Released during, as the title suggests, the Superior Spider-Man era, Superior Foes of Spider-Man revolves around a bunch of second-tier (at best) Spider-Man enemies, trying to pull off big scores as the "Sinister Six." Bullcrap. You've got Boomerang, a Beetle, Speed Demon, and the Shocker. They're the Sinister Syndicate! Spider-Ock never appears. Actual Spider-Man appears only in flashback, although Boomerang is revealed in the last issue to be telling this whole story to a guy named "Peter".
That Boomerang is narrating (those are his purple caption boxes) is important to keep in mind, because otherwise you'd be wondering how a guy who once thought trick boomerangs made him a match for the Incredible Hulk was managing to out-maneuver so many people. Once you allow for ~90% of it being bullshit, everything makes more sense. This was not something I managed to keep in mind when I was buying the comic as it came out, so I'd get annoyed at how often Boomerang would seem to skate clear or danger, or how Shocker got treated as the pathetic joke. You gotta have better villains on the team than this crew for that to be accurate.
Which is not to say Boomerang doesn't get made to look like a fool on more than one occasion. He has a humiliating run-in with Bullseye, the Chameleon freaks him out by impersonating the Punisher, and his own crew chucks him out. So he anonymously sics Luke Cage and Iron Fist on them, to teach them a lesson.
The book is really one long caper flick, with all the double-crosses, triple crosses, fakeouts, and surprise reveals you would expect. Spencer gets a lot of run out of characters being able to impersonate other people, or just the general weirdness that would exist in the Marvel Universe. The decapitated (but still functional) head of Silvermane is involved. An alleged painting of Doom's uncovered face is involved. A support group for super-villains trying to go straight in involved.
The book involves a lot of panels of characters arguing, talking, threatening, that sort of thing. Lieber's good at body language and expressions, giving Boomerang an air of undeserved arrogance. He throws in voice balloons with little pictographs as shorthand for whatever the characters are thinking about. Works well with the body language to flesh out the characters. Especially since the Beetle in this book was a new character, and I don't think Overdrive got much depth when he was introduced in Brand New Day. Or maybe he did, I didn't read the issues where he appeared.
Lieber keeps the layouts straightforward for the most part, though there are a couple of nice set-ups when the Syndicate storm someone's hideout and Lieber draws it as a cross-section of all the various rooms of death they're having to fight through. Not Boomerang of course, he sent them in the hard way while he took an elevator. Again, it's hard to believe he managed this without the others killing him, but he's telling the story, so things probably didn't go the way he says, if it happened at all.
I started buying Superior Foes in late 2013, the same time as the Duggan/Posehn Deadpool, in the early stages of a stretch where I bought more stuff from Marvel than I had since 2007. The book double-shipped a couple of times, relying on fill-in artists. Those were, unsurprisingly, the weakest issues, but Marvel just can't help itself. Superior Foes ended in late 2014, after 17 issues, not even surviving long enough to die in the mass kill-off of the line for Hickman's Secret Wars.
Spencer went on to make Boomerang Peter Parker's roommate during his run on Amazing Spider-Man, but I didn't read it, so who knows how that went. The new Beetle's gotten some limited run, though she doesn't seem to get treated with much respect. You'd think a skilled (and unscrupulous) lawyer, who is also a super-villain with a suit of powered armor, who is also the apple of her terrifying mob boss father's eye, would get played up a little more.
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