The Amazing Spider-Man 24/7

The Amazing Spider-Man 24/7, by Various, Marvel Comics.

ONCE UPON a time it was potluck what American superhero comics British readers read: You’d see Daredevil blinded by love with the Black Widow and wonder how the hell she went from being Iron Man villain to shacking up with the man without fear, but slowly you’d fill in the dots. It proved we weren't lacking in imagination. The trouble is, these days they make it hard for themselves.

Sure the writing of comics has got more sophisticated, but in attempting to hit us from all sides with metaphoric après-post-modern awareness, widescreen narrative techniques and attempting to have characters speak whatever the latest jive/slang or whatever they often forget that to the casual observer it becomes just babble. When you get continued characters playing out their scenarios and discussing matters or having midlife crises over matters that occurred in previous issues of the comic it just extrapolates the matter – if you think that’s going to make the reader rush out and part with another £15 to see what they were talking about, forget it.

It is the role of the editors of these collections not to make the casual purchaser feel dumb. All they have to do is write a paragraph or two explaining what has gone on before. It’s not hard. Honest. Instead they practice writing back cover blurb that is meant to excite the browser enough to pick it up, but frankly fails.

But Spider-Man? Surely we can’t go wrong with that? Wrong. Everything I thought I knew seems to be slightly different from how it should be. Is this the result of some dimensional life-changing crossover? I don’t know. It seems to intimate as such, but nowhere in this book does it tell me. Unless it was while I was yawning and overlooked it.

The stories themselves seem to end in mid-point, going off at tangents and rarely returning to something I presumed was a pivotal point earlier. The strips are collated from the regular Amazing Spider-Man and a title called Amazing Spider-Man Extra, but maybe not all the strips?

Maybe it’s me, but this is not a good collection. Good strips and some nice art within it, but as a whole not a good collected book. When the writing’s not trying to be too clever or push the lead character into adult scenarios it simply doesn’t need, it’s solid stuff, and I’m not saying this because I know him but when a short section is inked by Mark Farmer those pages stand out as the best in the book – In fact when leaving through it they were the reason I decided to give the book a try.

What can I tell you? Seems something odd happened in the Marvel universe, again and Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four seem to work together quite a bit because of it (though something appears to have happened between them in the stories featured here that’s not explained). J Jonah Jameson has become Mayor and his father’s returned out of the blue and is having an affair with Aunt May. No memorable villains, just a few new versions of ones created back in the 1960s.

I guess you have to buy the regular comic to appreciate this kind of stuff; unfortunately it doesn’t make me want to. Seriously, some good bits, just far too little of them.

Sponsored by Target Media.

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