Geek Review: The Amazing Spider-Man Volume 1 (2015)

Spider-Man has been many things for many people.

But then someone thought he should be a more James Bond type of hero post-Secret Wars.  That led to a new Amazing Spider-Man series with a first volume subtitled Worldwide.

Due to some of the stuff that a certain Superior Spider-Man was up to, Peter Parker is now in charge of a large and powerful tech company, and as such, he’s expanding Spider-Man from a friendly neighborhood hero to a more global one.  That means working with SHIELD, having Mockingbird as a liaison between himself and Nick Fury, and getting all the best gadgets that money can buy and his own scientific brilliance can think up.  Of course, he’s still Peter Parker, a man who still believes that with great power there must come great responsibility.  And since he has more power, he also has more responsibilities.  That means giving away particularly useful tech, developing equipment he can use as Spider-Man (posing as Peter’s bodyguard, a trick he clearly picked up from Iron Man/Tony Stark), hiring old friends to run parts of his business including former enemies the Prowler and Harry Osborn, and not giving himself a huge salary despite the fact his company can theoretically afford to pay him more.

That’s actually a minor plot point at one point when someone tries to remind Peter he may be overspending, but that would be so Peter Parker and an easy way to return him to his usual status quo when the time eventually comes if it hasn’t already as of this typing.

Of course, it also means Peter has to make up for all the people “he” hurt when Otto Octavius was controlling his body from the looks of things.  I’m guessing here, but some of the dialogue suggests as much.

So, normally I like Dan Slott’s work at Marvel, but something about this series didn’t quite work for me.  I think it’s because Spider-Man doesn’t really feel like he should be a globetrotting hero.  He was a mid-level hero who fought bad guys in his area of New York City.  Sure, he has an argument with the Human Torch, but Zodiac is the main bad guys here, and they don’t seem like real Spider-Man foes.  More classic Spidey foes are doing something in various subplots, but there wasn’t much there for me to see where that was going, and this just didn’t feel like a Spider-Man story.  It probably would work much better for the aforementioned Iron Man.  And quite frankly, outside the movies, I’ve never been much of an Iron Man fan.  No wonder this trade didn’t work much for me.  7.5 out of 10 Spider-buggies.

At least the Spider-Buggy is back…