The Octopus Strikes Back: The Superior Spider-Man #9 Review

Editor’s Note: Sorry, but this has to be. The spoilers of an old life must make way for the new.

At the end of 2012, Spider-Man writer Dan Slott got a lot of attention boosting attention to his long run on The Amazing Spider-Man by, well, killing The Amazing Spider-Man.

The move caused an uproar amongst long-time Spider-Man fans, who acted like Slott stole Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey and then beat her with it about the nead and neck. It was interesting to watch: hundreds upon hundreds of long-time comic fans – fans who have seen almost every damn character of any prominence die and come back to life over the years – acting like they were incapable of understanding that Spider-Man’s death was obviously temporary. Of course Spider-Man’s gonna come back to life; Marvel would no more kill its flagship character than it would hand over the keys to the shop to slashfic writers for whom English is a second language.

However, the move got a lot of press and led to a lot of printings of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, so from a business standpoint, the move to kill Peter Parker was a success. So four months later, what does Dan Slott do for an encore?

Kill him again. Duh.

Doc Ock has discovered that some vestige of Peter Parker lives on in their shared brain. So Ock, eager to be free of Parker’s interference, uses his neurolitic scanner to enter their combined mental space to do battle and wipe what remains of Peter out. So, being a superhero comic, they fight, and while they do, they argue over what it means to be a hero, what it means to be Spider-Man, and who is more deserving to be Spider-Man. They point out each other’s weaknesses and shameful things they’ve each done, and it turns out that this time around, Peter’s the greater sinner, allowing Ock to gain the upper hand and, well, win, apparently wiping what remains of Peter Parker out of his brain, leaving only Otto Octavius.

I’m gonna start with my gut reaction, which is the gut reaction of the five-year-old who first read Spider-Man comics and the reaction of everyone who called for Slott’s head on Twitter yesterday: it is hard to watch Peter lose in this way. Slott handles the defeat of Peter in this particular manner – being utterly erased from his own memory – extremely well. It is difficult to watch the everyman hero I’ve been reading since 1975 just be eliminated from himself, and it is heartbreaking to see him not only forget the ancillary characters like Joy Mercado and Ned Leeds, but it’s a killer seeing him forget Uncle Ben. And sure, seeing Peter in tears trying to remember the character who defines his greatest loss is a dirty and kind of obvious emotional trick, but it is effective.

Problem is, it’s not as effective as it could be. And for me, the reason for this was that we just saw Peter killed at the hands of Otto Octavius just four months ago. And when that happened, we saw that Peter wasn’t really dead (maybe a ghost, but not dead-dead. You know, like Grandma-dead!) within about two weeks. So seeing it happen again, just in a different manner, just doesn’t feel as weighty as it could if you stop and think about it for more than a few seconds. And maybe that’s just an after-effect of reading and reviewing comics on the Internet, but there’s vastly less impact this time around because we’ve seen it already, we’ve seen that the consequences aren’t nearly as bad as we’ve been initially led to believe, and it blunts the impact more than I would have liked.

What we’re dealing with here seems to be Act Two of a genre trilogy disease: you need to put the heroes on their heels so they can come back strong for the final third act. It’s a structure we’ve seen a million times, and it generally works… but since it’s familiar, it also reduces the stakes. Let’s face it: nobody really thought that Han Solo was gonna get thawed out and his throat slit by Jabba after the end of The Empire Strikes Back, did they? Hell, I saw that movie in its original theatrical release when I was eight years old, and even I understood that Luke would rescue Han if I could just hold out until 1983, and the same effect is happening in this issue: I know that Peter’s coming back… but I do want to see how it happens. Which means that even though I didn’t feel the oomph in this issue’s conclusion maybe the way that Slott intended, it was still effective in that I’m on board to see how things play out.

Ryan Stegman’s art is much as it has been in is other Spider-Man work. His stuff is a bit cartoony, but less on the side of manga-cartoony than his alternating artist on this title, Humberto Ramos, which means it’s more to my particular liking. His bodies are realistic in an angular kinda way, and his faces are expressive (seeing Peter start to lose his shit as his memories go is just shattering), and his action is solid, particularly since most of this issue takes place in a dream space where things don’t necessarily make a lot of sense. And Stegman does one really cool thing in that dream space: he spells all the signs wrong. They’re close enough so you know what they say, but off in that way that that dreams often are, which helps sell the dream logic in a subtle way. And the climax, where Stegman ups the speed by moving to smaller and smaller panels before opening up to big panels to reveal Otto’s “triumph” is paced damn near perfectly. It’s good stuff, provided you like the general art style.

Look: it’s hard to see Peter apparently wiped out, but it doesn’t pack the impact that it could just by dint of the fact that we just saw Peter get killed, and get killed without the consequences that the finality of getting, you know, killed, should carry. And no reasonable person can really think that this story means the death of Peter Parker. And that fact weakens the issue somewhat; seeing a dude get killed over and over again loses its punch after a while. But looking at it as an act two, where the hero needs to be laid low so that his eventual triumph carries more weight, it works perfectly well, and it does what it needs to: it makes me want to see how things play out. Sure, it’s not the gutpunch that Slott probably wanted once you think about it for more than a few seconds, but it keeps the story moving along briskly and it makes me want to see more. And that’s an effective comic book, no matter how you shake it out.

So everyone who’s losing their shit and shrieking at Slott about this issue: settle down. Right now Otto is trying to be a hero. Slott needs to return him to full on villain, and make Peter’s journey as rocky as possible, to make Peter’s eventual return all the more sweet. So as long as Slott doesn’t fall prey to whatever instincts have recently taken over The Walking Dead, where we’ve spent a year waiting to see Negan take a bullet to the face like we all know is going to happen, this could wind up playing out very well indeed.