The Amazing Spider-Man [2018] #19.HU - Marvel Comics

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 19.HU, June 2019

Having previously established Curt Connors’ alter-ego as one of the main targets of Kraven the Hunter’s insane plan to gather up “all the animal-themed villains for the grandest hunt of all”, this twenty-page periodical’s plot spotlighting the Lizard launching a desperate rescue mission to retrieve his absent son must have had the vast majority of its 51,836 readers in April 2019 wondering just what all the fuss was actually about. Indeed, considering that “Imagine Games Network” once ranked the scaly college professor as the sixty-second greatest comic villain of all time, it’s disappointing to see just how impotent Nick Spencer’s incarnation of the “anthropomorphic reptile with scales” is portrayed.

For starters, the Lizard can no longer apparently show “aggression toward[s] another living thing” due to voluntarily having an inhibitor chip surgically installed in his spine which paralyses him whenever he starts to lose control. This ‘nerfing’ of the human mutate’s claws and fangs really begs the question as to just what Connors thought he could achieve when his goal was to physically break through Arcade’s “big, unbreakable force field” and personally defeat an entire army of gun-toting henchmen so as to save young Billy; “Yeah, one little problem with that plan, champ.”

True, Curt does seek the ‘assistance’ of the S.H.I.E.L.D. trained Taskmaster to aid him in his mission, as well as help the distraught father defeat the cannibalistic sewer-based creature, Vermin. But this alliance’s foundation is based purely upon the good doctor previously poisoning the mercenary in a beer tent at the Queen’s Night Market so as to force his aid, and resultantly seems to be destined to failure the moment an opportunity arises for Tony Masters to double-cross him. Which the assassin unsurprisingly does at the book’s end.

Regrettably, not even the pencils of Chris Bachalo arguably seem able to salvage much from Nick Spencer’s ‘run-of-the-mill’ narrative, except his marvellously imaginative re-design of the bi-pedal Lizard. Bulbous headed, with a truly massive maw that wouldn’t appear out of place on a Carcharodon carcharias, the lab-coat wearing parent dominates each and every panel within which he appears, especially when his love for his son overcomes his enforced abhorrence for violence. Whereas the likes of the Taskmaster, Vermin’s victims and especially Arcade, disconcertingly appear to simply be ‘aged-up’ child actors taken straight from Alan Parker’s 1976 musical film “Bugsy Malone”.

Writer: Nick Spencer, Penciler: Chris Bachalo, and Color Artist: Erick Arciniega