The Amazing Spider-Man [2018] #20.HU - Marvel Comics

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 20.HU, July 2019

Considering that Nick Spencer’s fifteen-page script for this particular special issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” didn’t debatably add much to the motivational background of Adrian Toomes, it is easy to see why the comic sold significantly less copies than the other two instalments to the American author’s lengthy “Hunted” storyline which also hit the spinner racks in May 2019. Sure, the two-time ‘Charter Party candidate’ starts this book off well enough with a brief glimpse of the professional criminal’s early days “toiling in a laboratory alone.” But this flashback to the invention of the old man’s famous wingsuit is swiftly shelved in favour of (yet another) recap depicting him despicably deserting the Gibbon during the opening foray of Arcade’s formidable Hunter-Bots.

This regurgitation of Martin Blank’s harrowing death scene really does feel completely unnecessary, and disconcertingly smacks of a writer desperately struggling to pad out a plot which has already been curtailed in size due to the publication containing a secondary yarn. Indeed, large chunks of this comic’s narrative seem to simply repeat key sequences previously depicted within the title’s main book line, with only Toomes’ rather contrived meeting with Arcade at “the luxurious Central Park institution Tavern On The Green” providing any fresh material; “I’m very up-front with the clients… If I’m gonna build you a death trap, said death trap has to have a chance of survival.”

Happily however, at least this series of all-too familiar summaries is sketched by Cory Smith, whose dynamically drawn layouts imbue the repeated death-dealing chase-sequences occurring in New York City’s fifth-largest park with plenty of animated life, or rather in the case of the Bison and Gibbon, death. The “simple lil pencil artist” also depicts a seriously egotistical-looking Vulture, and facially captures all the aging electrical engineer’s haughty arrogance once he’s been elected by the desperate super-villains as their all-powerful saviour.

Rounding off this disappointing instalment to Spencer’s “spiritual successor to the 1987 storyline Kraven's Last Hunt" is the five-pager “Mother”, which focuses upon Arcade’s replication of Vermin using an injection of “fifteen CCs of the Mountain Dew-coloured stuff.” Regrettably though, even this distinctly darker tale is perhaps more memorable for the look upon the white-suited assassin’s face when he realises that the Taskmaster has betrayed him to the Lizard, than Edward Whelan’s utterly bizarre doppelganger duplication sub-plot in which the "cannibal killer" is 'given' a family of his own.

Writer: Nick Spencer, Penciler: Cory Smith, and Color Artist: Erick Arciniega