bedsitter23 | Comic Review- The Amazing Spider-Man #1

Amazing Spider-Man (2018-) #1 by Nick Spencer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nick Spencer is taking over Amazing Spider-Man. I was a huge fan of his Ant-Man and Spectacular Foes of Spider-Man, so I am pretty excited about this. Of course, now everyone knows Spencer for his "Nazi" Captain America, but I feel like I wasn't touched by this in comparison. I only caught part of those series, and my initial thought on Spencer holds strong.

Dan Slott wrote Amazing for many,many years of which I read a few. Slott was a fine writer, but he kept it pretty traditional.

Spencer, from the start stamps his style all over this. That has always been fine for titles that seemed pretty peripheral like Ant-man and Foes (even on his own book The Fix). He could write a style that was almost satire or parody, winking at tropes and conventions. Fast and breezy, stuffed with wit.

But Amazing Spider-Man, well, that's kind of a big deal.

Ryan Ottley does a fine job of capturing what the title should look like. One gets the impression that Spencer has big things planned (nods to One More Day and other past storylines abound), so it seems reasonable to suspect that those some will be up in arms before this one's finished.

The first issue is a bit of a mixed bag. In comparison to Slott, I think we will see an opportunity for higher "highs" but we might expect lower "lows". Even for me, the "joking" tone is occasionally too much.

In fact, I would say at $5.99, with all the extra pages that comes from a double sized issue, it tends to work against Spencer. He probably would have been better with a quick First Issue splash. Instead, this almost feels overlong.

Yes, Spidey does like to joke, and what made Foes and Ant Man so fun were the flippancy. But it seems to take all of this double sized issue for Spencer to find the appropriate balance.

Not that, this isn't promising or I didn't enjoy it (and I certainly am picking this one up going forward), but after the stability of Slott, it may take awhile for a writer like Spencer to find his footing.

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