Return of The King: The Superior Spider-Man #31 Review

Editor’s Note: Yeah. That sounds just spoilery enough to be right. Let’s go.

It’s been about 16 months since Doc Ock took over as Spider-Man, which has been just enough time to forget that Spider-Man is supposed to be fun, dammit.

Spider-Man’s supposed to be a wisecrack and an acrobatic move and a triumphant battle against insurmountable odds, while simultaneously Peter Parker’s a self-defeating complaint, an overdue bill he can’t afford to pay and a ruinous relationship that disintegrates against, well, predictable odds. Is it a formula? Sure. Is it soap operatic? Hell, yeah. But it’s a thing that works, and which has been working for 52 years. And it seems like a simple enough formula that we’ve seen so often over the years that we wouldn’t miss it if it was gone for a while… but I did, dammit.

Doc Ock as Spider-Man has been an interesting thought experiment to help reinforce that it’s the character of Peter Parker that makes the comic and not just a power set and a red and blue leotard, but nobody falls in love with a thought experiment unless it’s the Milgram Experiment, and even then it’s only if the enthralled already had a closet full of jackboots. So while it’s been a kinda cool distraction to watch a darker, more obsessed version of Spider-Man, I was ready for it to be over since I already have Batman.

So not only is it just plain good to see Peter back in the saddle in The Superior Spider-Man #31, writer Dan Slott clearly knows it. Because throughout this issue, characters react to Peter being back in costume (despite ostensibly not really knowing that he ever wasn’t the guy in the costume) with a general sense of relief and a sense of return to normal.

And so did I.

The Goblin King has taken Ock’s fiancee Anna Marconi hostage while New York burns, since the Green Goblin has rigged Ock’s spiderbots to ignore anyone wearing a Goblin mask, and those predisposed to wear said masks are less likely to spend their evenings drinking tea and discussing True Detective than they are to gobble E and do cannibalism for the greater glory of The Yellow King. After Peter tells Carlie he’s back in control and he checks in with Aunt May, he connects with Spider-Man 2099, discovers Anna is being held by the Goblin at Archemax headquarters, and storms the front door. Spider-Man attacks the Green Goblin, unmasking him to discover he is… based on his face, a lumberjack who makes ends meet in 80’s gay porn. Whoever he is, he claims that he is Norman Osborn with a new face. Norman spends a while screeching that no one can defeat his evil genius plans, all while apparently forgetting that the lynchpin of those plans is that the spiderbots only ignore people wearing Goblin masks. While Gobby takes a fall, Spider-Man saves Anna, loses the Goblin, and then moves into the Christos Gage backup tale where Peter begins the long process of picking up the pieces of a year and a half of being Doc Ock…

Okay, the strongest part of this issue is the return of Peter, and how Slott handles how the supporting characters deal with that return. From the expected and standard “let me tell you something only Peter Parker would know” he uses with Carlie, to the simple appreciation of Peter’s better attitude from The Avengers, to Miguel O’Hara’s simple, “Yeah, that sounds just stupid enough to be right,” it was cool to see how people just seemed to naturally react to Peter being Peter again.

But the best reaction, and arguably the best moment of the whole thing, was how The Goblin reacted. It’s a simple moment of a wisecrack, but Slott and artist Giuseppe Camuncoli give the moment and Goblin’s realization four panels, to allow us to see Goblin hear and understand what he was dealing with. In a few panels, we really get the sense that Goblin knew Ock, and Goblin knows Peter, and he is suddenly faced with his greatest foe… if that is, in fact, Norman Osborn.

Which leads to probably the weakest part of the issue: Norman’s alleged new face. Now look, I recognize that Norman Osborn has always had the worst of all possible haircuts in all of comics, being a half inch too short and 20 years too early to demand fistfuls of Jheri-Curl. But at least it was distinctive, you know? This new face and haircut and Godawful moustache make Goblin look like the best evil master plan he could come up with would involve the hostile takeover of an interstate rest area men’s room glory hole. I don’t know what you call that kind of moustache, but I’m going with “yam bracket.” It is awful, and does not lead to a really intimidating villain face.

Then there’s the aspect of the story that I should have expected, being what amounts to a mini-reboot of the title: the reset to a general status quo. By the time the main event and the backup story have concluded, Peter’s relationships with Mary Jane and Carlie are over, he’s made up with Aunt May and her husband, he’s cut public ties with Spider-Man, and Jonah is no longer mayor. Look, I have been reading superhero comics since 1975. This is not my first rodeo. I know that we would eventually get back to the character’s status quo, and on some level, that’s what I want; I wouldn’t have read Spider-Man for damn near 40 years if I didn’t want to keep reading about that guy. And over the course of the next several months in The Amazing Spider-Man, I’m sure we will see all the effects of the last 16 months of The Superior Spider-Man slowly written away, including the eventual and inevitable return of Doctor Octopus. But to see so many major pieces swept off the board so quickly was a little disheartening and abrupt; it seemed less like an organic story development than a forced time saver to get things “back on track” quickly. These are all things that had to eventually happen, but to have them happen this quickly pulled me a bit out of the story.

The Superior Spider-Man #31 wasn’t a perfect comic book. But it does what I’ve been wanting for a long time: bring back Peter Parker. And not just bring him back, but bring him back in character and have the characters around him react to the return in a satisfying way. And it all happens with some dynamic and exciting art from Camuncoli in the main story (except for that face for “Osborn.” Yeesh.) and more detailed and fine-lined stuff from Will Sliney that accentuates facial expressions in the more intimate backup story written by Gage. While I generally enjoyed The Superior Spider-Man, I’ve been ready for it to be over for a while, and this issue was a decent enough way to have Peter wrap up some of what Ock did and start repairing the damage… even if some of those repairs seem to come a little too fast for my taste.

And now I am prepared to sit vigil for the story where The Green Goblin and his new moustache implements his evil plan to smuggle 100 cases of Coors to Paul Williams.