Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week – beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.
Finally.
Not that Superior Spider-Man #30 was bad and that now that Otto’s tale has reached its end, I’m relieved, that is. You saw the part where this is called the Best of the week, right? Spoiler alert: I’m gonna compliment this comic. And it’s very much deserved, for the way Dan Slott and his team (here, Christos Gage and Giuseppe Camuncioli) Setting up a story for 100 issues in Amazing Spider-Man, leading to an audacious ending, and then following that up for a year and a half is gutsy, and for savvy readers, the question was never about whether Peter Parker was going to come back. He’s the star character of a giant blockbuster movie; he was always coming back. The question was whether a story could be made out of taking Peter away, and using one of his archnemeses to highlight his strengths by aggressively contrasting them. The series has been a very successful journey, in that regard.
Superior Spider-Man #30 was the final homestretch of that journey; if the tension of the first half of the series was based around Slott and co’s canny skill at doing just enough work convincing you that Otto could actually be a better Spider-Man while still keeping him slimy, the second half was filled with the question of how bad he’d make Peter’s life before the latter could fight back. And as it turns out, the answer is “New York is in flames,” basically the exact sort of thing you’d expect a supervillain to accidentally do. There’s a poetic inevitability to Otto Octavius ruining the city even when he’s not trying to; it establishes how singular Peter is, how being Spider-Man isn’t just about robots and island fortresses. The secret to being the best Spider-Man possible is that you don’t hesitate for a SECOND to jump in front of a train to save someone. It doesn’t matter who that is. You do it. You find a way.
Funnily enough, that’s basically the story of how Peter actually gets his body back, too. The “how” is left surprisingly vague, after there were so many details about how Otto supposedly purged his predecessor’s ghost from his body. The answer is, in essence, “Peter’s ghost was still there and fought its way back,” but the details, brought to life in some of Camuncoli‘s best work to date, was this weird mind odyssey where Peter lost all sense of identity in Otto’s memories, and had to fight back with his own reassertion of self. The trick of it all, though, is that if the whole reason the story in Superior Spider-Man exists is because Otto experienced Peter’s life and empathized enough to try to change, then all that is mirrored in the mechanism of how Peter fought his way back. He doesn’t punch out Doctor Octopus, even in his mindscape. He talks to Otto. Each has lived a life in the other’s shoes, and they’ve come to only one conclusion: it has to be Peter. In his one act of selflessness, Otto gives up the love of his life in order to save her. And in a moment of perfect empathy, Peter understands why, and is changed by the moment. The next issue will have the conclusion, with the webs, the violence and the quips; all those other Spider-Man elements. Peter’s real victory happened here, where he wasn’t the strongest or the smartest. He was just the kindest, and that is ultimately the only thing that’s important in any of this.