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PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #33
"Maybe Next Year"
Highly Recommended (9/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Paul Jenkins
Pencils: Mark Buckingham
Inks: Wayne Faucher
Colors: Transparency Digital
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Axel Alonso
Price: $2.25 US/$3.50 CAN |
I can't count the number of times I've read someone saying
that they like the new Spider-Man books, that Ultimate and Amazing have really turned them around. What boggles the mind for me is that they're missing Peter Parker, which improved even before Ultimate was
published with the team of Jenkins and Buckingham coming onboard. This issue
might be a good one for those folks to check out, because like Jenkins's first
issue, it's more focused on Uncle Ben and Peter Parker than Spider-Man and his
amazing foes, and like that first issue, it's a very human, down-to-earth and
touching story that expands on the man behind the costume.
One of the things that I praised Ultimate Spider-Man for was the fleshing out of Uncle
Ben, taking more time to expand on the character so that readers could feel his
loss as more than just a motivational factor for Peter Parker. Jenkins is doing
that in reverse, establishing Uncle Ben more strongly through the occasional
flashback story, and making him more than a plot device. After all, Ben had
fifteen years of influence on Peter Parker... there's a lot of interesting
stories to be told there. This issue features one of them, a story of how Peter
and Ben connected through annual visits to baseball games featuring the New York
Mets.
I'm not much of a baseball fan, honestly. But
the baseball games I have been to have been as a result of my father's lifelong
love of the game, and of another perennial loser team, the Chicago Cubs. So I
could easily understand the bond between Peter and Ben at the game, and how
something as mundane as a team that seems to lose most of their games can be
something magical and important to a relationship. Peter's love affair with the
Mets (figuratively speaking, of course) and baseball is just a facet of his
remembered relationship with Uncle Ben, and in standard male-bonding patterns,
Peter expresses his love for his father figure through adherence to traditions
they shared.
Buckingham is a good artist, but he's been at
his best when working on the more human moments in this series, due largely to a
great control of facial features and some very interesting character designs for
Uncle Ben and Peter Parker. This issue doesn't feature much in the way of fight
scenes or web-swinging through the city, it's mostly small motions and routine,
with Peter grabbing his keys, getting dressed, riding the subway, etc. We don't
even see most of the action on the baseball field. Instead, we see the action
through the reactions of Peter and Ben, and that gives us a much more vivid
picture, much more easy to relate to.
Because there was no creative team or big storyline change when the revamp month hit, Peter Parker has been largely ignored in favor of Amazing, Ultimate and Tangled Web. That's a shame, because it's on a quality
level as good as the first two and (so far) better than the
last.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
