Amazing Spider-Man #9

So my daughters and I read most of our comics together these days and Amazing Spider-Man is on the list of favorites. (I have to skim over and block some of Pete and Silk’s dialogue, but other than that the book is very kid-friendly.)

My 10-year-old is a huge Mayday Parker fan, thanks to years of back issue bin diving. So Dan Slott's Spider-verse story was right up our alley, based on what we’d heard. She’s a smart kid; concepts like alternate realities and multiple Earths don’t scare her off. But, after reading the opening chapter of Spider-verse, I was feeling a big confused. I don’t know anything about Morlun’s family. Are they new? Where do they live? Why do they get the Earth-1 designation? These things were bothering me! So I figured I’d ask my daughter to tell me what SHE thinks Spider-verse is about.

“Spider-verse is about a ton of Spider-people coming together to team up. The spider-people think our Peter Parker is really important, but he’s just confused. One of the Spider-Men is very powerful. A family of vampire-type thingamabobs want to eat all the spider-people. One is named Morlun. One has a name that starts with a D. And their Dad looks like a sasquatch. And there is a pig Spider-Man.”

So really, what else does she need to know? I guess it really isn’t that complicated, is it? She and her sister both love Peter Porker after one appearance. They are intrigued by Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman. They love Silk and the Scarlet Spider. (And boy, are my kiddos worried about the New Warriors.) They have fewer reservations about the complexity than I do!

I will say this; my daughter is very, very worried that Peter and MJ from the MC2 Universe are really dead. She’s going to be mighty upset to see her beloved Mayday lose both her parents. I’m hoping Slott will give us some sort of an out before the end of this storyline.

I’m also very hopeful that the Spiders are going to eliminate some of the Morlun family’s more forgettable members. They look too much alike and have too similar of goals for me to easily differentiate between them. Morlun never had the most unique look when he was alone, having “fat Morlun” “girl Morlun” and “hairy Morlun” isn’t quite enough for me.

Olivier Coipel does a great job on art, as always. My daughters thought Mayday looked “different” and I’d have to agree. Seeing her rendered in Coipel’s modern style is a bit jarring after a hundred issues of Ron Frenz’s far more “classic” pencils.

This is a GOOD comic, continuing Slott’s epic run on the wall-crawler. It’s even worth the extra buck at $4.99!