Sticky Fingers: The Superior Spider-Man #2 Review

Editor’s Note: Let me go wild, like a spoiler in the sun…

The problem with The Superior Spider-Man #2 is the scene. The scene.

You will know The Scene when you see it. In fact, you will have some difficulty unseeing it. And given that Doc Ock is occupying Peter Parker’s body, and given that Ock, a former ugly duckling, is suddenly in the body of a guy that can allow him to do things that he has never been able to do, while not necessarily understanding how to do those things, the scene makes complete and total sense.

And yet The Scene overpowers almost everything else in the issue, and it does it unnecessarily. Sure, it serves a purpose in furthering a main plot point, but it does it in a way where you almost won’t remember the plot point it furthers. The Scene just about turns this issue into the comics equivalent of Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny: do you have any idea what Brown Bunny is about? Of course not, all you know is that Gallo got his cock sucked by Chloe Sevigny on camera.

And we will address The Scene, and how it affects the comic… which, in spite of the scene, gives us more Peter Parker than I would have expected even a month ago, and which finally shows some real signs that maybe, just maybe, Otto Octavius really has some elements to be a superior Spider-Man… and, in some areas, a superior Peter Parker.

You know, if you can get past The Scene.

Otto has clearly been enjoying his time as Spider-Man, arranging himself a little press conference where he can get his picture taken and get a handshake from the sudden Spider-Man fan J. Jonah Jameson. And in the meantime, he keeps working to make himself an even better Spider-Man… mostly in ways that mean he doesn’t have to work so hard, like setting up a system of cameras to watch for crime that he can watch from his iPad, so he has more time to try to get into Mary Jane’s pants. Which is a task he is enthusiastically pursuing, and at which he is utterly failing, as Mary Jane wants to take things slow. Eventually, Ock finds a way to alleviate his longings and return his attention to crime-fighting, only to find himself drawn back to Mary Jane with a final, emphatic solution… all while the disembodied consciousness of Peter watches helplessly.

So we’ll start with what works here, the most effective thing being Peter Parker. And not just because it’s good to see Peter again, even as a disembodied spirit with limited ability to affect the action, but because he is us. Peter acts as a Greek Chorus for every reader who has had a bout of nerd rage since The Amazing Spider-Man #698. He stands behind Otto and yells in disbelief at his actions, his motivations, and even his dialogue – Peter yelling, “He’s saying super villain stuff! How can no one see through this?” pretty much mimics one of my biggest concerns with The Superior Spider-Man #1, and it was kind of refreshing to see the man we all accept as Spider-Man saying what even the angriest readers were thinking. Seeing Peter like this should take the sting out of just about any angry fanboy still carrying a grudge over the events that brought us here.

What further works is, surprisingly, Otto, who despite his innate villainous nature, isn’t actually all that bad here. Yeah, he’s trying to lay into Peter’s woman, and he’s being a little overly analytical and pissy about the entire project… but he’s accepting her lead on the pace of things, even if he doesn’t particularly like it. And while he’s using his scientific genius and access to Horizon Labs to find ways to not have to be Spider-Man quite so much (or at least to make it not quite so much of an effort), he’s still coming up with some pretty clever solutions to make that happen. Granted, they’re what amounts to old Doc Ock tech dressed up in red and blue, but it still makes the job easier, and it’s actually kind of cool. And his ruthless and nutcutting solution to “his” orbit around Mary Jane? It’s actually more direct and kinder than anything Peter ever did. I was genuinely surprised at how much I was able to get into a lot of Ock’s actions in this issue.

And then there’s The Scene. Which just about blows all the positive stuff in the issue out of the water. And there’s no way to talk about the scene without spoilers, so without further ado…

…did we really need a whole page of Doc Ock jacking off while accessing Peter’s memories? I mean, yeah; we never see him actually yanking Doctor Octopus’s eighth leg, but see that look on Peter’s face on the top right of the panel? If you’re a dude, you’ve made that face, and not simply when you’ve been fondly reminiscing, unless if by “fondly” you mean “frantically,” and by “reminiscing” you mean “masturbating.” And hey, that’s okay; everyone older than 13 has Primed the ol’ Web-Shooter, and there’s nothing explicit here for anyone younger than that to necessarily know what’s going on. But the problem here is that, if you stick a scene in a comic book where a guy spends a page doing the ol’ Thwip-Thwip into a Tube Sock, that is the only thing that is going to stand out about the book. It stops being about anything else except the Friendly Neighborhood Jizz-Slinger, and yes, I can do this all day.

All in all, in light of The Scene, I found it really difficult to go back through the issue and recapture the things I actually liked about it. Which means that, despite being effective as a titillating scene which is admirable in how writer Dan Slott was able to so clearly show a guy displaying the proportionate speed and strength of Spider McGee, Porn Star (okay, they’re not all gonna be Picassos) in a way that should go over the heads of kids, I ultimately have to consider it a failure. It made the book about jacking off just about more than anything else, and I don’t need an escapist superhero fantasy to remind me about that… I spent high school reading them to forget that shit.

Ryan Stegman’s art is much as it was in the first issue – somewhat reminiscent of Todd McFarlane’s (particularly in the big old eyebrows), with a fine line and some good-looking acrobatics. However, in this issue, it appears somewhat more abstract and sketch-like than I remember it in previous work. There appears to be a looser hand with some of the figures, particularly when Spider-Man’s in costume, that gives the book an interesting look. But a lot of his facial expressions are, well, exaggerated. For example, in both panels where Jolly Jonah appears, his face looks like he is busily ejaculating into his pants. And there’s a picture of Peter winking at Mary Jane that looks less flirtatious than it does that he’s experiencing a massive stroke. On the whole, it’s pretty good looking stuff, if a bit on the cartoony side… except for Peter’s O-Face, which depicted so lovingly that it makes me suspect (while praying I’m wrong) that Stegman might have spent some time Cranking Over the Spider-Mobile in front of a mirror.

Look, there is a lot to like in The Superior Spider-Man #2. It’s great to have Peter back, and Slott has clearly spent a lot of time figuring out how to use him to bring sceptical readers back into the fold, and how to make Otto at least believable as Spider-Man. But the whole thing is jeopardized by Slott getting just too damn cute going out of his way to bring us images of Doc Ock bonding with his waldoes.

(That one works on two levels! Thank you, good night!)