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bstratton's review
3.0
I never read this series when it was being published, and I was really looking forward to reading it, as the Ditko-Lee era of Spider-Man might be my favorite run of comics of all time. I went in expecting that it would read like missing chapters of that story… and that is not at all what I got.
There is some lip service paid to the continuity of the original issues, and nothing “breaks” their continuity, but many of the supporting characters and antagonists are original characters created specifically for this series. Some of them wind up supposedly having a profound effect on young Peter/Spidey’s life, which of course they can’t, not really.
And many of these characters just feel visually and tonally wrong for the era. A lot of that is due to Pat Olliffe’s art, which is perfectly fine, but it is so specifically 90’s that it instantly dates the book and dispels any illusion that these stories are taking place between the panels of Lee and Ditko’s work.
Given Busiek’s work on books like Marvels and Astro City and Avengers Forever, I expected a lot more from this. Instead, it’s just a bunch of serviceable Spidey stories drawn in a McFarlane-lite art style. And that’s all well and good, but that’s pretty much the definition of every Spider-Man story of the era. I have to wonder if it was remembered so fondly by readers at the time just because the alternative was the interminable Clone Saga, and this series featured the “real” Spidey that they had greater affection for.
It really does feel like a “you had to be there” thing. It hasn’t aged badly, exactly, but it does feel like the Amazing Spider-Man of the late 1960s/early 1970s, where nothing felt particularly inspired or consequential.
There is some lip service paid to the continuity of the original issues, and nothing “breaks” their continuity, but many of the supporting characters and antagonists are original characters created specifically for this series. Some of them wind up supposedly having a profound effect on young Peter/Spidey’s life, which of course they can’t, not really.
And many of these characters just feel visually and tonally wrong for the era. A lot of that is due to Pat Olliffe’s art, which is perfectly fine, but it is so specifically 90’s that it instantly dates the book and dispels any illusion that these stories are taking place between the panels of Lee and Ditko’s work.
Given Busiek’s work on books like Marvels and Astro City and Avengers Forever, I expected a lot more from this. Instead, it’s just a bunch of serviceable Spidey stories drawn in a McFarlane-lite art style. And that’s all well and good, but that’s pretty much the definition of every Spider-Man story of the era. I have to wonder if it was remembered so fondly by readers at the time just because the alternative was the interminable Clone Saga, and this series featured the “real” Spidey that they had greater affection for.
It really does feel like a “you had to be there” thing. It hasn’t aged badly, exactly, but it does feel like the Amazing Spider-Man of the late 1960s/early 1970s, where nothing felt particularly inspired or consequential.