Review: ‘Spider-Man’ #7 Is All Flash
by Tony Thornley
Spider-Man launched with huge fanfare and promises of an event years in the making. With the ‘End of the Spider-Verse’ arc ending in this issue, it was clear that those promises had no substance behind them.
Dan Slott, Mark Bagley, John Dell, Andrew Hennessy, Edgar Delgado, and Joe Caramagna end the event in a spectacular fashion, but not much substance.
Silk has found a solution to save the Spiders and restore the Great Web. Unfortunately, that doesn’t defeat Shathra on its own. Thankfully there’s a whole, wide Spider-Verse out there.
This issue is, quite simply, a mess. Slott’s script is a rushed jumble of ideas, concepts and fights that are barely coherent. After considering the severe missteps of issue #5, it’s even more glaring how rushed this is. The story that unfolded here could have used at least another issue or even two to let the plot breathe, but instead we just see sudden plot resolution, a final fight with the cavalry rushing in, and then pages of epilogue.
And in those epilogues, one of the issues’ other big issues lies. Marvel gave a big character debut much fanfare, but here it lands with a thud. This is not the first time Slott has introduced a previously unknown Spider-hero, with retroactive importance that makes the reveal feel worse. He’s written out of the story two panels later, with lots of cliched dialogue about his eventual return and importance. Even worse, Slott gives him nearly the same introduction that he gave another, established character a page or so earlier and he executes that introduction successfully, making the new character’s intro even more glaringly bad.
The art has been one of the best things about the book, but unfortunately that’s not the case here. Delgado’s colors are great, and the opening pages have fantastic line art from Bagley and Dell. But once the book shifts inkers, there’s a clear drop. Detail is lost, the crisp lines of the last six issues are nonexistent, and the crowd scenes- of which there are MANY- become muddled and unclear. There could be a myriad of reasons for this, sure, but it still stands that it shifted a very good looking book into something I disliked.
This final issue is emblematic of the larger arc- it’s definitely not what we hoped and in the end, it’s a big disappointment.
Spider-Man #7 is available now from Marvel Comics.
Overview
It’s incredibly frustrating to see such a promising book turn out to be such a mess. We’ll see if anything interesting can come out of it.
