And so the first Brand New Day arc finishes.
Overall it was a very good Spider-Man story, which is clearly what they were aiming for. That may sound like an obvious thing to want, but for a long time it looked like they were aiming at writing stories that had Spider-Man in, rather than Spider-Man stories. And in this recent age of event excess, having a self-contained Spider-Man comic feels like a breath of fresh air.
The gelling of McNiven’s art with Slott’s writing picked up through the three issues and by the end you can pretty much forget the reset button they’ve pressed and go with the new flow (of course, Jackpot’s appearance in the next arc may reverse that).
Between the success of this arc and the Messiah Complex storyline in the X-Books recently, there is a strong argument for moving this to a weekly rather than three a month. I thought the X-Books crossover made a bit better use of the pacing opportunities that a weekly format gives you, thought the mish mash of artists hampered the appeal of the lengthy fight scenes that this pacing allows. Spider-Man at the moment feels like a median between the pacing of a US monthly comic and the pacing of 20+ page weekly shonen action series. I think there’s room to push it closer to a weekly manga’s pacing in terms of giving the artist more room to breathe and lessening the hammering home of plot.
For example, there’s a reveal in this latest issue that really could have had more time to breathe. In fact, even if this was a monthly, the reveal would still seem too hasty. Also this issue had some of McNiven’s best action art, looking a lot looser and more natural than his art has in the past, and it would have been nice to see the fights given more panel time.
Next issue we have Marc Guggenheim and Salvador Larroca. I’ve enjoyed Guggenheim’s work on Wolverine, and I think his fast paced, vibrant scripts are a good fit for this format. Larroca’s evolved from a poor man’s Carlos Pacheco into a very good superhero artist, his newuniversal work was very good and look forward to see what he can do on Spider-Man.