Spider-Man #700

With the new fashion of stopping comic book series and renumbering them with issue #1, not many comics get to issue #700. So: it's a tribute to Spider-Man, Stan Lee's greatest creation, that it has done so. Next month I believe we'll be getting The Superior Spider-Man instead, with... someone else in the role. Just in case there is anyone here who cares about what happens and hasn't read #700 yet, I avoid the name. It is someone any Spider-Man reader would know.

Now, I haven't been reading Spider-Man much in years, though I love his appearances in the many comics I read that have him turn up. Avengers, Avenging Spider-Man, and so on.

And there's a lot of buzz about this one. My friends are ranting, just as they ranted over the Spider-Man story One More Day, that annulled Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane Watson. Now, I, too, wish they had kept that marriage; as far as I can tell, Peter Parker's adventures after that issue have not been as interesting as those when Mary Jane was still married to him. All the Civil War series. That was great.

I had expected it to be a little like the death of Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-Man, where Peter died and another young hero took over the role as Spider-Man. As a sales ploy, it worked once: so I saw that as a sort of trial run for the Real Thing.

I was so wrong.

This? In an issue that was sometimes hokey and sometimes moving, they did the unexpected and turned the story on its head. I like that. Shakes things up. I believe we will be having a run of Superior Spider-Man, so that will be the status quo for a while, and then Amazing Spider-Man, or some such title, will resume with the return - I hope - of Peter Parker.

How, you may ask? Isn't Peter dead? Well, no, the whole point is that someone else's body died with Peter's consciousness in it. So Peter himself didn't die; or if he did, a comic in which minds are transferred between people and radioactive spiders bring on superpowers, anything can happen.

This reminds me of Dark Avengers, where the Avengers team is replaced by villains playing the roles of the heroes. That made for some damned fine comics in the hands of the likes of Brian Michael Bendis. Sadly, Dan Slott is no Bendis, but he writes a lively story.

I really liked the follow-up story in Avenging Spider-Man #15.1, where we get the new Spider-Man dripping jealousy of the old, and full of self-congratulation and self-hate. Partly because I like Chris Yost's writing a little more than Dan Slott's, and largely because I like Paco Medina as artist much more than Humberto Ramos.

I got Spider-Man #700 out of curiosity, when my friends started ranting. I expected to hate it. Instead, I found myself enjoying it. It isn't "more of the same", it's an interesting twist. Sales gimmick? Sure it was, especially at a whopping $7.99 U.S. cover price.

One thing I like is that Peter Parker's friends can't tell he isn't Peter any more, though if he keeps calling Mary Jane "woman" in that contemptuous way, she's going to catch on pretty fast.

Yeah, I enjoyed that. I wasn't going to start reading Spider-Man - 'cause I am already buying too many titles, and it is Slott and Ramos doing it still, and ... and ... well, maybe just the next one, hmm? We'll see how it goes.