So...That just Happened; a Spoiler-Free Review of Amazing Spider-Man #698 - Updated with Spoilers at the bottom

Now, I've read Spider-Man for a while.  I weathered the later parts of the JMS run, yes I am talking about Gwen Stacy/Norman Osbourne's kids.  Hell, one of my fondest comic shop memories was being a boy when the final issue of the Clone Saga and summarily shitting on it for a solid hour with older, cooler customers.  I enjoyed much of the post Brand New Day run.  I stopped reading at about Spider Island because I wanted to lighten my pull.  Anyway, I would say that the revelations made in ASM #698 rival those earlier ones.  Before I get into the vitriol though, I will say that as a writer, fake in my case, I understand where Slott is coming from.  Comic books thrive on new directions.  They're fictional characters, and the big reveal makes sense given events of the book, and the fact that it's a fucking funny books, so rules of what have you are arbitrary.  I mean the twist does make sense given the focus of the last year or two of the book, which I've skimmed.

Yup

However, as a fan of Spider-Man though; I absolutely hate every last fucking thing about it.  I loathe this new direction.  I'm hoping that this was an attempt to break the internet to push sales up for #700.  I do.  As yet again, it seems like another cheap fucking shock tactic that'll be sustainable for maybe 6-12 months of stories, until normalcy has returned.  Now, this may seem harsh as I'm getting mildly irate about the fate of fictional characters, but it's more than that.  I'm bothered that we all know how this is going to work out.  You troll the core fanbase; they get irked, as is happening here; this gains some legitimate "organic" "legitimate" media coverage; you get non fans into the stores; you get a six month bump; the "nerds", myself included come back to the book, and we repeat.  I mean it's really that well it sounds like an abusive relationship really.  And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.  But it's just an irksome, inglorious way to take things.  Who knows, I may be wrong; it happens, constantly; this entire blog is a monument to that.  I don't know; maybe this is the greatest thing ever, but my gut reaction is that it' just another cheap fucking twist to do get people, more popular ones, obviously, to do this very thing that I'm doing.  It's a vicious cycle.  Seems like a cheap, but rational and prefaced but just dirty feeling, twist that we'll go through for like 6 months-year.  Honestly, I think this may be one of the more reasonable responses to this that you'll see come tomorrow. So the verdict: I can respect the bold writing choices made by Slott; as a fan of Spider-Man I fucking hate this. I just hope this is a swerve before the new series.  Please?


UPDATE - SPOILERS BELOW









Yeah - Dock Ock switches bodies with Peter Parker; Parker dies in the feeble Doc Ock body.  Octavius is now Spider-Man; he's going to bang MJ.  Octavius tried to marry/bang Aunt May.  Weird.  Not sure how much juice is there. 

Even though it's All-New; you've already read it before - All-New X-Men #1

And now it's time to strut.

Inflammatory titling aside, the reason that you've read this all before is that frankly the majority of the content has been repeatedly plastered on far more legitimate comic book blogs.  That's really the main hindrance of enjoyment.  I mean the comic book itself is engaging, but you've seen most of it, save five pages, before, so that's the main detriment to enjoyment.    Aside from this book being light on unrevealed content, it's a pretty decent read and a novel concept.  That's really it without getting into too many specifics.  The art is crisp, and the characters don't, in my estimation, come across as too Bendis-y, (i.e. middle aged New York Seinfeld character).  I mean it's worth your four bucks if you're looking for another X book to get into, and if you read comic books like me and are a compulsive, borderline, hoarder.  So there you really have it.  Not too much to grouse about, and unfortunately, nothing that surprising, kinda like AVX #1. That's really it.  No need to endlessly pontificate. 

So Where are we Going NOW!... Wait did you get that? I don't know...may have been a little subtle... the other idea was Marvel MEOW!

