"Hope He Didn't Expect You to Monologue," in Ben Reilly: The Scarlet Spider #5, by Peter David (writer), Mark Bagley (penciler), John Dell (inker), Jason Keith (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)
This series spun out of the Clone Conspiracy storyline in Amazing Spider-Man, where Ben Reilly was the 28th Ben Reilly the Jackal cloned, and he'd watched the other 27 be killed by the Jackal. So he killed him and became the Jackal and cloned a bunch of dead characters, and some other stuff happened and I don't know.
That's not a promising start, but I've always liked Ben Reilly as this character who resented having a particular morality - Peter Parker's - imposed on him by virtue of being a clone, and struggling against it. This Ben is much more amoral than '90s Ben was, willing to lie or make all sorts of absurd promises if it saves his neck, willing to demand money from people he saves. But he will save people, sometimes.
So there was potential there, and Mark Bagley was the artist, so I was on board. Bagley always is able to sell the emotion of a situation, and he can draw a solid fight scene (although he seems to skimp on backgrounds more during the fights than I remember from the past). It's not so much page layouts, just that the way things are laid out, you can easily tell how each action flows into the next. The hits have force behind them.
Unfortunately, after 5 issues, Bagley got switched to a Venom title, I think, and Wil Sliney took over art chores. It took one issue for me to decide that was a no-go. The flow of action wasn't there, and there were too many panels where the expressions on character's faces looked odd. Where it didn't convey what the scene was calling for, or like the art fell into the uncanny valley, where it's trying to realistic, but not pulling it off.
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