Given how much I enjoyed 100%, released a couple weeks ago, I thought I would really like Pope's take on Spidey, but I found this story to be a little unfocused, really needing more room than it was given. The central idea of the people surrounding a super-villain's life fits right in with the Tangled Web ethos, but we've seen this territory covered in much more interesting and coherent ways in previous issues like "Severance Package" and "I Was a Teenaged Frog-Man."
I'm always up for a look into the life of a super-villain, whether it's an established crook or a new one. Pope offers that up in this issue, looking at a man with a pretty crappy home life and a not totally unrealistic set of technical skills, and managing to make the guy sympathetic as a person without making him very likable at all. A lot of this is down to the central character in the series, a believable teenage girl with a crush on Spider-Man, which irritates her super-villain father to no end.
My big problem with this story was that it seemed pretty obvious to the reader where it was going, and that lack of surprise made for something of a weak ending. I suppose that the point was how the lead character reacts to the knowledge that the reader has had for the length of the story, but I felt like the lead character didn't get established beyond her crush on Spider-Man, and her "moment of truth" when confronting her idol went by pretty quickly too. And I must admit, although I'm willing to give writers on this series in particular a wide berth when it comes to continuity, that the reference to the Beetle was unfortunate, given how much that character has changed in the pages of Thunderbolts over the last five years.
On the artwork, however, Pope is as great as ever, and his depiction of a scuzzy apartment, the ritzy Amalgamated Bank and the Stag Beetle battlesuit were all beautiful to look at. Pope also gives Spidey, in his brief appearance, a weird and alien look that I really liked. Tangled Web stories are at their best when Spider-Man seems less like a person and more like a force impacting on the lives of the main characters, and that was definitely the case here.
Getting to see Paul Pope artwork is a rare treat, but I'm coming to realize that I enjoy his Vertigo or self-published work a lot more than his work on Batman, Spider-Man or other DC and Marvel properties. While I wouldn't say his work doesn't fit these company-owned characters, I would say that it doesn't fit it anywhere near as well as the science-fiction/drama tales that Pope spins on his own.
