Amazing Spider-Man #529-531

Okay, not off to a roaring start. Christ, usually it takes me at least a couple weeks to completely lose steam on a project. I must be getting old and tired. Or maybe I'm still young and unfocused. Either way, it's something to do with an age and what that means for my abilities.

These were a couple of the lead-up issues to Civil War that featured Spider-Man and Tony Stark doing some political shit.

Can I say something about Civil War? Overall, loved it. However, it was kind of annoying that they took Iron Man from being one side of a very sensible debate to being a complete wackjob. In this series, he secretly hires some Russian gun-for-hire to attack him and help prove some kind of point. I can't remember who it was. Das Bullet or some such shit.

Anyway, he does the whole thing to badly prove a point, and he keeps it a secret from Spider-Man, who explicitly asks whether or not that is exactly what's going on.

That's enough. I just saw it as taking that part of the story too far when really the whole appeal of the story is having two equally opposed, equally justified sides. Once you turn one side into the side being led by a maniac, you kind of kill the story.

Anyway, there were a couple baffling things about these issues. First:Okay, so my understanding is that Peter Parker and Tony Stark are talking about some kind of injury Mary Jane got. Peter says something like, "I was wondering what exactly you did for her..." and this conversation comes up. Then, in the middle, they both look straight at the reader like, "Huh? You know what I'm saying, dontcha?"

What the fuck? Is there a joke here I'm missing? My best guess is that the joke is, "Holy shit, we broke her arm and in the first panels of the comic she looked fine! We gotta write our way around this!"

Well haha. Some math: This panel is 1/3 of a page, and let's assume this is a 22-page issue. If you divide it up, you're paying about 14 cents per page. Divide by three, eh, just over 5 cents for that panel acknowledging that they fucked up earlier. I'll pass, thanks.

But it gets worse:



I'm not a big fan of editor's notes as-is. It's kind of a cute, comic-booky thing to do, but even the brief ones that say, "Remember ish #457, idiots?" are pretty unnecessary. But this, this goes on and on until even a third, boss editor gets involved. So we have a story within a story, but the story within the story is occurring outside the story, and is in fact creating the story in which it is contained. Pretty meta. WAY more meta than funny.

I will say that these issues certainly provided the most compact, coherent pro/con debate for the registration that led to Civil War. It was done in what is essentially a courtroom scene, which is a scene that No One needs to see ever again. But at least they did it.