Found all three books from this week, plus one from two weeks ago. So let's kick things off with the nostalgia titles from Marvel.
Hama puts several pieces in motion right off. There is a Dr. Malheur who is performing some sort of experiments involving monkeys out in the jungle for some guy with a spider tattoo on his face. There's a General Coy roaming the general after a bounty. SHIELD is keeping an eye on things from a Helicarrier. There's a Soviet plane wrecked in the jungle, and two mutants who have also been "enhanced" who may be the subjects of the bounty.
And into all that drops Patch. Literally, because after Fury tells him to butt out, Logan jumps out of his buddy's plane - without a parachute. He runs into the two hiding and gets cut up and left for dead. I know it stretches credulity that a lot of people don't recognize Logan just because he puts on an eye patch, but he actually brings out the claws during the fight and Gimel and Beth still don't recognize him. I figured Logan did enough Cold War secret agent crap he'd be very well known to even fugitive Soviet agents/soldiers, just as someone they might have to kill.
But I should know better than to start trying to untangle the layers of Logan's backstory at this point. Anyway, my initial impression is the thread about Malheur and his experiments in unrelated to everything with General Coy and Nick Fury. I'm not sure which thing is the reason why The Prince asked Patch to go investigate. I'm unclear enough on the power structures of Madripoor to know whether Coy and Prince are rivals, associates or something else entirely. If rivals, then you figure Prince wants to know what the general's scouring the jungle for. But if the Prince is a crimeboss, then maybe it's the guy connected to the yakuza he's curious in.
Di Vito's art is his typical clean look. Underwood's inks add a little rough edge to what's kind of a pulp adventure, what with the spies and weird scientists and whatnot. The idea of Logan wandering a tropical jungle in a white tuxedo is a little silly, but the jacket's already being torn up, so it may not last long. I liked the full-page splash of Logan's descent to the forest floor, done as series of images of Logan falling and hitting tree limbs awkwardly. Cowles compliments it with Logan's scream stretched across a bunch of small speech balloons as he falls.
I'm sort of amused at placing the sound effect of Patch stabbing Beth's arm over the actual stabbing. I guess that is where the sound would emanate from, but it feels like they think they need to hide it. Although looking at the rest of the fight, Cowles seems to have other sound effects that also move on the arc of the attack. So maybe that's just the approach he (or Hama, or Di Vito) decided to go with it.
It's kind of weird, because I don't know that I'm interested in any of the characters so much as I am how Hama tries to tie all this together. Do the different threads even come together, or is it going to be a case of tying one off first, then moving to the next?
Ben fights Dr. Trainer, who once again knows who is under the Spider-Man mask. She seems to be angry that her father cared more about Ben than her, though Ben argues that isn't true. Then she vanishes and a decaying Kraven shows up. Who turns into a bunch of spiders. Edward narrowly saves Ben from those. Ben heads to Ravencroft, figuring if it's no Chameleon it must be Mysterio. Again, Mysterio got put in an asylum? He's not nuts, he's just a crook with an ego. Send him to regular prison.
Either, way, he says it isn't him, so Ben starts trying every other foe he can think of, hoping it's not the Jackal. Well, it's not Jackal, but it might be worse. Yes, it's the return of the Spider-clone absolutely nobody requested, Spidercide! The one that could shapeshift and stuff. Yeah, I tried really hard to forget he existed, too. So much so I did not know his body releases toxins that produce emotional responses. Unless Ben is being metaphorical about toxins permeating his mind, digging into the darkest caverns of his psyche. It's DeMatteis, it's a possibility.
Spidercide being a shapeshifter would seem to make him the likely culprit behind the first date serial killer, but that feels too neat at this point. Especially since Spidercide seems to be fixated on Ben, and was so clingy in his "John Diaz" identity Ben basically stopped hanging out with him. The notion he was going out on dates and charming people seems before killing them seems unlikely. But there also hasn't been any forward momentum on that thread, so I'm not sure DeMatteis can deal with it in two issues. If he intends to. Maybe Ben not solving it because he's been caught up in these mind games is going to be a point.
I'm curious about Ben's notion that, unlike Peter, he isn't motivated by guilt. Even though he is supposed to be Peter Parker at this point. The point being Ben's life on the road, trying to carve out some sort of existence for himself has forced him to move past that. Which makes a certain amount of sense. If Ben spent five years believing he was the clone, then he would have told himself what happened to Uncle Ben had nothing to do with him. He didn't exist when that burglar escaped, and would have worked hard to reject what he saw as Parker's influence.
Baldeon tries some horror stuff with Spidercide's shapeshifting. The spiders pouring out of Kraven's mouth as his head decays, plus some multi-faced, multi-limbed howling monstrosity near the end of the issue. I'm not his work can quite carry it off. Maybe more shadows, more left to the reader's imagination, would work. There's a panel of Ben lifting the multi-faced thing where we can only see outlines of eyes and teeth and a few limbs that's kind of creepy. Baldeon does do a good job of drawing those panels so that Ben feels trapped. As the spiders swarm him, the panels are tilting so it's like he's falling or being pulled down and the multi-thing tends to dominate the shared panels. It's all around him so that even when he's attacking it, it looms over him.
No comments:
Post a Comment