J Michael Straczynski arrives as the new writer on AMAZING
SPIDER-MAN. This is his first work for Marvel, after a couple of
reasonably successful books over at Top Cow. Personally, I
bought the first two issues of Rising Stars, wasn't particularly
interested in it, and never went back. It had the quality of
reading a synopsis rather than a story.
As for Babylon 5, I watched the first episode of that and
couldn't get past the abysmal acting. During the second season
my then-girlfriend insisted on me watching it again, and I could
see what people liked about it. The series was always flawed -
some shaky acting remained, along with the occasional lapse into
tooth-gratingly pretentious dialogue, and it never really tied
up all of the storylines - but nonetheless it did succeed in
doing a five year storyline with reasonably interesting
political and social themes. The ambition was there, and if the
final product wasn't perfect, it was at least reasonably
successful.
As you'd expect, this first issue is largely set-up, introducing
the central concepts and putting in enough teasers to get people
to come back to see them being properly explored. That means
that (aside from the standard "subplot featuring next month's
villain" scene) Straczynski takes Peter back to his old school,
which is apparently going to be a prominent setting for the
upcoming storylines, and brings in his new character Ezekiel,
who has a retcon he'd like to explain to us.
Let's start with the school. It has to be said that I don't
remember it looking quite so inner city in the origin story. For
that matter, I don't remember the teenage Peter living in the
inner city at all, which leaves the graffiti-covered hellhole
looking as though it's somewhat overselling the point. The idea
of taking Peter back to his old school has some interesting
elements, though it remains to be seen what kind of role Peter's
going to be there in. Certainly the character belongs in a
down-to-earth environment. That's traditionally been his
freelance photographer role, which has worked okay. (One of the
key illustrations of how little Byrne and Mackie understood the
character was their decision to give him a job at a Kirbytech
plant, missing the point rather badly.) This one is an idea
with potential, but it's way too early to see where the story's
heading with it.
Ezekiel is one of the elements here that will seem rather
familiar to Babylon 5 viewers (not only is he an engimatic chap
who's turned up purely to drop some hints, he even gets to make
use of the repeated question "Who are you?", the sort of question
that was a recurring theme in B5). This issue, he raises a
question which may simply be a question, or may be setting the
groundwork for a huge retcon.
The question is, granted that Peter got his powers from the
radioactive spider, how does he know that the spider didn't
already have the powers independently of the radioactivity hitting
it? Maybe it was simply trying to give him the powers before it
died. Why didn't Peter think of that?
Well, the immediate answer is "Because it's a bloody stupid
theory." For one thing, it posits a spider which is already
carrying superpowers quite independently of being involved in a
science experiment gone wrong, introducing two rather unlikely
events instead of one, which is already a perfectly good reason
for Peter to dismiss it as overwhelmingly unlikely. For another,
it posits a spider intelligent enough to know that it's a
repository for superhuman powers which "need" to be transferred
to a human, and yet stupid enough to hang around in the middle
of dangerous experiments that are going to kill it. This
conveniently fluctuating arachnid intelligence also seems a
fairly obvious flaw in the theory.
And of course, in the Marvel Universe, radioactivity is magic.
Everyone knows that.
Of course you can't prove that this theory is impossible within
Marvel logic, because nothing's impossible within Marvel logic,
but it's so contrived that, to put it mildly, you can hardly
blame Peter for not having fully explored the possibility. If
this is just an exercise in screwing with the readers' minds,
then it's quite a good idea since it's just about plausible
enough to work. If Straczynski is serious, he's going to need
an incredibly good storyline to hang onto such a strained
concept. Maybe he has one, though the threatened dynasty of
spider-men seems unlikely to be such a concept. We will see.
As a set-up story, this issue does its work pretty well, and
naturally, much will depend on whether the ideas it's introducing
have a decent pay-off at the end. For the moment, Straczynski
has a strong grasp on the character and some cute comedy moments,
helped by the always reliable John Romita Jr on art. A couple
of awful lines of dialogue mar the story - "Sometimes I think
there isn't a sonar in existence that can sound out the depth of
her compassion" is a dreadful sixth-form poetry metaphor - but
for the most part the script holds up.
Taken on its own terms, this has to go down as a success, since
it does work as a set-up issue - but the real test is down the
line, when we find out whether Straczynski is heading towards
something incredibly clever, or something unbelievably stupid.
