REVIEW – Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #2 (March 2019)
Spoilers ahead!
Rumor has it there’s a new hero in Spidey’s life… and it’s Pete’s snarky octogenarian neighbour?
I know as readers we’ve come to expect unexpected twist and turns in our plot lines, so I guess I understand why Taylor felt compelled to include the reveal of Marnie as The Rumor at the end of this issue. I mean, it was technically a twist, wasn’t it?
In fact, I don’t know why I asked that. There’s no question it was a twist. It was definitely a surprising turn of events I didn’t see coming. It just wasn’t a very good one. I mean, super-heroes are my grandparents’ age these days? At the risk of getting pegged as an ageist, give me a break.
Maybe Marvel’s aging executives are having a collective midlife crisis. That might explain the company’s move towards aged heroes in recent days like Old Man Logan, Old Man Hawkeye, and now The Rumor, apparently.
But where Logan and Barton are both characters whose personalities are well-suited to becoming gruff, aged versions of themselves, Marnie is not. She’s a relative unknown that the audience hasn’t had time to build a vested interest in, so the reveal lacks any real impact. Worse, Logan and Barton’s character designs both lend themselves well to being aged, and you can buy into their elderly personas easily. Marnie’s The Rumor alter-ego on the other hand, comes off as a goofy contrivance that I guess will somehow move the plot along in issue #3? Plus what’s with the costume design? It’s hard enough to take a super-senior seriously as it is, but to dress her up in that outfit? Gross.
Oh, and she somehow knows Spidey’s secret identity. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Spidey’s big thing is that he keeps his identity super secret, right? So it makes sense that everyone and their dog knows who he is these days, including the little old lady from next door, of course.
If my problems with this issue had just ended there I might have been okay. After all, it’s not the first time and won’t be the last that a comic veered off into ridiculousness. But this “cliffhanger” capped off a bizarre, uncomfortably goofy second issue. Between Johnny Storm’s stupidity about what a discreet approach means and the subsequent, impossible to decode action scene where I guess Spidey somehow stopped a building from coming down, I was left either scratching my head or rolling my eyes more than I was intrigued by the rest of the story.
That said, it wasn’t all bad. I was genuinely amused by Tierra and Jasper’s fandom for the Human Torch while not having a clue who Spider-Man is, and everything between the fight at the apartment and The Rumor’s reveal was proficient if not exceptional. Cabal’s art and Woodward’s colours are still great, and the rumble at the Consulate was a fun one even if it did take a weird turn at the end.
Unfortunately the bad just outweighed the good this week, and while it’s certainly still salvageable and not at all unreadable, Taylor’s got some heavy lifting to do in the next few issues if he wants to earn back some of the first issues’s good will that got squandered here.
Overall: 6/10. It’s not an unreadable mess, but it’s also not doing much to justify its place in my file. Still, this was only the second issue. Let’s see where Taylor’s going and maybe give him a chance to recover from the misstep.
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