Amazing Spider-Man 1

Amazing Spider-Man 1
Slott (w) and Ramos (p) and Olazaba (i) and Delgado (c) and Eliopolous (l)

Peter Parker is back and needs to catch up pretty quickly to the months he's missed. Parker Industries is in some trouble and he has to start getting out of it by severing ties with Spider-Man. Even that may not cut it as their big rollout invention is steeped in nano-tech (Nah Nohtek, shout out to my Croach the Trackers out there) and other cybernetics, a skill of Octavius' and not of Peter's. In addition, the city has turned on him in a much more vocal way than ever before. In the past, he's been seen as maybe a villain but never with the sort of antipathy and fear they have for him now. His first busted crime goes a little awry too as he brings down new villains White Rabbit, Skein, Panda-Mania, and Hippo but only after Skein, who has control over fabrics, disrobes him entirely but for his mask. He returns home to find Anna Maria waiting for him (who had found a wedding ring stashed away in their apartment) with, thanks to the videos that surfaced of a nearly naked Spider-Man stopping crime, accusations about his double life. This special quadruple size issue also includes a plethora of stories from the likes of writers Dan Slott, Chris Gage, Chris Yost, Joe Caramagna (stepping away from lettering to do a quick little writing pass with fellow letterer Chris Eliopolous as his artist), and Peter David and artists Javier Rodriguez, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Will Sliney, David Baldeon, and more that tell stories spanning from a recent attack on another prison that went badly for Electro, check-ins on Spider-Man 2099 and Kaine, the introduction of a new character we'll see in a special AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 1.1, and a look at exactly how Black Cat is doing after her betrayal. The start of the issue gives a very brief recap of his origin and sets things up for the ORIGINAL SIN tie-in that's coming which will have to do a little more with the spider that first bit Peter. Also included in this issue is a special reprint of INHUMANS 1.

Story
Just looking at the main story, Peter is thrown exactly as far under the bus as seems necessary to kick things off. He's startled to find out just how much things have changed in his absence and it forces him instantly back into the reactive sort of Peter Parker we all know and love. Slott puts him up against a small gang of easily defeated adversaries for his first match-up back which gives us enough of an opportunity to see him in action while also knowing that he's not going to lose the fight so we don't have to worry too much about stakes, we can simply see how the world is reacting to Spider-Man these days. It's a smart play and, even amidst the blatant comedy of Spider-Man losing his costume right out of the gate, it helps to set up some of what's coming. There are plenty of irons in the fire as both the main issue and the many little stories indicate and Slott is ready to dive right back into things. 5/5

Character
What can you say? Peter Parker is back. This is most certainly the same Peter Parker we've known for so long and Slott finds himself in the position of having very few character developments and instead letting us watch the character in a world that's developed around him. Peter rarely actually develops as a character in the same way that Steve Rogers rarely develops as a character; neither of them have the moral ups and downs that so often frequent heroes and anti-heroes. They're both set in their moral goodness and righteousness (though occasionally a particular writer will skew that one direction or another with varying results) and so it's the world around them that changes and they constantly need to find their place in said world. Peter's getting his legs back under him and this issue proves effectively that it's going to take some time. 5/5

Writing
I love Spider-Man. I love him as a character (how do you write a Marvel blog and not love Spider-Man?), I love his various titles, I love his stories, etc. I quite like Dan Slott too. And yet, I don't think I'll ever call this the best written series out there. There are people doing better things writing-wise and pulling out better tricks and using less exposition and so on and so forth. Still, Spider-Man gets something of a pass for this, almost like a legacy title, with rules that are grandfathered in. CAPTAIN AMERICA wouldn't have survived only being written one way. THE AVENGERS wouldn't have thrived with just one writing style through all of time. Just about anyone you can think of has seen writing styles change massively over their decades of existence. Not SPIDER-MAN though. SPIDER-MAN abides because this style of writing, this lighter tone (though obviously not always) and this hopefulness (that's really more what it is than a "lighter tone") is what we know and want from Spider-Man. I can't promise that I'll swoon over any writing technique out of this book like something out of HAWKEYE or EAST OF WEST or PRETTY DEADLY (which may as well be poetry) but it's hard to be particularly dissatisfied with it. 5/5

Art
With the return of Peter Parker comes the return of Humberto Ramos, Victor Olazaba, and Edgar Delgado, three guys so inextricably tied to Dan Slott's Spider-Man that it would have been nearly impossible to see this book kicked off with anyone else's style. It's great to see so many good and effective styles in the stories following the main story but these guys embody this Spider-Man and they immediately return to form. Great way to start things off again. 5/5

Miscellaneous

Few things here. First off, this number one retails for 5.99, which is quite a price to pay for a single issue. Of course, within that single issue, we also get an extra 20-30 pages of tie-in stories and a special reprint of INHUMANS 1. I'm not sure I love the 5.99 price point for the book still; with Marvel's line wide price hike to 3.99 and amidst all the heat their taking from comic stars like Robert Kirkman and Eric Stephenson, I'd love to have seen a show-of-good-faith sort of thing for this launch and giving this much content for the now-regular 3.99 price. I'm not a businessman at Marvel so I can't say if that would have been feasible (though I do think I'm enough of a businessman to speculate that an incredibly profitable company like Marvel, who knows this book is going to sell like crazy particularly if it's all this content for 3.99, could have handled it), but it would have been a solid gesture, as opposed to charging 5.99 for it and still releasing about a hundred variants (also a little bummed because my girlfriend and I went all around checking out local and not-so-local comic book stores to see what variants were in stock and found retailers marking up the incredible Marcos Martin variant to as high as 40 dollars right out of the gate and even seeing the Skottie Young variant up to around $15). Is it worth it for the 5.99? Yeah, probably. If you're a Spidey fan or a regular Spidey reader, definitely. Do I get it if you're not willing to buy this book instead of buying two regular issues of many books (PARTICULARLY in a week when Image released a slew of reprinted number ones for just a dollar)? Absolutely. I do legitimately think that if this issue, in its current state, had been released for 3.99, we'd all be praising the price instead of eyeing it suspiciously.
Second order of business: I really dug myself into a hole here when I made that final issue a post all its own, didn't I? Now I feel compelled to do it for this number one. Hopefully this is the last isolated Spidey post, though, in truth, I clearly talked enough for this to warrant its own post, if only for that last paragraph I just wrote.
Thirdly: that Marcos Martin cover is gorgeous. It's right there, over to the left of that long miscellaneous paragraph.
Fourth: I swear I'll stop praising even the flaws of Spider-Man comics now that this one's done. I've been particularly easy on it as SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN ended and with this kick-off because I do think they were particularly good comics but also because, you know, we're just all happy to have Peter Parker back and at the end of the day I'd rather give out good reviews than bad ones because I'm a happy sort of person.
Fifth: Sorry for this really long section here, I love you all, have a great day.

Total score: 5/5