Avenging Spider-Man #17 – Review

By: Christopher Yost (Writer), Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco (Artists), Dave Curiel (Colorist)

The Story: Spider-Ock has to babysit the Future Foundation, while the Time Variance Authority comes crashing in because time will severely be meddled with.

The Review: With all the weirdness going around in the main Spider-Man book, Superior Spider-Man, one has to appreciate books like this one. While it still does offer weirdness, it offers a wholly different kind of adventure, as Spider-Ock interacts with the grander Marvel Universe.

Here in this issue, Spider-Ock has to keep the Future Foundation, the fun concept of genius-level children introduced by Jonathan Hickman, in check while the replacement Fantastic Four are going in a mission in the microverse. Such a concept does allow for a fun bout with the genius-level Otto Octavius interacting with children that are closer to his level of intellect.

Avenging Spider-Man #16 – Review

Chris Yost (Writer), Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco (Artists), Dave Curiel (Colorist)

The Story: Spider-Ock teams up with the X-Men to battle a giant spider in New York City.

The Review: With the Spider-Ock thing now running in the Marvel universe, it was only a matter of time before we saw him interact with the other teams and other super-heroes in New York and the rest of the world. A concept with so much potential as Spider-Ock needed to be exploited in various ways, which makes this team-up book an actually great idea. In this particular issue, Spider-Ock teams with perhaps one of the most, if not absolute, well-loved team of the Marvel Universe: the X-Men, specifically those who work at the Jean Grey School of higher learning. Here, Chris Yost manages to advance the Spider-Ock character, but also write a fun team-up full of action and funny moments all in character.

What Yost manages to do here is make Spider-Ock actually funny, using his arrogance and his analytical mind to its fullest to bring some snide remarks. He is kind of a jerk, yet we can see how he interacts with Beast and the rest of the X-Men in a way that shows much insight into what kind of man he is. Still driving on the point that he thinks he is better than everyone else, his thoughts and dialogue are full of these small tidbits of characterization. When he says that he thinks it right that the X-Men obeys his instructions or that Beast is a cheater of a scientist since he has access to Shi’ar technology, it shows us just what kind of person he is, yet it manages to make him entertaining all the while.

What’s also entertaining would be the action, as the way the threat is dealt with is actually quite interesting, seeing just how the analytical mind of Spider-Ock checks out the power and uses of every of the X-Men around him. There are still a lot of hints about what’s happening and the situation Spider-Ock is unaware of from the ending of Superior Spider-Man #1 and it works quite well. How Spider-Ock wonders why he saved Storm and just how he answered her makes for some deepening of the plot. I know we will most probably see no true development of the character in this series, but it is nice to see that Yost uses what Dan Slott is setting up in the main series.