Amazing Spider-Man #656 – Review

By: Dan Slott & Marcos Martin (storytellers), Muntsa Vicente (colors), Joe Caramanga (letters), Ellie Pyle (assistant editor) & Stephen Wacker (senior editor)

The Story: Spidey struggles with the loss of his Spider-Sense as he tries to hold true to his new “nobody dies” creed.

What’s Good: Here’s a newsflash: Marcos Martin is a really gifted graphic storyteller.  I greatly appreciate the freshness of his page layouts and panel designs because he almost never has a page that is just a boring grid, yet he mixes is up without doing weirdly shaped panels.  Pretty much everything is a rectangle/square, but they are all sorts of different shapes and sizes… some have panel borders, some don’t, some have backgrounds, some don’t.  And even with all this interesting design going on, every page looks visually balanced.  It really makes the comic look different and if you read a lot of comics, you really appreciate some variety!  Of course, Martin’s Ditko inspired linework is pretty darn impeccable too.

One of the fun themes of Slott’s run on ASM so far has been Peter’s new job at Horizon Labs.  Basically, this has given him the resources to craft some new Spidey-gadgets.  A few issues ago we saw the Stealth Suit that allowed him to be invisible and resist the new Hobgoblin’s laugh, and in this issue we get yet another Spidey-suit.  It is very compelling that the creators are actively using Peter’s science background for something greater than simply mixing up web fluid.

The other item that really catches your eye in this issue is the continued evolution of J. Jonah Jameson’s grief over his wife’s death.  In the stellar issue #655, we saw normal grief, but here Jonah molds that grief into an action item, namely that he want to kill any murderers in NYC.  That goes for Alistair Smythe (death penalty) and it also goes for the new bad guy in this issue: The Walking Massacre.  Certainly you can imagine how Jonah’s new “shoot to kill” orders are going to run afoul of Spidey’s “nobody dies”.