So, as I did to mild fanfare back in the days of Myspace, in my salad days, I'm pretty much going to spoil semi obvious things or make wild speculations about unrevealed things about comic books that have yet to come out.  Now, you may be wondering where my skills of ratiocination come from, mainly Phoenix Wright games and tv mysteries of the 80's.  So without further ado, to spoil the unspoiled, which is difficult in our day and time.  So we'll start with the only one that nobody is going to call.

Avengers

So, who's that guy in the back you may ask?  Well, there's really just one logical choice for it.  First, look at the hair.  It's dreadlocks or something of that nature.  You know what, I don't feel like drawing this out with a bunch of cute little questions and shit of that ilk.  Really no sense in drawing it out.  They're coming our of a portal; he's got dreads; they're trying to add new blood to the line up (i/e Cannonball and Sunspot) and it's obviously Eden Fesi from Secret Warriors, which was written by Avengers author Johnathon Hickman, and also a pretty good read if you haven't picked it up.  IT can get a little dense with all of the insane plot twists, I mean as dense as a cape and tight espionage book gets, but it's a fun read with solid art and characterization that really plays with the universe well and has some pretty neat moments.  So yeah.  There's that.  

All New X-Men

So far it's looking like it's just some new characters in the background.  Probably with some tangential connection with the franchise.  As the girl with the obvious phoenix attire (yes, I'm speculating on a sash on a funny book cover, my former professors and employers are rolling in their respective chairs) is not Rachel Grey,  well who is it?

You've really only got two options then: Hope and also teenage Jean Grey.  First one makes some sense as with the whole summer event book and the phoenix thing, and the sash.  It's a logical-ish call as this is a place for kinda logic.  Teenage Jean Grey though is the more interesting choice as well the leads of the two x-men books are both fascinated with dead gingers, but our nation still mentions Lindsay Lohan, so it's understandable (I'm a time traveler from six months in the future). The other reason that it works, honestly, is based around the potential storyline aspects of it, and by that I mean teenage Jean Grey after learning about her many myriad deaths and being dressed as a dominatrix and marrying a herb who mind bangs a woman behind her back is like nertz to um living through this and jumps ship to probably Uncanny as it's more interesting what with the whole broken up Scott and Emma, so there you have it.  Also, there's really no correlation of thing sin the present of comics on some things (I'm talking about Damion Hellstrom who is a hero and a villain and dead all in the same month).  So the space time doesn't really matter and having them float around in the present indefinitely is kinda neat conceptually.

Update - I'm totally fucking wrong.  It's some girl with a sash and time powers.  Doesn't even have red hair in the thing.  

X-Men Legacy

I'm more excited than I thought I'd be for this one.  I've always liked Legion as much as you can as he only showed up every so often back in the day and would go coma, trying to kill Wolfsbane, unwriting history etc. every so often.  Anyway, the whole multiple personalities, powers, psych prison thing is kinda cool.  And for the new series it should also be cool as, obviously, the gimmick is now changed to be the well received, but cancelled Moon Knight reboot of a couple years ago. In that book, Marc Spector vacillated between the personalities of Wolverine, Spider-Man, and I want to say Cap instead of the given personalities he had established which is a novel twist on it and more compelling to the less well versed fan, as we weren't all in middle school freaking out over Stephen Platt's art on it and glancing at it.  Anyway, 

So, I mean this is pretty obviously going to be dude controlling the many farcical characters in his head by jumping from the personalities of Wolverine, Magneto, Cable, and Beast.  I mean it's kinda right there.  Or not.  I'm just trying to kill time until 5 at this point.


Superior Spider-Man

So the slip on that one is that it's Miguel O'Hara from Spider-Man 2099, which is actually the most palatable option really.    Unless it's 616 Miles Morales, who if you read Spider-Men (which was actually pretty good) does exist.  Although that might be a bit too much.

And on that note I'm done for right now.  Here are a couple of quick ones though.

Iron Man

A lot of people really don't care for Greg Land and are quite vocal about it.  Just saying.  Read issue #1 going to give it an arc before passing judgement.

