Four Panel Folly Comic museings.

Best Comic I Read This Week: The Amazing Spider-Man #635

This is about the quality of my family portraits as well.

Alright, alright! I'm kind of eating my words here. I've been poo-pooing the Grim Hunt storyline and all its “We're hunting spiders” nonsense since it was first hinted at in the issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. I thought it all felt like a little bit of a desperate attempt to find someone threatening enough to be a Spider-Man “big bad”. I still sorta do, because the wife and daughter of Kraven aren't scary. (Why focus on them when you have all the potential of Mr. Negative?)

But yeah, dang. Grim Hunt has been delivering the goods so far. Spider-Man is really threatened by the forces at work against him and they are legitimately messing up his business.

The plot around Grim Hunt is about Kraven's brood trying to resurrect him using the blood of Spider-powered superheroes. They already offed Mattie Franklin, one of the many Spider-Woman's, and now are gunning for Petey Parker himself.

So the Kraven's are into Voodoo now. That's cool. A lot of people like to try out new religions in college. Maybe next time we see them they'll be big into Rasta? That'd be cool too.

What I really love about this story so far is the tension. Everything is going wrong for Spider-Man at once. Madame Web is being forced to help the bad guys, Spidey has to run around trying to protect all the other Spider-powered heroes (Arana and Arachne show up briefly in this issue), Kaine is all present and angry, and now the zombie of Spidey's old mentor Ezekiel has shown up with bossy ideas on how things should go down.

It's problematic.

Writer Joe Kelly is really writing some great comics here. He bounces around all the multiple plot lines, keeping things interesting and coherent. Not only that, he also ended both issues so far with a major stabbin'. So who knows how many people are going to have a knife in their chest by the end of this Grim Hunt. (On a side note, Major Stabbin' is my experimental hip-hop/marching band fusion MC name.)

Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano's art works during the quite moments and adds the gloom and doom of the scariest game of Ghost in the Graveyard to Spider-Man being hunted for his blood. On the other hand, their art is way too restrained during the action sequences. When you got a dude in blue and white spandex fighting giant lion monsters, something on the page should POP. But pop's are absent.

Speaking of Giant Lion Monsters, what's that all about?

Any ways, The Amazing Spider-Man #635's back story, about a previous encounter between Kaine and Kraven (back when he was still alive), is alright but won't be winning any Eisners. It seems the only purpose of it is to really drive home how much of jerk Kaine is. But I already know that! I just saw him being a jerk in the regular part of the issue. He was expertly communicating how unlikable he is. This makes the back story unnecessary.

That's enough griping though, because this issue is GOOD. And this storyline is GOOD. Words have been swallowed. I'm still waiting on the verdict to see if Grim Hunt going to be worth the more boring parts of The Gauntlet, but until then I'll just enjoy the ride.