3 out of 5

The quirky covers and series name brought to mind a childhood fave, The Deadly Foes of Spider-Man, and so I picked up a couple of issues when they came out and flipped through.  It had the comical tone I’d supposed, but Nick Spencer’s writing, at a glance, reminded me of most of Marvel’s current humor writers – over-explained jokes (show it AND tell it…) and, more annoyingly, timely references that will only date the book a decade from now.  Timely jokes are fine, but, in my all-powerful opinion, the punchline should not be the reference.  Howard the Duck is a good example of a series that generally did this right with a couple of instances of doing it wrong: Steve Gerber was generally skilled at taking the seed from whatever he was satirizing and make that the source of humor.  So maybe some names are puns on things you had to be there to get, but the core concept remains funny when you read it today.  But occasionally, it’d be too on the nose, and you have to do a bit of research to give the gag context.  Modern twitter and meme humor is based on knowing what’s up in order to get it, so, unfortunately, when Marvel nabs these humorists from hashtag sources, they bring this mentality with them and you get little snickery comments as jokes that will lose their buzz a few months later.

When Midtown Comics began to advertise Superior Foes as “still not canceled!” and it suddenly dawned on me that artist Steve Lieber was the dude from Whiteout, I decided to give it an actual take-it-home-and-read-it chance, right in time for what would be the third and final arc.  And I was sincerely surprised by the intelligence of the humor, and the heart of the characters.  We’ve had variations on the “the dumb side of heroes / villains” tale, so showing the everyday dealings of the B-Listers making the new Sinister Six (…with only five members) isn’t exactly a brand new spin on anything, but the issues I was reading seemed to suggest there was a lot more going on under the hood than the gags for which I’d previously brushed it off.  So I ordered the first two trades.

Unfortunately, it seems my glance at these early issues was pretty accurate.  So perhaps it took some issues – and nigh cancellation, rescued by fans – to get Spencer really in tune with his characters, as bit by bit, that heart and soul starts to peek through in this collection of the first six issues.  For while the first few issues are funny, and are important for setting up some story twists for later on, Spencer’s writing style (jokes aside) reminds me of Brian K. Vaughan: everyone’s just a variation on the funnyman.  Maybe some are dumber or smarter, but everyone’s just in it to make a smart comment.  Treating comic book characters as everyday Joes is always good entertainment fodder, but when there’s not much of a personality divide between your cast, it more apparently becomes a string of setups.  Occasionally Spencer gets smart with his expectation / pause / payoff structure, not telegraphing the punchline, and this wrings out some pretty good laughs, especially with Lieber’s humble art style.  But again, that only gets you so far, and it’s not until we start to see some other sides of our leads – primarily Shocker and Boomerang – in issues 5 and 6 that the book starts to show promise beyond chuckles.

The trade is pretty barebones (and printed in Marvel’s budget binding / paper format), only including some small shots of the variant covers toward the end.