Spider-Man: Back in Black

Collects Amazing Spider-Man #539-543 and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #17-23 and Annual #1.

Ok, let me start out by saying that Spider-Man is my all time favorite super hero, and a mere cameo of Spidey will bump the quality of any comic book up a notch or two for me. That said, I don't like creative teams on the Spidey-books fucking things up (you know, "With great power, comes great responsibility" etc.), so I can be critical of them as well. You send the X-Men to alternate universes, strip them of their powers and do whatever you want, but don't mess with my Spider-Man! Ok, enough with the warnings.

Spider-Man: Back in Black takes over where Civil War left Spider-Man; that is, on the run from the law and with aunt May bleeding from a gun shot wound on the door step of a rental bungalow. So, a little worse than usual...

The idea of 'Back in Black' (besides the obvious one of coinciding with Spider-Man 3), was to put Spidey in a situation that would strain him psychologically to such an extreme that he would become really pissed. And stop cracking jokes. So that the reader would know that Spidey is really pissed. Also, he's wearing his black costume again, just in case someone had failed to realize that he is really, really pissed. As such, the 'Back in Black' event is not really a cross-over, it's more of a coordinated theme between the various Spider-Man books. I guess this is a good idea, because crossovers with different creative teams don't always turn out so good (remember 'The Other'...?).

I guess the Amazing Spider-Man arc could be considered the main arc, since this is where Spidey hunts down the man responsible for shooting aunt May. The quality of Straczynski's writing goes up and down a lot. Some of it is really good and some of it stinks really bad. I would put this somewhere in the middle. The story is basically just Spidey beating up henchmen while getting closer to the main villain, and sometimes he and MJ watches over aunt May and think dark thoughts. It doesn't really move anything and when it's all over nothing has changed. Spidey is just a bit more pissed than usual, and cracks fewer jokes than usual. Maybe letting aunt May die at the end would actually have made it more interesting, but as we all now, aunt May is the toughest woman in the MU, so that's just not gonna happen.

!!! SPOILER ALERT BEGIN !!!
The master mind behind the shooting is, of course, the Kingpin, and the buildup is done in such a way as to make the reader think that now, finally, the Kingpin is back and ready to rumble. But when it comes to the showdown it turns out that he is not ready to rumble, and he gets kicked around by Spidey, in a way that makes him look like a snotty-nosed, girly sissy crying for her mother. Considering the bouts these two have had in the past, I think this is very uncharacteristic, and I think it's a cheap shot introduced just to make Peter seem as pissed as the reader can possibly imagine.
!!! SPOILER ALERT END !!!

Ron Garney's art, however, I really enjoyed. He has a very solid style that suits Spider-Man perfectly, his action sequences are good and he succeeds in keeping the art moody enough to go with the story. His style reminds me a little bit of John Romita Jr., except less gritty if that makes sense.

The FNSM arc pretty much just continues where the last tpb stopped. Peter David doesn't seem to be too concerned about keeping up with Civil War and what else is going on in the MU, which can be quite refreshing at times. However, it does seem like some of what is in here wasn't really his plan. For example, in the first story line David has Spidey team up with Sandman, which, to me, looks like a plot twist that could have come from above. With Sandman out of the way, he moves on to the conclusion of the Arrow-storyline, which has been simmering in the book for a while.

I actually think FNSM started out really well, but this tpb definitely sees the low point of the series so far, and the reason for this is to found both in the writing and the art. David fails to make the characters interesting enough for the reader to actually care about them, and in Spider-Man this is an important point. I like the idea of using classic Spider-Man characters like Flash and Betty, but they should be kept in character. I don't mind the author digging deeper into their personalities (they did tend to be a little one dimensional in the Stan Lee days...), but that does not seem to be what's going on here. Also, David continues the theme of Spider-Man's supernatural origin, introduced by Straczynski which so far culminated with 'The Other', and I've decided I don't like this theme. Can't we just have Spider-Man having been bitten by a radioactive spider, and then let it be at that?

!!! SPOILER ALERT BEGIN !!!
In the second story line Betty Brant ends up shooting Arrow aka. Ero (because she's so sexy!) with a shot gun, and then hooks up with Flash Thompson. This, to me, is just using old characters for the sake of easy recognition.
!!! SPOILER ALERT END !!!

All I have to say about the art is that I fail to see anything interesting about Todd Nauck's drawing, and that's about it. Still not as bad as Liefeld though...

Just when you think Peter David has lost his knack for writing, though, this tpb also includes FNSM Annual #1, which proves all would be-doubters wrong. The two stories in here are very well told, and the first one does deliver some of the exploratory characterization of classic characters (in this case the Sandman) that I wrote about above. Also, the art (by Ronan Cliquet and Colleen Doran) is excellent, and this is probably the best part of the book. Too bad it's so short...

All in all, this book did disappoint me some. I think the basic idea of 'Back in Black' is good, but the execution just lacks some, especially the FNSM part. The ASM arc sort of stands still, and FNSM arc moves ahead, but not in any interesting direction. The FNSM annual does make things better, but not enough to push the score to average.

4/10