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A review by hairbear4298
Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky
3.0
I really do appreciate this concept of aging up superheroes in real time and wish that all of the famous superheroes had a similar treatment because of how interesting it would be to see them develop as people. Zdarsky does a very interesting thing here by not just aging up Spider-Man but by also introducing various seminal events in the character’s history into the story in real time from when they were written into the comics. For example, Secret Wars was an event that occurred in Marvel Comics in the 80’s and so in this story when they get to the 80’s that is a major event in Peter’s life. Unfortunately I think giving Peter too much to do in his old age actually hinders the story for me a bit.
The first half of this book was nearly perfect and had such a great flow to each of the stories being told along with some really interesting tie-in to real events and potential alternate histories (the Vietnam War and a real war with the USSR). In the second half of this book, things certainly lose a bit of steam for me. While Peter was in his youth it made sense to pair him with nonstop introductions of various events in the character’s mythos, but as he reached his 50’s it felt far too fast paced to be throwing all of these things at him in just a few pages. It started to feel like a quick SparkNotes version of those events rather than the real thing, which could have been the intent but it just didn’t work for me. I appreciated the ending of the book though and did think that the scene towards the end with Aunt May was very sweet.
Side note: I actually really do love that Iron Man was a total warmongering asshole in this story and that they sort of imply that he is this universe’s Donald Rumsfeld as he is the Secretary of Defense post-9/11. Also, I would read an entire series of Captain America defying orders and attempting to straighten up the situation in Vietnam, awesome stuff there.
The first half of this book was nearly perfect and had such a great flow to each of the stories being told along with some really interesting tie-in to real events and potential alternate histories (the Vietnam War and a real war with the USSR). In the second half of this book, things certainly lose a bit of steam for me. While Peter was in his youth it made sense to pair him with nonstop introductions of various events in the character’s mythos, but as he reached his 50’s it felt far too fast paced to be throwing all of these things at him in just a few pages. It started to feel like a quick SparkNotes version of those events rather than the real thing, which could have been the intent but it just didn’t work for me. I appreciated the ending of the book though and did think that the scene towards the end with Aunt May was very sweet.
Side note: I actually really do love that Iron Man was a total warmongering asshole in this story and that they sort of imply that he is this universe’s Donald Rumsfeld as he is the Secretary of Defense post-9/11. Also, I would read an entire series of Captain America defying orders and attempting to straighten up the situation in Vietnam, awesome stuff there.