The Amazing Spider-Man [2015] #26 - Marvel Comics

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 26, June 2017

There can surely be little doubt that, if nothing else, Dan Slott’s script for Issue Twenty Six of “Amazing Spider-Man” is frantically fast-paced, as well as packed with an incredible amount of gun-play and explosions. Indeed, with the exception of an utterly bizarre shareholders conference call disconcertingly crowbarred smack into the middle of Web-head’s confrontation with Norman Osborn, “Fight Or Flight” just doesn’t let up on the action until the comic’s final few pages when Nick Fury dramatically decides that Peter Parker, who “has provided S.H.I.E.L.D. with our current crop of weapons and technology”, is now “no different than A.I.M. or Hydra” simply because the American contractor has decided “to invade the sovereign nation of Symkaria.”   

Whether or not this twenty-page periodical’s 62,515-strong audience actually felt the Berkeley-born writer’s narrative made sense though, is arguably an entirely different matter. To begin with, if this book’s basic premise was for Harry’s father to use the wall-crawler and Silver Sable as advertising guinea pigs for his Kingslayer Mark 1 mechanoid, then the arrogant arms dealer clearly made an uncharacteristically unwise decision. For whilst Stuart Immonen’s marvellously dynamic pencils suggest the killing machine is both toweringly-tall and phenomenally well-armed, the large robot is still rather easily dispatched by the super-heroic pair due to their re-enactment of the final scene in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller film “Jaws”; “Smile, you son of a --”

Similarly nonsensical is the titular character’s decision to “ship millions of dollars of equipment to topple a lawful regime” simply because it’ll supposedly “help spider-man stop a bad guy.” This reckless resolution is entirely based upon the word of a woman who up until a few minutes earlier, Parker had thought dead, and may, at least according to Mockingbird, be one of the Jackal’s clones. Indeed, the “single-minded” Sablinova’s apparent survival from Doctor Octopus's sea fortress (see the 2012 story-arc “Ends of the Earth”) is infuriatingly swept aside by Slott with the single line “it doesn’t matter.” Considering how guilty Peter felt at the time of the mercenary’s “demise”, such a reaction seems wholly unacceptable.

What is clear from this second instalment of “The Osborn Identity” is just why the publication’s American author told ComicBook.com in an interview that "Stuart [Immonen] is fantastic at everything". The Canadian penciller provides Norman Osborn with a real maniacal glint to his eye, and there’s a serious sense of scintillating speed to his scenes involving the Green Goblin’s glide-cycles which is highly reminiscent of the speeder bike chase on Endor in the 1983 science fiction flick “Return of The Jedi”.

Writer: Dan Slott, Pencils: Stuart Immnonen, and Inks: Wade von Grawbadger