Conjugal Visit With A Remorseless Killer: Scarlet Spider #2 Review

Scarlet Spider is going to be a hard book for anyone who read comics for a long time before the Spider Clone saga to read with any level of objectivity. I’ve just now written and deleted a bunch of reasons why that is, but what it comes down to is that if you spent your 1980s adolescence reading books like The Dark Knight Returns, Mage: The Hero Discovered and Watchmen, the logic in the 1990s was simple: if ($_spider + $_clone) {($_comic == shit) && ($_comic_dollars_spent == 0)}. Sure, there are people crawling out of the woodwork now defending the Spider Clone saga, but there were also people who begged for conjugal visits with Ted Bundy; we call whose people cranks on a good day and apeshit crazy on a bad one, and we don’t generally entrust either with important things like firearms, or the editors’ desks of major comic books.

Long story short: I have not been looking forward to Scarlet Spider.

So I was prepared a few weeks ago to pick up the first issue, summarily review it and probably discard it… except by the time I got to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I’m such a hotshit writer about comics how come I don’t rank free advance review copies, it was already sold out… and this was by Wednesday evening. Which proves that despite my personal prejudices, someone was looking forward to this book.

So this week, I was able to get my hands on Scarlet Spider #2, and even at face value, I wasn’t excited about it – I mean, look at that cover. The center focus is the hero’s crotch with a bisected stone behind it, making it look like Scarlet Spider either has The Thing’s wang or that he is literally shitting a brick.

With all that said: Scarlet Spider #2 is actually a decent comic book. The character work is engaging, and I actually enjoyed it… even if I think it’s all presented in a way that isn’t going to be sustainable in the long term

In this issue, Scarlet Spider is in Houston on his way to Mexico to start a new life… doing what is anybody’s guess. As a clone with no education history, he has a bright future ahead of him perhaps as a masked Mexican wrestler, or a filthy gringo selling fish in an alley behind a bar. Regardless, he is leaving behind a woman he apparently saved from some damn thing in the first issue, who is under attack by someone with the ability to control fire who calls himself Xiuhcoatl. Xiuhcoatl states that he has always wanted to fight a super hero, which is a noble goal for a villain who can probably be defeated by a ten-year-old with a Super Soaker.

Despite Kaine’s repeated assertions that he is not a super hero, he puts on his super hero suit and returns to the battle to use his super powers to do some super heroing. And this is where the book gets its power. Writer Christopher Yost presents Kaine as someone who really does not want to be doing this. He has some small sense of wanting to protect the woman Aracely (Aracely! Get it?), but his motivation quickly switches to just wanting to kill Xiuhcoatl and get on with his life… which means that we see a guy in a Spider-Man suit trying to strangle someone to death. Throwing the guy off a skyscraper. Shooting at a guy.

As a lifelong reader of Spider-Man, seeing a guy in a spider suit do things like this is affecting. It causes a sense of cognitive dissonance; an involuntary wincing and saying, “Jesus, I can’t believe Spider-Man is doing this stuff.” Is that a cheap gimmick to get a reaction out of the reader? Maybe… but it does work… at least for right now. On an infinite timeline, this isn’t a method that’s going to be sustainable; the character will either need to embrace being a hero (Which will remove the actions and therefore the impact) or eventually kill somebody. And if someone that everyone thinks is Spider-Man kills someone, well, hello Avengers / New Avengers / FF simultaneous manhunt! But for now, in the limited scope of what’s happening in this issue, I found it extremely effective.

Putting aside the truly wretched cover, Ryan Stegman’s art actually serves a Spider-Man style book reasonably well. His action storytelling is fluid and easy to follow, although I wish he’d stop drawing Scarlet Spider in action as having curved femurs like Popeye after a life on horseback. His figures are impressive, although he makes it look like “Xiuhcoatl” is Spanish for “Check out my delts!”, and his facial expressions remind me of Todd McFarlane… which is never bad in a Spider book, but I finally realized that it reminds me of McFarlane because Stegman draws everyone with big, thick eyebrows like Houston is populated with the secondary cast of The Godfather. Big eyebrows allow for ease in expression, but once you realize it’s happening, all you start seeing are eyebrows. But in general, I liked the look of this book.

In the end, I liked Scarlet Spider #2 a hell of a lot more than I thought I would. Time will tell if seeing someone who looks like Spider-Man act like a dick loses its ability to shock and engage – and frankly, I can see it getting old – but for right now, I found myself sucked in… and if you had told me in October that that would be the context in which I used the word “sucked” in a Scarlet Spider review, I’d have called you a lying scumbag.

I was impressed. Think about giving it a look.