2 out of 5

It’s admittedly been a while since I’ve read my Conway Spider-Mans, but I have experienced the writer enough in recent past – both his older 70s stuff and something more current, in The Last Days of Animal Man – to feel satisfied that my digging those classic S-Mans wasn’t just because I was a kid, but because Conway’s a classic writer for a reason.  His dialogue or narration will forever have a Silver Age story-teller style to it, but its always worked within the tone of his stories; the characters may talk or think expositionally, but its never given me pause with the way George constructs and paces his tales.

Still, not everything is going to be gold.  Especially when its clearly a fill-in book like Spiral, Conway’s strengths with characterization wrapped around cliches that have to support a tired story-angle of a gang war.

Gang wars can work in books when they’ve been built up.  It’s true I haven’t been reading ASM, so maybe it *has* been built up, but the structure of this series – as well as relegating its numbering to “between” issues with the whole .1 thing – doesn’t lead me to believe that’s the case.  It reads instead like World War III – the story that was *supposed* to be the focus of 52 but ended up falling to the side and pushed into a mini-series.  Here, I have no doubt that the regular ASM writer planned to deal with the whole “power vaccuum now that big boss Kingpin is locked up” on their own terms, but maybe editorial or crossover scheduling determined otherwise.  Or maybe not.  But either way, I can’t believe that Conway was calling up the editors saying he had a great idea for a new Spider-Man story.  This was handed to him, and who knows if he asked for it or was nudged into it.

Moments of goodness pop up as Spider-Man tries to tame the wild Wraith from taking her revenge on the bad guys of the city – brief interactions or thoughts that belie Conway’s potential depth – but those moments are leveled over by an otherwise rushed and inconsequential seeming – because it’s rushed; because it’s .1 issues which will inevitably return to a status quo – plot.

Artist Carlo Barberi isn’t doing any favors, either.  Again, I must cede to Conway’s experience and believe that he knows how to script scene action well enough.  Barberi just has no grasp of how to capture that.  Pin-up shots are fine, but anything with lots of moving pieces or multiple focuses is a tragedy of layout – misunderstood things happening off-panel, or things referenced like they were supposed to have happened in-panel.

So Conway’s back, but it doesn’t amount to much, the writer tasked with livening a completely generic fill-in series.  It’s approached more seriously than it could’ve been, but those few moments where it does actually click only set up a larger contrast between the vast majority of the book, which is by-the-numbers.