Ghost-Spider #10 // Review
Gwen Stacy’s life is complicated. She’s fighting crime as a well-known hero while studying in a parallel dimension. Now she’s got a couple of friends who have been fighting crime alongside her. Things are going to get a bit more complicated with her newfound friends in the tenth issue of Ghost-Spider. Writer Seanan McGuire’s distinctive wit and attention to dramatic tension illuminate a very inwardly complex story. Brazilian artist Ig Guara coaxes the more delicate elements of the story through the pages with thoughtful intricacy. It might not have a hell of a lot of action, but the emotional impact that McGuire delicately pummels into the issue leaves a powerful impression.
As she’s been under the mask, Ghost-Spider has been the lone defender of the Manhattan in her particular corner of the Marvel Universe. Now she’s got a couple of allies. They’re half of what might have been the Fantastic Four in another universe. Johnny and Sue Storm of Ghost Spider’s world are the product of the nefarious Doctor Doom. Naturally, they’re going to be a bit twisted. And since they’re also big celebrities, they’re going to want to have Manhattan all to themselves. Given the fact that they are as powerful as they are, Ghost-Spider is going to have a hell of a time convincing them to work together.
“I’m not risking my life, Dad,” Gwen tells her father. “I had a team-up. Superheroes DO that.” And she’s not wrong, but Gwen’s dad is right to be concerned about her and her new friends. McGuire’s apt attention to detail in dialogue resonates through an issue that brings a strikingly vivid look at the lives of four characters: Gwen, her dad, Johnny, and Sue. McGuire’s characterization is particularly intricate in regard to this fascinating iteration of Sue and Johnny as socialites who have come of age under the direct influence of Dr. Doom in an era of social media. What might have seemed kind of silly on introduction has turned into a fascinating character study.
The emotionality of Gwen, Johnny, and Sue are given breathtaking life by Guara’s art. There’s a jaw-droppingly sophisticated subtle sense of psychological detail drawn into poise and posture distinguished from Gwen from Ghost-Spider and Ghost-Spider from Johnny and Sue. The two friends are genuinely concerned about Gwen in their own twisted and sociopathic way. This concern by way of homicidal indifference is incredibly difficult to bring to the page. Still, Guara does it in a way that neither exaggerates its complexity nor undersells the psychotic emotional hall of mirrors that this world’s Johnny and Sue inhabit.
McGuire and Guara put together a very, very engrossing issue here that tells its own story while fitting into an engrossing ongoing saga. Somewhere in the midst of everything else, McGuire is giving Gwen a much more gradual and nuanced walk with her version of the black costume than Spider-Man’s editors allowed themselves back in the mid-1980s. In addition to everything else, it’s that much more satisfying to see Gwen going through some of what Peter did decades ago with the singularity of vision afforded a single author.
