Raising Wyoming: Ultimate Spider-Man #17 Review

You ever get a shit assignment at work? Someone pulls you off of your normal duties and you get asked to work on some bullshit project that was someone else’s bonehead idea, and maybe you try to argue that maybe this thing isn’t something that you should be spending your time on, and that maybe it will totally fuck up what you were trying to accomplish on your primary project, but you get told that this is the way it is, and it’s their way or the highway. So you grind your teeth, you take on the assignment, and since you are a fucking professional, you do the best you can with what you’ve been given to work with, while trying your best to keep your original work from dying on the vine.

Welcome to Ultimate Spider-Man #17, a continuation and integral part of the Ultimate Universe’s United We Stand crossover, a story where Captain America has been elected President of The United States in a write-in campaign, where Hydra has taken over big parts of the country, terrorists roam the streets of New York, and Wyoming is some kind of dead zone / no man’s land where anyone who chooses to go there is taking a dangerous, useless risk. Actually, that’s pretty much how Wyoming is in the real world, but that’s not the point.

The point is that United We Stand is a big, goofy, nonsensical shoot-em-up that has made a bunch of schoolyard, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we $WILDEST_THIRD_GRADE_IDEA?” choices along the way. And it has occurred smack in the middle of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s efforts to create and nurture a new Spider-Man, one who attends a private school, who has a loving, if complicated, family, and is learning about what it means to be not only a hero, but to be a decent person. And smack in the middle of those efforts, now he needs to fight War Machines over Wyoming with Giant Woman and Falcon under direct orders of the President of The United States. You know, Captain America. Which flies in the face of the slow paced (admittedly, sometimes seemingly glacially paced), character-driven story that Bendis has been building since last year.

And it is to Bendis’s credit that even though he has to deal with this big, goofy situation, he keeps a tight focus on the characters of Miles and his family, while delivering enough big thrills to make it arguably the most effective issue of this crossover to date.

This issue has the super-powered forces of S.H.I.E.L.D. amassed outside of Casper, Wyoming, ostensibly to repel the advancing forces of Hydra, but personally I think it’s because someone lost a bet (seriously: I’ve been to Wyoming. You watch Old Faithful blow off, and then you dodge angry buffalo and toothpick-chewing locals and fuck off to the relative civilization of Big Sky, Montana – they have bars with pinball!). Hawkeye orders Spider-Man and Spider-Woman to work together during the battle, which puts Spider-Woman on edge, possibly because Spider-Woman, as a clone of Peter Parker, finds the idea of a thirteen-year-old kid wandering around calling himself Spider-Man to be odd, if not downright offensive. Then Hydra attacks with a bunch of flying War Machines, which is good luck, considering that, on an open plain with no buildings, mountains or trees, a dude who can swing from high places and cling to high surfaces would be about as useless as tits on a boar hog. Meanwhile, while battle ensues in Wyoming, Miles’s father has been arrested by S.H.I.E.L.D. in New York, only to be freed in a Hydra attack, and given a choice to join… and a rifle. And finally, Miles does something incredibly brave, only to learn that in Wyoming, a dude who can swing from high places? Yup: tits on a boar hog.

So what we have here is a big punch-up in the middle of nowhere, with the President of The United States on a fucking sky cycle. The whole scenario is kinda dumb on its face, but Bendis gets around it by keeping the focus on Spider-Man, in totally over his head and yet, with the energy and enthusiasm of a kid, trying to keep up… and also on Spider-Woman, who just clearly has no faith in Miles. The tension between the two is palpable, particularly from Spider-Woman’s side, which really worked for me, considering that she is, for all intents and purposes for the story, Peter Parker. And there is no way in hell that a more experienced Spider-Person would voluntarily work with a 13-year-old acting like he deserves the name, whether he was stepping up or not. The conflict between the two kept the huge battle focused on the characters, and kept the entire thing grounded in a way that a story like this, frankly, isn’t easy to do.

Weirdly, the part that worked best for me didn’t have anything to do with the superhero action, but it was the interlude with Miles’s dad and Hydra. In a crossover like this, most writers focus on the action and don’t pay a hell of a lot of attention as to how it would affect Joe Blow on the street. But Bendis does a good job in showing how this mess is affecting the citizens of New York, and how a military deployment, and the implementation of what amounts to martial law, could lead to a certain ambiguity of opinion over who the good guys are. Let’s face it: if you’re walking the street, minding your own business, and some cops put the arm on you for no reason, there’s a pretty good chance that you might be sympathetic to whoever breaks you out. So seeing someone like Miles’s dad, who has been presented pretty consistently as a good man, struggle with who he supports in this battle was affecting, far more so than anything of the story I’ve read in, say, The Ultimates.

Pepe Larraz’s art was perfectly serviceable for the story, in a purely workmanlike way. His panel layouts are clear and easy to follow, which sounds like a bare-minimum requirement for a comic book, but remember: this is Ultimate Spider-Man, a book that more than almost any other in recent memory give readers confusing double-paged layouts that play poorly with the spine break and are unnecessarily confusing to decode. Larraz’s figures are generally realistic, with a fairly minimalist line work, and what faces he draws (big parts of this book feature people in full face masks and whole head helmets) are expressive… although those expressions are, more often than not, screaming, determined rage. The action is pretty easy to follow, although there were a few panels where Spider-Man and Spider-Woman are swinging around Wyoming suspended by… well, something; those panels reminded me of the Amazing Spider-Man video game where Spider-Man can swing across Central Park, apparently webbing onto passing pigeons. But on the whole, the art was simple and easy to follow, if not stylized and spectacular.

Look, I’ve gone on record that I think the whole United We Stand crossover is kinda silly at best, and chucking the Ultimate Universe into arbitrary chaos to make things look like they have high stakes, as in Wildstorm’s World’s End arc that was ultimately that line’s swan song. So to see Ultimate Spider-Man made a part of the book was initially pretty dispiriting. However, Bendis takes the assignment and makes the conflict more human and believable than almost any other book in the crossover. And while it still feels like a giant distraction that will inevitably be chucked by the wayside and forgotten, Bendis at least grounds the story in humanity better than most.

But still: Spider-Man should not be in Wyoming. Not because his powers are useless there (but still: they really are), but because he’s just a kid, and he can’t have committed any sin to really deserve that.