Daaammn.  Either this was a very, very good single issue or I’ve been sleeping on writer Tom Taylor and need to correct that ASAP.  There’s so much that feels natural in this issue (sometimes you can tell when circumstances just seem to align for a fun one-shot) and I have heard good rumblings about other Tom projects that I’m tempted to consider it as the latter…  But regardless, this issue was still great, both writing and art.

Laura, the current female Wolverine, gets brain-zapped into alternate universe Spider-Gwen and vice versa.  Instead of fussing with this core mechanic with a villain, Taylor keeps the urgency mostly narrowed down to a time constraint – figure out why this happened or your brains will get lost forever! – and also manages to avoid obvious fish-out-of-water jokes by having our heroes be quick adapters to the situation (this is the Marvel Universe after all).

While I can’t say definitively what an annual “should” be – part of the ongoing storyline, a one-shot – I think, at the very least, it should justify its extra pages with a fittingly filling story, and that’s what Taylor does here, pacing things to do give us grounding for each plot beat.  And it’s funny, but in a very diagetic way (as opposed to Ryan North’s immersion-sapping commentary and too-cutesy dialogue).  Marcio Takara’s art strikes a perfect balance between light-hearted cartoonism and a Marvel-ish house style, with a keen eye for comic timing and effective use of / lack of backgrounds for highlighting.  Complementing this are Mat Lopes’ colors, which are like classic Archie pop work but in the best way possible; the punctuation panels with color flats or patterned backgrounds are perfect.

I can’t wait – seriously – to dive into the ongoing Wolvie series.  Fingers crossed that it doesn’t taint this amazingly entertaining annual.