COMIC: Spider-Man – Brand New Day

Here it is then. All I could feel was a sense of foreboding about the amalgamation of the three Spider-Man titles into one single ongoing thrice monthly comic.

I tried desperately to forget One More Day, the half-baked four-issue story arc designed explicitly to get Peter Parker single again (and fix several other ‘pesky’ plot points) directly preceding this big change, attempting to put behind me the fact that the web-slinger essentially made a deal with the Devil, trading his marriage with MJ for Aunt May’s life.

I know very well that virtually nothing in comics is permanent (even Bucky Barnes is back from the dead) but for the time being Marvel’s little stunt has put the genie back in the bottle in a number of ways and there’s no sense in complaining about how cheap everything feels going forward now that J. Michael Straczynski’s rather grand run on the title is left feeling like a footnote. This is Brand New Day and Marvel wants you to like it.

And it hurts to write this… but it’s not too bad after all. In fact, it’s even pretty good. There’s little time to wonder about the cosmic reset, as the first issue lifts some of the darkness that has previously permeated the flagship title and the only angst in sight seems to be of the soap-opera variety. It’s clear that Dan Slott was born to write Spider-Man and in his capable hands the sudden jolt is far less unsettling than it has any right to be.

Eschewing clumsy explanatory dialogue ­ is a risk when you’re dealing with such a change to the status quo ­ in favour of a script that gives the reader all he needs to know without feeling too laboured. This is despite the repeated insistence in the first issue of plunging Peter into situations he’s not been seen in for a while, just to hit home the new possibility that One More Day has foistered upon the title. It’s almost as if you can hear Marvel editorial in the background yelling ‘See? See what scrapes he can get into now?’

If there’s any complaint here, it’s that the book almost feels too light, at least for this True Believer. New villain Mr. Negative is an intriguing prospect but everything seems over far too quickly. I suspect that this may subside once we get used to having at least thirty-six issues a year and plot threads left suddenly dangling can be revisited at will. For any new reader, this is as good as any Issue 1, and is a much more easily digestible comic than it should be, much to Slott’s credit.

For anyone else who has been around a little longer, Marvel assures us that their writers’ ‘braintrust’ has it all in hand but with that stench of sulphur in the air, there’s still an inescapable pungent sense of loss. We’re told that everything we’ve read still happened but this is cold comfort considering for new and old reader alike, something still feels missing.     David Lillywhite