Superior Spider-Man #25 – Review

by Dan Slott, Christos Gage (Writers), Humberto Ramos, Victor Olazaba (Artists), Edgar Delgado (Colorist)

The Story: It’s the Avengers against the Superior Venom as chaos erupts in the city.

The Review: There’s always something rather nice in longer issues. While the normal 20 pages structures can be generally used well by most writers, there’s something satisfying in knowing that publishers aren’t against the idea to print larger book in order to tell bigger stories. They come as a bit more costly most of the time, but they are worth it more often than not.

However, I cannot say that the higher page count was used in the most efficient of ways in the big conclusion to Darkest Hour, the Venom story which pitted Otto as infected by the symbiote. There is plenty of nice ideas and a general sense of action that is rather entertaining, yet there are several problems that makes this large issue not the best it could very well be.

The most obvious problem is the number of plots and subplots the book tries to handle at the same time. The war against the Goblin King and Hobgoblin, the transformation of Carlie Cooper, the fate of Flash Thompson, how citizens reacts and many more such events are thrown at the readers, with not all of them receiving the buildup or enough space to have the impact it should have. It does get exciting at times, but most of these scenes ends way too soon for them to be satisfying.