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| THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 17, June 2015 |
It is copiously clear why regular writer Dan Slott turned to
Christos Gage for help with the script to Issue Seventeen of “The Amazing
Spider-Man”, as this second instalment of “The Graveyard Shift” contains an
extremely busy narrative. Seldom does a comic’s storyline so mercilessly flit
from character to character and scene to scene with such apparent wanton
abandonment, even when it is supposedly an action-orientated title.
But crammed
within the meagre fourteen-pages of “Trust Issues” is an awkward evening family
meal between Aunt and Nephew, a breath-taking night time swing through the city
skyline courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood Webhead, a hullabaloo at Parker
Industries over Peter’s plans for his company’s future, a murderously stealthy
act of sabotage within said corporation’s Security Hub, a demonstration of
state-of-the-art prisoner incarceration which unsurprisingly goes spectacularly
awry, a moment of total treachery by one of Spidey’s co-workers and finally a
last minute confrontation between the titular character and the Ghost.
Disappointingly however the vast majority of these ‘happenings’ are actually
superficial padding at best, as very little actually develops as far as the
multi-issue story-arc is concerned. Indeed despite all the ‘white noise’
generated by the long-time collaborators, the only occurrence of note, besides
an endearing appearance by the robot Living Brain, is that, having started to wreak
havoc at Parker’s multi-billion dollar conglomerate, the comic ends with the Ghost
apparently killing Sajani Jaffrey; a former Horizon Lab employee who is arguably
one of the series’ most dislikable personalities.
Far easier to follow is the
rather sedentary six-pager “No Take Backsies”, a simple no-nonsense tale which
involves the Black Cat repossessing her former horde of stolen loot from
current owner Regina Venderkamp. In many ways this ‘burgling short’ is something
of a missed opportunity by Slott and Gage, as its intermittent inclusion within
the messy main story would certainly have helped slow down its feverish sequence
of events to a less frantic read.
Disconcertingly the artwork of Humberto Ramos
is equally as dissimilar for the two ‘strips’ as their plot’s conflicting pacing, with the Mexican’s pencilling of Peter Parker's 'bad day in the office' appearing decidedly rushed
in places, especially during the S.W.A.T. Bots malfunction, yet wonderfully
cartoony for Felicia Hardy’s solo outing.
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| The variant cover art of "THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN" No. 17 by Scott Forbes |
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