Customer Reviews

Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 5: Sins Remembered

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ok...I guess I'll be the 1st to review this tpb collection. This tpb collects Spectacualr Spider-man 23-26. There are no additional stories after this as mentioned in the Amazon editorial. No Mindworm or celebrity story here.

This is the continuation of the atrocious Sins Past storyline.

After an apparent overdose of drugs taken by Sarah, Peter Parker flies to Paris to check up on Gwen's daughter. After being release form the hospital, Peter stays with Sarah in Sarah's house without letting his wife MJ know. Sarah develops strong feeling for Peter that Peter is unaware of. MJ's female intuition propels her to go to Paris as well.

In Paris, MJ walks in as Sarah as she is kissing a shocked Peter. MJ storms out mad and upset. The rest of story involves Peter trying to explain himself and professing his love to a mad MJ. At the same time Spider-man must help Sarah out with a gangster named Dupree. Dupree wants Sarah to pay for her brother Gabriel's drug debt. Apparently Gabriel stole Duprees drugs and sold it. Now Dupree wants his money and is going after Sarah for it. Everything is nicely wrapped up in the end.

There is no mind-blowing story here. A few funny scenes here and there. The awkward moment when MJ walks into Sarah kissing Peter. Peter is told to look for Marguerite who turns out to be a "lady of the night." A good read even though I abhor the storyline of Gwen having Norman Osborn twins.

A couple years ago, J. Michael Straczynski, having wrapped up his long-running Ezekiel plotline in Amazing Spider-Man, followed up with an ill-advised story about the twin children of Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, who, thanks to advanced aging that's a byproduct of Goblin's screwy genetics, are now physically adult. They'd been raised in secret by the Goblin and told that Parker and Spider-Man were responsible for their mother's death, so they decided to kill Spider-Man and everyone close to him.

This story is the sequel to that one, published in Amazing's sister book Spectacular Spider-Man and written by Straczynski's friend Samm Barnes. (In the Spectacular story immediately prior to this one, Disassembled, Spider-Man went through some big changes. They are of course not mentioned even in passing here.) Following the events of the last story, Gwen's daughter has moved back to France. Peter decides to go visit her and help her out. There follows a lot of unfunny France jokes, terrible dialogue, some ludicrous plot about the Stacy twins getting secretly involved in the underworld to pay for the drugs they need to help their headaches, and an awful "love triangle" sequence played so that, in an incredibly contrived moment, MJ walks in right as Gwen's daughter kisses Peter, and then conveniently ignores that he was violently pushing her away even as she initiated the kiss. Spider-Man's spider-sense seems to come and go here to meet the needs of the story, and Parker generally comes across as a complete moron. None of this is helped by generally ugly art that doesn't measure up to that by JRjr and the fun stylings of Humberto Ramos who were also on Spider-books around this time.

This is a completely pointless story that falls well below the level of Straczynski's melodrama in Amazing and Jenkins' character-based stories in Spectacular. It's a terrible sequel to a story that absolutely didn't need one (didn't even need to be written in the first place).