Deadpool

It's Deadpool all right.  Now the question is to see if it stays fresh or gets grating.  So far though it's got Brian Posehn and Tony Moore, and that's awesome.  Even though the last series lost it's way after a while, Deadpool is either nifty or grating; it's one or the other; there is no middle ground.  So far we're at nifty.

Uncanny X-Force

It's a tall order to fill.  I'll give it a shot, but I don't know if it's going to live up to the last series.  Also, the only real question is if Cluster is a girl clone, as Fantomex does do the cloning, or EVA in a suit.

So there you go.  Comic Book fever.  Catch it.  I guess. It's better than Magic: The Herpening.  Yes, I just made that up.  But seriously, they make you buy new cards every year.  Glad that I've spent this many 0 dollars on it since the late 90's.  I'm a freeloader and will just borrow your deck.  I digress.  #NERDSHIT.

   

Party like it's 2005...kinda - AVX Retrospective.

As the leaves change, so to does the landscape of comic bookery.  It is inevitable.  Every year, every thing changes.  It is the mutability of the beast.  Before us, it transmutes into a chimera.  This sloughing beast has many names: New 52, Dark Reign, and now...um Marvel Now.  But6 how did we get here?  What was the impetus for this monumental return to a prior status quo?  Punching space gods in both the face and genitals; that's how.  But how does all of this interstellar nard punching make us feel?  Well, to answer that you can start your own blog I guess, and I'll read it fair, illusory reader.  Now though we will deal with how I feel.

It was okay I guess

I mean it didn't leave the typical flavor of carrion, from pummeled equine, that a lot of events give me.  Part of this was just due to the fact that it didn't really up my pull, as I was reading most of the books anyway.  The other part was that there was less truly ancillary filler. Granted, there was a lot of expounding on the meteoric crackle of fists between say The Thing and Namor, but there was less of say, Jackpot, fighting a Skrull that was a hodgepodge of B-list Spider Villains.  So, yes, that's a plus I guess.  Pretty much, these comic super events are typically a bloated mass of vestigial tales, bloat, and laconic droning.  This event at least stayed on topic for the most part with the tie-ins.  Sure, some of it was kind of filler, but it was competent filler usually, and it all dealt with the main conflict, more or less.  As for the plot, they probably could have tightened the thing up a scooch, as the most interesting concept, beloved X-men making the slow burn from magnanimous cyphers of an ill defined space god to fascistic, man thonged, tyrants was left on the side for more punching.  THe reason for this is that well after the X-Men made that full, inevitable, heel turn you knew where this was going.

 

  Sisqo saw all of this coming

 As for the events within, there have been some decent moments and interactions sure.  I do look forward to some of the new books coming out of this, but yeah pretty much this:  Charles Xavier died way more convincingly, given ephemerally, in Messiah Complex; the Phoenix lost way more meaningfully in um The Dark Phoenix Saga; The Thing punched Namor way harder in the 60's when men were men, and women knew their place.  I mean, yes, characters come from literally out of left field in the last issue, and I mean I almost called the resolution to it Spoiler it's just that they didn't say "Fine, More Mutants" but "More Mutants" and "No More Phoenix" as it's good to be the Deus Ex Machina.

We all would have preferred it ending with "Fine, More Maggot"...No?

You Should buy AVX Versus #6

It's got Squirrel Girl and Pixie, and Domino beats up Rulk.



So...

In summation, AVX was who we thought it was.  It was Avengers and X-men punching each other and eventually coming together to fight a common enemy, some of the X-men.  Wakanda got leveled; Hope knows Kung-Fu; Spider-Man can take a punch to the face; fine, More Mutants; Cyclops' arc has made him both more interesting over the years/ kind of a dick;  I guess as the heavy handed allegories for civil rights go, that makes Wolverine MLK Jr?   I don't even know any more.  So, in closing, it was better than last year's events, as Fear Itself was instantly retconned after publication/ inconsistent and Flahpoint, seriously what the fuck just happened?  Wait?  What?  Sot that's what you missed in AVX.   

No, Seriously, what the fuck?  I still don't, what?