Miles Morales: Spider-Man #14 // Review
One of the challenges of serialized fiction is keeping each installment significant and exciting, while still moving the overall plot forward. Some issues of ongoing, monthly comics feel like substantial milestones in the series, telling an important story with wit and flair. Other chapters feel like pieces being pushed around, with little focus. Unfortunately, Miles Morales: Spider-Man #14 is of the latter variety.
The issue finds Miles adjusting happily to life as an older brother, helping his parents with new baby sister Billie. The book also touches briefly on his ongoing investigation of the new villain Ultimatum, whose identity is still unknown to Miles, though not to the reader. And then, disaster strikes when Miles loses his journal, which threatens to expose his secret identity.
As always, writer Saladin Ahmed has a firm handle on Miles and his supporting cast as characters, as people; their voices are consistent, and their behaviors are appropriate to what we know of them. The problem is that Ahmed doesn’t find a way to structure the issue in a compelling way. It doesn’t exist as a discrete unit, but instead as what might be a short chapter in the collected trade.
Regular series artist Javier Garrón is absent for this issue, though the next issue blurb at the end of the comic promises his return. Instead, he’s replaced by not one but three artists: Ray-Anthony Height, Zé Carlos, and Belén Ortega. Ortega makes an effort to match Garrón’s style, and is almost (but not quite) successful, making the pages set in Miles’ school seem the most of a piece with the series. Carlos and Height don’t make the same effort, nor do their pages seem at all similar in style with each other’s work, making this issue a mish-mash of different, clashing styles. David Curiel and VC’s Cory Petit, the colorist and letterer respectively, aren’t able to unify the book into one cohesive whole.
The result is a mushy mess of a comic. It has no clear beginning, middle, or end, and it doesn’t feel visually consistent. Miles Morales: Spider-Man should be one of Marvel’s flagship titles, and some of its previous issues have been stellar, but it’s depressing to see its quality flag.
