Given this title's sales numbers and several cancellation announcements, it's no small feat that it's made it all the way to its 75th issue. There's plenty to like here: lots of super-hero action, an accessible celebration of the vast array of characters in the Marvel Universe and a youthful energy that should appeal to new, younger readers. Still, there's also a clumsiness to the plotting that leaves the reader scratching his head from time to time, and the combination of the Frenz and Buscema artwork makes for exaggerated characters who sometimes look silly rather than dynamic and powerful.
Lady Octopus has broken the feral Canis out of jail, and together they plan on ruling the New York underworld with an iron fist. In order to take them down and thwart their plans, Spider-Girl has forged an alliance with the terrorist known as the Black Tarantula, and he has outfitted the young heroine with everything she'll need. Among those resources is a new martial-arts tutor, Elektra, and a strike force of agents monitoring local criminal activity. Spider-Girl needs something else too: a new costume, since her original is tattered to the point of being beyond repair.
I've never been a big Ron Frenz fan, but I love Sal Buscema's work. Unfortunately, both boast an exaggerated style, and merging those two styles creates a distorted look for the characters that's distracting. Too often, the characters' faces are elongated and angular to the point of being ugly. Furthermore, the design for a new villain introduced here, Kodiak, is completely uninteresting. I do like the new Spider-Girl costume, which is a nice adaptation of the black Spidey costume/Venom design from the 1980s and '90s.
The real conflict here isn't about Spider-Girl's efforts to fight crime or to save lives, but her inner turmoil. She's made some tough choices as of late, and she's been preoccupied with them, questioning the wisdom of those decisions. This story is about living with those decisions and moving on. DeFalco's script conveys the conflict quite clearly; in fact, he spells it out for the reader in the issue's climactic scene. Still, it suits the younger-reader tone of the title, and it's not so obvious as to be grating or anything. Another aspect of the fun here is the colorful array of characters -- new and old -- who turn up on a regular basis.
While the emotional conflict is a compelling one, how DeFalco and Frenz arrive at it doesn't make a lot of sense. Spider-Girl's alliance with the Black Tarantula just doesn't work when one thinks of all of the other heroes and allies she could call upon for help. If there's one characteristic (other than gender) that sets this character apart from her father it's that she's not the outsider in the super-hero world that Spider-Man was.
