That may be the fastest my opinion has ever turned around on a comic. I was surprised and impressed by issue one, but issue two of Mark Millar's Spider-Man is everything I feared it would be, not just because it makes Spider-Man look like a jackass, or makes the Avengers look like ineffective fools, but because it does so by playing havoc not just with their observed continuity but with any kind of logical version of the characters. Spider-Man spends most of the issue looking like either an impatient moron or an indecisive ninny, and even if he's just meant to be having a bit of a breakdown over his aunt being in danger, it's a bit much. Spidey doesn't look like he's got feet of clay, here... it's more like he's clay right up to his nether regions, and maybe a bit beyond, with some of it having made its way into his head to substitute for a brain.
Spider-Man (a reserve Avenger, by the way, and even if not, certainly someone who has fought by their side many times before) is refused access to the mansion to get help and has to battle his way through security, which makes the Avengers look like insensitive jerks who don't really care about people in trouble. Is it a funny gag? Yeah, kind of. Does it also provide Millar with the chance to make Spidey look like a force to be reckoned with? Sure. Is it completely out of place in the more serious tone of the story and, more to the point, completely illogical and contrived? Oh, you betcha. At the very least, you'd think Jarvis could check the video monitor to see if the panicked guy outside really *is* Spider-Man. And when Spidey finally does get in, he chokes and can't accept the Avengers' help, because he's worried that it might give away his secret identity. Because, you know, saving Aunt May isn't more important than that, especially when guys like Norman Osborn and whatever psycho captured her already know it, and Captain America is considerably more trustworthy than they are.
So basically, the entire sequence is one, long, pointless joke at the expense of the superheroes involved with no payoff. It's too bad, because there are genuinely good moments here, particularly the portrayal of Spider-Man as someone who can give a well-armed SWAT team a run for their money, but even that has a bit of a logic problem to it as the reader starts to wonder when the Avengers started having cops protect their mansion from internal breach. Millar combines this contrived plot with elements like mocking the genre as hard as he did in The Ultimates, with the Avengers coming off as a bunch of spoiled playboys and several pages given over to making fun of the secret identity as concept, showing off how badly almost everyone at Marvel misses the point of that genre convention these days. Millar's attempts to work with continuity as it stands also backfire, as he not only gives away a key element of Bendis's first arc in The Pulse (guess we know how *that* one turns out now, huh?) but presents The Owl as an effective would-be Kingpin, which is considerably different from where Bendis left the character at the end of his arc on Daredevil.
The artwork, by the Dodsons, is capable enough, although it looks a bit rushed, lacking in background detail in general and colored in an overly dark palette that does nobody any favors. The Dodsons do a pretty impressive job of Spidey in motion, really giving a sense of his flexibility and power, but most of the rest of the guest stars don't fare as well, especially the damn-near-unrecognizable Hawkeye. The Dodsons excel when Spidey or a closely related character (Black Cat, Mary Jane) are involved, but when they go more afield, it doesn't look right, and the generally dark tone of the book, from inking on to coloring, isn't helping. Even if it is consistent with the tone that Millar is aiming for.
Too bad, because the first issue had a lot of promise, but this issue flushes most of that right down the crapper. Millar is a good to great writer, but like too many in the industry right now, he has no love for the superhero genre, and he shouldn't be writing them as his primary focus. Pity that the only way to make a good living in the industry right now is to write them, whether you hate them or not, because a few stories of "all superheroes are stupid or immoral" can be fun (The Authority, Supreme Power) but when it's all that's on the racks, it starts to get boring. And Spider-Man, as Marvel's big cash cow and highest profile icon, is the last guy who should get this kind of treatment.
