Miles Morales: Spider-Man #38 // Review
Any high school boy would love to be picked-up from school by a couple of attractive women. Misty and Felicia are on business, though. And Miles’ extra-curricular activities are kind of dangerous, so it’s not exactly a pleasant sort of a situation in Miles Morales: Spider-Man #38. Writer Cody Ziglar continues mystic earthbound adventure for Miles that is brought to the page by artist Luigi Zagaria and colorist Bryan Valenza. Though the dialogue feels cheesy in places and the supporting characters aren’t given nearly as much appeal as they should have, the overall adventure is actually a lot of fun.
There are a couple of thieves that have been stalking the night. They seem dangerous. Miles and Misty have had to call-in the help of a somewhat reformed mega-thief in order to track down the thieves and deal with them. Felicia Hardy is a bit of a wildcard, though. If she’s really going to help, she’s going to need to earn the trust of Miles, who feels a bit uncertain about the situation. It doesn’t help that the thieves in question seem to be employing the use of supernatural foxes that might just be a bit too powerful for the three of them.
Ziglar’s work feels pretty tightly-drawn from the traditional Spider-Man mold. There's a danger out there in Manhattan at night. And it's a little bit more powerful than something that the police could handle. So it's going to take somebody with superpowers to handle it. However, the threat in question might be something that goes beyond the simple good-versus-evil sort of a thing. And maybe the people who are involved in causing danger might be victims themselves as well. Solving the problem might take something more than heroism...something like empathy.
Zagaria draws the action across the page with a clever hand that finds quite a few different angles for the action. There is a sharp sense of execution with respect to nearly everything. However, the white foxes that are the the central supernatural force of the issue. Don't keep the page of the way they could. There's real potential for a profound amount of power and it's kind of hard to mix earthbound realism with these supernatural forces in a way that really shows how big they are. In order for them to really feel like something special, they would have to be drawn in dramatic perspective with a little bit more of an eye towards the impact of seeing something like this in the middle of Manhattan.
Issue with this script might lie in the fact that Felicia Hardy doesn't come across as being nearly as quickly. There's a feeling that she's just sort of a one for the ride. At least on some level. There isn't as much of a sense of control over the situation that she would tend to have if she were written in a way that was more true to the way she has been written in recent memory by people like Jed MacKay and G. Willow Wilson.
