Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #13

Written by Peter David

Penciled by Todd Nauck

Cover by Mike Wieringo

 

What a difference this story arc has been from the one before it, about the damn Spider-Man 2211. That two-parter was dull and painfully close to breaking the established distance between Peter and his long dead Uncle Ben. David has done a complete 180 and managed to bring back Mysterio, three of them actually.

 

Now, the real Mysterio killed himself quite a while ago, but David runs with that. Two of the Mysterio’s are imposters, one is Francis Klum: a man who already has real powers of teleportation and limited mind control. The other is a more traditional Mysterio who quickly gets his butt handed to him. Then Klum begins his battle with Spider-Man, almost winning if not for the help of the newly revived Flash Thompson (Peter’s old high school bully who was in a coma).

 

The third Mysterio is the original Quentin Beck returned from the dead, now working for some mystical master that has imbued him with real magical power. What we get then is a grade of Mysterios from the original, special effects only type (very dull and lame) to the superpowers type in Klum to the truly wizardly undead Beck. David has managed to turn Mysterio into a more dangerous villain, but the character’s M.O. might be sacrificed in the process. Would a character that uses dark magic or has real superpowers need illusion?

 

I like Flash’s character, even with my earlier doubts still playing on my nerves. He adds something to the book, a hint of charming naivety that used to be a trait of Peter’s, but now Peter’s ‘super-Spidey’ with his new spidey-suit and new spidey-powers, something which has been swept under the spidey-carpet since ‘Other.’ Flash also allows the book to have genuine romance, vicariously of course, since Peter can’t have any.

 

That romance, the school’s nurse Mrs. Arrow, turns out to be more than she seems, don’t they all? She has spidey-spikes just like Peter, who recently got them in the ‘Other.’ Kind of takes away from his singular nature that was supposed to be part of the point of the ‘Other.’ Maybe they’ll make her the female agent of the mythical spirit of Spider? Who knows? Dredging up that awful event wins no points with me.

 

Spider-Man certainly needed this book, done well natch, since J.M.S.’s Amazing Spider-Man was taking on more and more of an untraditional Spidey-tone and is obsessed with Civil War. That book lost a lot of the adventure and fun that used to be a part of any Spider-Man comic.

 

In the end, the supporting cast decides that they need to make Peter stay at the school, some for more nefarious reasons than others. That sounds like the perfect way to keep this book’s tone light and its cast deep.

 

Rating - 7