4 out of 5

Some isolated, anthology goodness featuring our wallcrawler and relative creative newcomers.

Joseph Goodrich and Takeshi Miyazawa give us ‘Human Interest,’ which is a tad forced – Pete and Ben covering a (natch) human interest story of, I guess, a leukemia patient (?  human interest!) who happens to love Spidey – but to Goodrich’s credit, he doesn’t stuff in morals or too much cornball cheers / tears, taking the story to a surprisingly realistic conclusion.  Prior to that, as part of the forced narrative, Peter arranges a meeting for our patient with her hero, and it’s a good lil’ deed with a dash of action and dramedy.  Miyazawa’s art is sketchy but confident, not exactly notable but absolutely in service of the story.

Then Brian Lynch and Sean Chen offer ‘Slyde Into Destiny ?,’ a rather hilarious robbery-gone-wrong with slippery villain Slyde, who keeps reminding everyone that he’s a big deal as he bumbles step after step of the heist, with a bemused Spidey pretty much letting the “villain” defeat himself.  This works really well because Lynch and Chen don’t make Slyde incompetent, just sort of inexperienced, and the conclusion ends up justifying – in a good way – that approach.  Chen’s art has a lot of fun, eye-directing choreography, though his positioning of Spidey’s eyes is really distracting at times.