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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bendis and Bagley retell the tale of Spider-Man and Venom, October 31, 2003
The grand conceit of the "Ultimate Spider-Man" comics is that they go back to the beginning of the story when the bite of an irradiated spider granted high school student Peter Parker amazing arachnid-like powers. For those who remember the first 100 issues or so of "The Amazing Spider-Man," writer Brian Michael Bendis, penciler Mark Bagley, and inkers Art Thibert and Rodney Ramos have been providing a high intensity retelling of the tale. This time around Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy are fellow high school students of Peter Parker and the fateful encounter with the Green Goblin comes early on. In this sixth collection of the "Ultimate Spider-Man," which brings together issues #33-39, there is a quantum leap beyond the Stan Lee days of the original comic to retell the story of Venom.At this point in the tale Captain Stacy is killed while in pursuit of a burglar who had gone on a crime spree posing as Spider-Man, leaving Aunt May to offer his orphaned daughter Gwen a place to live. Meanwhile, after defeating the burglar who has been posing as Spider-Man, Peter is stunned to find out that Mary Jane, who has not only been his girlfriend but the one person he trusts who knows he is Spider-Man, can no longer stand the pressure and breaks up with him. In the wake of that shock Peter connects with Eddie Brock, now a student at Empire State University. It seems Peter and Eddie's dad worked together at the lab and Peter thinks Eddie would like a copy of a videotape of their families enjoying a picnic. Eddie is touched, and has something to show Peter as well, something he calls their "inheritance." Of course, this is the "black costume," now no longer and alien parasite but a genetic bodysuit. While experimenting with it, the suit leaps onto Peter who discovers it has one big advantage over his regular Spidey suit: it repairs the damage done to him by bullets. But when Spider-Man catches up with the burglar who killed Uncle Ben, his new suit literally goes in for the kill. Eventually Peter will go to Eddie for help, and then it will be time for the suit to find a new person with whom to play and Venom, Spider-Man's evil twin, is truly born. One of the improvements Bendis and Bagley came up with for their revisionist version of Spider-Man was the idea that it was Peter's father who was the scientific genius who came up with the webbing formula. They build on that foundation again by working in both Eddie Brock and the Venom costume into the fabric of the Parker family saga, not to mention Curt Connors. Knowing Eddie gives the conflict with Venom more depth and Peter gets to be a smart kid without being a genius on the level of Tom Swift. The subplot of Nick Fury being something of a quasi-guardian angel and part-time mentor for Spider-Man is continued, and watching Aunt May and Gwen bond is also going to make things interesting down the road. The "Ultimate Spider-Man" comics lend themselves to being collected as trade paperbacks because the Ultimate titles focus on multi-issue story arcs. This allows for stories of greater depth that play upon the "original" stories on which they are based, and also helps avoid the problem when Spider-Man has to fight a different villain each month. I am curious as to what readers who missed out on the first decade of the original "Amazing Spider-Man" think about this retelling of the web-slingers saga think about these comics, given they missed everything the first time around. But I find them to be a thoughtful and rather ambitious reconceptualization.
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by Brian Michael Bendis
by Brian Michael Bendis
by Brian Michael Bendis
by Brian Michael Bendis
by Brian Michael Bendis
