Amazing Spider-Man #29 // Review
Otto has Norman. No one knows where any of them are...except for maybe Otto’s arms. They might have some idea where Otto is, but they’re going to need to rest before they can get to the task of tracking them down. (The arms in question have had a hell of a time with Jameson.) And...y’know...they also kind of want to kill Peter. Things are weird, and they’re going to get weirder in Amazing Spider-Man #29. Writer Zeb Wells continues a conflict between the webhead and Doctor Octopus in an issue that is slung onto page and panel by penciler Ed McGuinness, inker Mark Farmer, and colorist Marcio Menyz.
Otto’s kind of crazy. Norman can relate, but given his current situation...he kinda has to. He’s captured by a madman who has cybernetic prostheses that seem really, really interested in killing him. Meanwhile, Peter handles getting attacked by Otto’s cybernetic arms, but once they’ve settled down...they’re interested in interfacing with his nervous system. It’s not going to be easy to trust them given the fact that they wanted to kill him, but it may be the only way they have of saving Norman (and possibly the whole city as well).
Wells has really switched the direction of the series into action/comedy mode with the 29th issue of the current series. It’s a fun adventure that never tries to take itself too seriously. There ARE a couple of serious dramatic moments, but nothing that ever totally outweighs some of the semi-inspired weirdness of the issue. Wells does a pretty good job of maintaining the weird momentum from beginning to end, but it’s kind of difficult to feel exactly where the heart of the story is, as the modulation between seriousness and comedy feels a bit strained.
McGuinness and Farmer maintain a pretty solid grasp of Wells’s combination of comedy and action. It’s not an easy thing to maintain. There’s Peter with his mask off, looking meaningfully at a quartet of cybernetic tentacles as they lounge somewhat nervously on a living room couch. It’s a tense moment, but there’s some seriously weird comedy going on there as well, and the art team nails the balance between the two narrative tones more or less perfectly. That’s no small accomplishment. A couple of pages later, Otto’s tossing around Norman, demanding with a straight face that he show him “the goblin inside.” And as weird as that sounds, it hits the page with a hell of a punch, aided as it is by some remarkable definition of depth and perspective by colorist Marcio Menyz.
Wells is mixing comedy and serious drama in a way that makes it kind of difficult to interface with the center of the story. A few pages before the end of the issue, it’s just...silly. It all kind of falls apart by the end, but there ARE some really good moments splattered throughout the issue that almost reach a kind of brilliance with some very witty dialogue by Wells.
