Zeb Wells

Ben Reilly -- Peter Parker's clone and the erstwhile Scarlet Spider -- returns to take up the mantle of Spider-Man on behalf of a corporate sponsor that has come into possession of the trademark. Conveniently, Peter Parker gets sidelined with a pesky coma while Reilly runs around getting the hang of the hero thang and his fancy new high tech suit and gadgets. The Daughters of the Dragon duo, Colleen Wing and Misty Knight, get shoehorned in as freelance employees of Beyond Corporation so they show more can train Reilly and look suspiciously at the very suspicious corporate leadership.

I skipped the Nick Spencer run of Spider-Man and thought this might be a jumping on point to revisit my old friend Pete, but, whoops, Pete is M.I.A. and Ben Reilly is no Peter Parker regardless of what any DNA test might say. And while Spencer is gone, this is a round-robin effort by four different writers and a half-dozen or more artists to produce a generic corporate comic book about a generic corporate superhero. So it's not a jumping-on point so much as a proceed-with-caution sign. show less

Bloody hell that was good. Dark and hella emotional but incredible to read. Perfect pacing, so much complexity and compromise in the pursuits of a nation, and, hey, you can't have an Inferno without... well, spoilers.

I'm not going to lie, I'm not a fan of Carnage. He always struck me as "it's Venom, but totally more hardcorez and gritty and people like gritty comics amirite buy me buy me buy me!". Moreover, this notion of a super-sadistic insane serial murderer just doesn't work in the Spiderman world for me. A villain like Carnage seems like he'd be a better foe for The Punisher, or Ghost Rider. Whenever you have Carnage basically murdering women and children and dogs and Spiderman making wisecracks show more while fighting him, the contrast just never worked for me, I think it's weird.

This book is no exception. In fact, I'd argue it's even worse in this vein. The art style, while absolutely beautiful and some of the best I've seen, is so dark and gritty, it once again seems like it belongs with Punisher, or maybe even Daredevil. But not Spiderman. It maybe could have worked if Spiderman was teamed up with one of those characters for this series, but instead he's teamed up with Iron Man of all people. Tonally, this whole thing just doesn't work for me.

Inconsistent tone aside, this book is only mediocre. Basically Carnage is back, though it takes multiple issues and jumping through a lot of increasing ridiculous hoops to get there. There's an interesting story about a doctor trying to help Shriek, and I enjoyed her story though I found the drawings over her to be needlessly sexualized (underwear, midriff-baring, the typical "we can just barely get away with this" type stuff).

The story takes a long time to get going, but once it does it never really rises above panel after panel of people fighting each other with occasionally "witty banter" (including one panel where Iron Man inaccurately claims he doesn't do banter). And then it's over too quickly, without exploring a lot of the more interesting stuff it had going for it.

Pretty disappointing over all. I'd probably recommend skipping this one, particularly since it seems to pull from a pretty deep Carnage mythology that is only barely explained). show less

As sometimes happens with my reviews when the book is somehow of personal value for me instead of just something I read and enjoyed, this review ended up being a story, of sorts. It's all pretty relevant to my thoughts on this volume (and the two following it), I think, but some of you may want to skim, I suppose.

At one time, I owned most of the original New Mutants comic book series. I loved that series, and I loved many of the characters. There were some minor annoyances, like the fact the show more Marvel X-books editors evidently required their writers (for a few years) to have characters blurt out explanations of their powers at least once in every issue where they used those powers, but getting used to strange tropey tics like that often helps make them recede into the background, and allows one to just enjoy the story -- at least when the underlying stories and characters are great. In that regard, and in most of the art, the New Mutants series was an underrated gem among comic books in those days.

Rob Liefield ruined all that, at least for a while, and my parents gave away all my comic books while I was in Europe. That broke my comic book habit for years, though I have gotten back into comics for a little while at a time, several times since then. I eventually came to the conclusion that, with the way comic book publishers have irrevocably shattered any sense of ongoing continuity in their stories with universe reboots and retcons, I should just buy collected works when they seem worthwhile so I can have complete, high quality story arcs (such as this example), when I want to read comics.

I saw a bunch of these New Mutants collected volumes at a rather cool used book store in Lincoln, Nebraska called A Novel Idea. They lacked volume one of this series, but I bought half of the volumes they did have when the overwhelming compulsion to acquire New Mutants stories hit me. I got volumes 2-4. I intend to buy volume 1 and collections of the issues of New Mutants following those collected in 2-4 (though this series of collected volumes leaves out some issues, so not everything will be from this particular collected volume series). I enjoyed the hell out of these three volumes. There's a lot of what made the original New Mutants great, but it has mutated and evolved (har) into something new and more mature, just as I have in the intervening years.

It's not the greatest literature, but it's some of the best mainstream-ish comic book material I've encountered -- in the top 5% at least -- as is the original New Mutants series from decades ago. Yeah, I want to keep reading this. I particularly love characters like Cypher and Magic, who have hidden depths, quirky powers with dark corners, and personalities that say something about the most interesting characterstics of ourselves and the intriguing supporting casts of our own lives.

Yeah, I plan to re-acquire the original run of New Mutants, in collected volumes this time, too. From the first pages of this particular volume, the first chunk of New Mutants story I've held in my hands and read with evocative illustrations in decades, I'm hooked on the New Mutants again. I blew through the other two volumes I bought so quickly, immersing myself in their stories with joyful abandon, that I didn't even get around to writing this review until the day after I finished the last of the three.

I had to force myself to slow down and appreciate them, they made me so hungry for more.

I gave it four stars because I wouldn't say they changed my life or literally amazed me, but they've re-awakened an enjoyment of mainstream-ish superhero comics in a way that has been very rare for me -- pretty much absent, in fact, because I don't really feel like things along the lines of the Jessica Jones Alias series, Frank Miller's old Batman classics, and Watchmen qualify as "mainstream" -- since the early 1990s at the latest. show less