Sunday, June 11, 2006

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man #9 - Marvel

First of all, if you've read any of my stuff, you know that I'm a huge fan of Spider-man. I'm also a fan of Peter David (writer), and Mike Wieringo (artist). However, with that being said, this story is just muddled. When I started reading this, I skipped the recap page, because you all know how much I hate 'em. I got 5 or 6 pages into the book, and had no idea what was going on. This is, as I mention in another review, a forced history or continuity. But with this one, maybe not so much forced, as jammed down my throat. They're trying to explain the Hobgoblin from . . . . 2211? How he, sorry she, had abducted the Spider-man from 2099, in an otherwise completely forgettable Spider-man special from 1995, and brought him back to meet the original Spider-man, for some forgettable reason. That was the first and only time that Hobgoblin 2211 was seen. Never seen again in Spider-man 2099, or anywhere else. Now, his, or her, history, which really hasn't happened yet, is being shoved down our throat so that this HG can be forced into Peter's continuity. It's also going to force a bunch of Spider-man geeks, unfortunately myself included, to jump on E-bay and start looking for this special that probably wasn't worth the $2 or $3 it cost the first time it came out. Which is going to make us pay $5 - $10 for a book that the only reason we want it is to have a complete continuity. Thanks!!
Thanks, for that headache. And, to top it off, I really do like time travel stories. This one, is just way to muddled. It leaves a lot more questions than it answers. It also muddies it up by, somehow, having HG cross some other dimension and not only come back to our time himself, err herself, but somehow, for some reason, dragging Ben Parker back with her from some other dimension. Did that make sense? Now, add to that, what looks like a "Spider-corps" from the future are actually "timespinners" whom "the universe owes for our efforts, a thousand times over." And after a long drawn out dramatic scene with the "spinners", where basically we get a whining version of what their job is, why they do it, and everyone's reason for questioning their viability, someone finds HG in the past and one of the "spinners" remarks, "That's a relief. Five more minutes of mea culpas, I would've been ready to change time myself." I couldn't have said it better myself. If I could change time I'd go back and erase this story from our history.

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