Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man #1 (October, 2022)

Huh.  Spider-Man?  In Los Angeles?  And there may be demons and nightmares and things?  That doesn’t sound like Spider-Man usual shtick.

Might be worth a look.  I’ll ask Jimmy about where it fits in the all-important Spider-Man timeline later.

Issue:  Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man #1, October 2022

Writers:  B. Earl and Jimmy Gomez

Artist:  Juan Ferreyra

The Plot:  Spider-Man, in Los Angeles to conduct scientific research, has trouble telling dreams from reality.  And those dreams are nightmares.

Commentary:  OK…this one was weird.  And not the sort of weird I normally like.

Peter Parker in L.A. doing a science experiment is not the worst excuse to get Spider-Man out of his usual stomping grounds, but I was a bit confused as to whom Peter was staying with and working with.  He talks about them like they’re old friends, but I didn’t recognize them.  Granted, they could have come from a period in Peter’s history, like when he was running a large multinational company, that I am just largely unfamiliar with.

How weird is it that Peter once ran a large multinational company?  Or that by editorial whim he basically lost all of it and his life went back to exactly what it was before all that happened?  Some people just can’t stand to work with a new status quo.

Regardless, Peter is having these dreams of the city turning into a nightmarish hellscape, where he swings around, his mask’s eyes glowing, and evades all kinds of monsters and demons.  When he’s awake, his life is pretty normal, but his experiments seem to be dealing with harmonic convergences between universes.  The problem there is the closer the issue comes to the conclusion of this particular issue, Peter seems to be experiencing his dreams while he is awake.  That is when he isn’t dodging the sorts of problems that come from being in L.A. instead of New York.

Nice artwork, confusing story, I think I won’t continue with this one.  Not my thing.

Grade:  C+