone room. Kaine… he wrecks the hell out of the security detail, with the caption mentioning that while he doesn’t have much of a life outside of violence, he’s making the most out of it. Then he finds something so shocking he has to go get Ben and the technician.
It turns out that special project is that Jennix has been cloning Spiders and these are the failures. Given what Kaine has gone through, it triggers a rage moment and that alerts Jennix that they are there. So Jennix makes good on his promise and goes to deal with them personally after showing them some footage of his experiments and how the clones don’t contain any of the essence that they have. As the comic ends Jennix makes it clear he’s going to turn them into an experiment once he’s done kicking them around.
Okay, review time….
I loved it for a tie-in. It got straight to the point and we have everyone in the roles they’re meant to play. 5 out of 5.
Amazing Spider-Man #11 (Spider-verse)
It’s time for my admittedly-late review of Amazing Spider-Man #11.
Okay, this entry into the Spider-verse event has Otto trying to take over. He believes that the Peter Parker that’s leading the good guys is a younger version of Peter rather than one after he surrendered, because he can’t imagine a world where he gave up. They fight for a few panels, but Peter uses the fact that Otto can’t kill him (because of the previously established misunderstanding) to knock him down. I’d like to point out that, technically speaking, Otto was leading his team better than Peter when it came to the whole matter of the inheritors though.
Meanwhile, of the Inheritors, Karn is still trying to get out of his punishment. His dick of a father has the Master Weaver send him to a harder world while talking with his favored son Morlun. They talk about the three spiders who could get rid of them and decide to go and crush their last hope.
Meanwhile Peter waits until Otto wakes up before telling him that they do need his help because he did hold his own against Morlun and the others. He then does a check up on everyone he can before moving out to make sure that Noir Spider-Man is safe and Spider-Woman sneaks into the Homeworld of the Inheritors while Miles and a younger him go gather more spider-people. That’s when things go bad.
Long story short, Solus and his sons break into Cosmic Spider’s world, kill a few, and only Jennix gets killed (before being respawned). Then Cosmic Spider gets munched on, like we all knew would happen. The comic ends with the fat bastard getting his hands on Mayday’s younger brother, who is The Scion.
Okay, review time…
I found this one to be okay. It moved the story along, Cosmic Spider got munched, like we kind of figured, and we see prompts leading to the tie-in. It was okay, but it could have been better in some ways. 4 out of 5.
Spider-Man 2099 #6 (Spider-Verse) Review
Spider-Verse continues within Spider-Man 2099 #6! Read my review on the story as Miguel, Lady Spider, and the Six-Armed Spider-Man try to carve up Daemos’ corpse for science!
The story begins with that asshole Stone after he had finally gotten rid of Spider-Man 2099 by trapping him in the past. He’s then greeted to the sight of footage Public Eye caught of that spider-man and his two friends. His assistant points out that they’re lucky he didn’t come back in time before they sent him off or another paradox would have occurred, but either way Stone wants him killed once and for all.
Meanwhile Miguel’s brother is talking with their mother when he shows up with his friends, who are lacking Daemos’ corpse I noticed. Lady Spider, or May, instantly gets on his radar as Miguel tries to get in touch with the other heroes of 2099. That’s when Daemos pops in and we lose the Six-Armed Spider-Man before Gabriel pops his ass with a giant gun when he got somewhere. The kiss he gets is well-earned.
Daemos then proceeds to tear Public Eye a new one when Miguel tells Tyler Stone that while he would normally kick his ass, instead he’ll owe him a favor if they ready the 82 floor of Alchemax Lab C. He jumps on that like there’s no tomorrow and together they trap Daemos in a stasis cell as the comic ends. Suck it!
Okay review time…
Much like in Spider-Woman, we’ve lost another Spider from Otto’s team to the Inheritors (although Noir was simply wounded) and Daemos continues to be a creepy bastard with all the sexual undertones. Seriously, kill him permanently already. But otherwise it’s good stuff.
I give it a 5 out of 5.
Spider-Man 2099 (2014) #5 Review
Okay, here’s the latest entry in the Edge of Spider-Verse series. Read my review and recap of Spider-Man 2099 # 5.
The comic opens with an alternate version of Miguel O’Hara , who sold out to the Avengers, being attacked by Morlun. It goes about as well as you would expect, namely he gets eaten so hard that all the other version of him felt it, including ours in the 616-universe and he nearly blacks out while chasing a helicopter. He pulls himself together and catches the robbers in the helicopter, but is confused about it.
Back with Morlun, it turns out that another alternate version of Miguel was watching and he may have led Morlun to him. This Miguel, who works with the Exiles, learned about Morlun and tried to reach the other versions of him through a mental link. Now he’s grabbing whatever he thinks will help and then running to the 616-Universe since Morlun might be afraid of it because he died there.
Back with our Miguel, he’s managing to convince Ty Stone and Liz Allen to work on building a super-prison for the villains when he gets another migraine. A younger version of him bit the bullet and once again the Exile Miguel felt it and decided it’s time to go to his 616 counterpart. Just as soon as he gets the portal open, he gets eaten in front of our Miguel and the only reason Morlun doesn’t go after him is because he’s afraid of their universe.
