THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #25

Dan Slott wrote The Amazing Spider-Man for like ten years or something crazy, so I suppose it wasn't a surprise that for years there were angry fans desperate for him to leave. I wanted him to leave as well, though I didn't hate his run, I actually enjoyed it. I just thought that ten years was long enough for him showcase everything he'd ever do on the book and it was never a great book, just a sometimes entertaining, good book. Well I guess we all should have been careful what we wished for, because Nick Spencer has been the new writer on the book for a year now and it's officially worse than Slott's run. The best thing I can say about Spencer's run so far is that Ryan Ottley, who used to draw Invincible until it ended, is the perfect artist for Spider-Man and has knocked every issue out of the park. The bad part of that equation is that this book is bi-monthly, meaning Ottley doesn't draw every issue. #25 is a 60 page, $7.99 book and Ottley only drew 25 pages of it. And, not surprisingly, those 25 pages are the only good part. You would think a #25 issue, especially since it's triple size and costs more than a kid can probably afford (and comic books are supposed to be for kids, right?), would be super special and something big would happen. Nope. The biggest thing that happens in this is that Mary Jane, who is back dating Peter, becomes famous again. Wow. Really pulling out the big guns, Spencer. There's also a new villain that's been lurking around the past year that seems to finally be coming to the forefront. The problem is that the villain is fairly lame. He can bring back people from the dead and kind of looks like a mummy in a cloak. There's also bugs that crawl around the rooms he's in. The one huge problem with him is that he talks in dumb, supposed to be clever/funny Spencer speak, which robs him of any sort of menace. Spencer can be a good writer, but usually only when he's doing independent stuff at Image like his early work on Morning Glories and his hilarious, buddy cop comedy, The Fix. His work as Marvel has not been very good. He wrote a memorable run on Captain America when Captain America joined Hydra...but that was memorably bad. And so far...his run on The Amazing Spider-Man has been forgettable. The big storyline he had so far was a new Kraven's Last Hunt that was like that Ice-T movie, Surviving the Game, and The Hunger Games but under a dome in Central Park. That wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly exciting, fresh, new, vibrant, thrilling, super entertaining, fun, or, really, anything great that you want a comic book to be. This book is bland and there's no way around it. Slott lasted ten years. Let's hope that Spencer doesn't make it past two. *