Superior Spider-Man #18 – Review

by Dan Slott (Writer), Ryan Stegman, Livesay (Artists), Edgar Delgado (Colorist)

The Story: Bizarre events in the present cause much trouble for Miguel O’Hara, Tiberius Stone, Horizon Lab and Otto Octavius.

The Review: Ambition and continuity can be great tools for any writers working in super hero comics. When the creative team are looking forward to a vast number of issues in order to tell a story, they need to pace out some of the elements in order for the readers to appreciate the larger pictures. Storylines are teased, some are seeded early on and so forth in order for the title to keep a certain level of excitement. If done well, it can give us some superb stories, but if done incorrectly, it can bring problems like obvious decompression. There’s a fine line between the two and not every writer is able to be on a unique side of the fence for most of their writing careers.

This issue has absolutely no problem in term of decompression, which may sound like a very good point in favor of its quality, yet in this case it isn’t. Simply put, there’s just too many things happening here as the pacing and the focus of the issue suffers quite a bit because of it. Many of these events are of consequences and are things that some readers might have been looking forward to, yet all of them are crammed in this issue without the necessary space to really let it sink in. There are many characters receiving development and panel space, with the people at Horizon Labs, the Goblin King, Miguel O’Hara, Otto and Tiberius Stone all seemingly fighting for relevance in this issue.