The comic ends as Miguel decides to go find Peter Parker.
Okay, review time…
So, we see another Spider-Man taking preemptive measures to stop the Inheritors, albeit one that failed. With only a final entry left in the Edge series before the main event I am excited.
4 out of 5.
Edge of Spide-Verse #3 Review
The Edge of Spider-Verse continues with the third issue! What fate will befall the Spider-Man of this story! Read my review and find out!
This time our Spider-Man isn’t a variation of Peter Parker, but a guy named Aaron Aikiman who worked in researching insect venom for medical purposes. They don’t go into details why he decided to inject himself with his treatment, but he basically becomes Iron Man and Spider-Man all rolled into one. After going through a summary of his life and relationship, which honestly is confusing because they’re trying so hard, we then skip to him patrolling the city to deal with a rash of kidnappings.
He catches the creature responsible, only it turns out to be one of the victims and as soon as it gives a cryptic message he has to rush the guy to the hospital. There he finds out its some of his tech responsible of it, or rather that belonging to his girlfriend, and he goes to confront her about it. Turns out she made the tech for her daughter when she woke from a coma, only it was some otherworldly creature that possessed her and had her make more machines to kidnap more people and continue the cycle.
He rushes out to deal with that, but before he could do anything, Morlun pops out of a dimensional doorway to confront him as the baddies run off saying mankind is doomed as the comic ends….
Okay review time….
Yeah, that world is screwed and that spider-man is dead. Morlun is far more of a threat than Karn is, so you know he’s dead. Overall I really couldn’t get into this story though. I get what they were doing, trying to show that Karn isn’t the only one actively hunting, but using an unfamiliar character and trying to cram that much backstory into a one-shot isn’t going to cut it. Unless Aaron somehow survives, this is the last we’ll see of him and it makes the issue kind of a waste…
2 out of 5, you can skip it and you won’t miss much.
Superior Spider-Man #33 (Edge of Spider-Verse) Review
Okay, Superior Spider-Man continues into Spider-Verse with Issue #33 of his series. Read my recap and review for my thoughts on Otto’s crusade through time and space.
The comic begins with another Spider-Man being hunted down by the douche in the mask with the energy halberd. He shanks him only to learn this one was a cyborg and he brought with him a little help in the form of the Superior Spider-Man and his colleagues of anti-heroes. They pin him down and Spider-Girl and Assassin Spider want to finish him while the rest are hesitant, until Otto tells them that comes after the interrogation.
The dude tells them that his kind kills their kind, and they should pray they don’t meet his family before busting out of the containment field from overloading it. They hammer him, but he doesn’t go down. Even after Spider-Girl jams a metal pipe through him and Assassin Spider blows him up, things only get worse as two more show up and wound Six-Armed Spider-Man and Cyborg Spider. The hunters are Karn, Brix, and Bora and they force the others to retreat, but not before Karn is injured by Spider-Monkey because the Bora threw her knives and they basically start beating on one another.
The Spider-Men are more than a little distraught at the new arrivals, but Otto leaves out to give himself time to think lamenting that they are mostly variations of Peter Parker and he’s a one of a kind special and that may not be enough in the long run. But he won’t simply run away because his Anna Marie might get caught in the crossfire if he tries, so he goes and assigns the Spiders in his army to different tasks. As for Assassin Spider and Spider-Girl, he takes them aside and mentions they may have to commit genocide to win and the others might disapprove, but those two will do whatever it takes to survive and acknowledge it as their side of the comic ends.
We then skip to Earth-1771 where Karn of the Inheritors goes against not some mortal totem of the Spider Essence, but a god of it who poisons him down to the soul. Karn recalls that centuries ago, in Universe 000 he and his family, including Morlun, are attacking the Master Weaver who weaves the web of life and destiny. The weaver hampers them, but does not fear Karn who he calls the Chosen One as he was the only one who took no pleasure in death, but wished to build and not destroy.
He hesitates at the words, as he was only there to prove his worth to his mother. But his mother jumped the gun and got killed for it, taking away the one person who showed him love. His father and siblings captured the Master Weaver and harnessed its power to travel through the multi-verse, while putting a mask on him to mark his shame and send him to a new dimension to hunt forever until he would earn his place back amongst his family.
He then jumps back to the present and draws strength from the god, stating it only makes him a more filling meal. He sees his pain as unending, hoping that with each portal he takes one will lead him home.
Okay, review time….
Well, nice to see Otto’s ego hasn’t deflated. Assassin Spider and Spider-Girl are clearly his supporters and we can see they’re the ones who will back him with anything he does as long as they survive. Karn’s past was surprisingly somber, leaving me conflicted. On one hand, he’s murdering Spider-Men left and right. On the other, he was unfortunate to have been raised by those bastards….
Issue gets a 5 out of 5.
Twilit Dreams Circle 