A Really Bad Grandpa — Reviewing ‘Miles Morales: Spider-Man #24

Meeting the family of a significant other can often be interesting. Especially if their family happens to be a supervillain. Then it’s just outright dangerous.

Vampire Spider-Man adds even more grief to his plate as the high-flying Vulture has a lot to say about his relationship with Starling in Miles Morales: Spider-Man #24. This guest-star and emotionally heavy issue comes from Cody Ziglar, Federico Vicentini, Bryan Valenza, and Cory Petit.

Spider-Man character stories are at their best when they are chock full of character development and relationship stuff. How the character in question struggles with their heroic duties, their life responsibilities, and how to navigate through them like a tightrope walker juggling chainsaws and great white sharks. Ziglar understands that perfectly, because that’s what we keep getting with this series.

Miles has a vampiric itch that just can’t be scratched at the same time his girlfriend’s criminal grandpa comes wagging his finger at their relationship. We get tons of beats where he struggles to ignore the siren call of blood sucking while going overboard on the most senior citizen of villains around. It’s all happening while Starling deals with her complicated feelings about her grandfather but also not being cool with her boyfriend throwing him around.

Family, it’s complicated.

All of it flows so easily, even as we transition into the return of Miles mentor Misty Knight and the emergence of a special guest star that wasn’t even solicited on the series cover until the next issue (that being Black Panther who managed to shake off his own vampire transition from the Blood Hunt event that just ended). A whole (major) book chock full of heroic and human feeling characters of marginalized groups.

We love to see it.

Also, we love to see the continued work of Vicentini and Valenza.

Everything has the right level of depth, chaotic energy, and focus that needs to be on display in a Spider character series. Every single hard blow and struggle moment of the Spider-Man & Vulture fight is fully felt on that page. They’re all over the place, blood is flowing, and the emotional waves coming off everyone are vibrating with high frequency. Vicentini really dances across the line that exists between rough/hard and whimsical, dipping into both elegantly.

Allowing things to have an atmosphere of heroic fun while being heavy and rough as hell. That darkness extends into the color palette that Valenza deploys with such skill. Plenty of the colors are more poppy or vibrant (it is a costumed genre book), but the darker shadows and weightier color choices are clear and felt. Mixed among them are the more neutral or toned down beats which give the world around them a true authentic appearance and resonance.

Zingers, threats, screams, and explainers are flying around almost as rapidly as the swinging and soaring combatants. Thanks to Petit, who always makes the lettering what it should be and more. Good lettering makes sure we see and can follow all the dialogue, captions, and other bits of assorted vocabulary easily and clearly. Great lettering infuses all of those words with so much more.

It lets us clearly hear the emotions with each word uttered, pairing with the artwork to create the right tone. He also switches things up here or there so that the particular volume or range is just as clear. That’s not to mention finding ways among all that to just create visually fun imagery that catches the eye. All that and more is here on these pages, and wherever Petit goes.

Miles Morales: Spider-Man #24 is now available from Marvel Comics.