Amazing Spider-Man #31 // Review
Money. Power. The law of the real city. It’s all there beyond the panhandler in some shadowy corner of one of the largest cities in the world. There’s a match at Killington House. Paste Pot Pete is drawn against the Tarantula. Side bets are encouraged in an underworld fight club somewhere within Marvel Manhattan. Look closely and you’ll find Hammerhead in attendance. Look closer and you might see any number of unsavory criminals in Amazing Spider-Man #31. Writer Joe Kelly delivers a story rendered for the page by artist Patrick Gleason. Color comes to the page courtesy of Marcio Menyz.
Elsewhere Peter Parker and Aunt May are meeting a guy who claims to be Ben and May Parker’s long lost son. 45 years ago there was a mix-up in a hospital. They told Aunt May that she couldn’t have kids...but did she? Meanwhile, back at Killington House, Spider-Man has shown-up. He’s interested in getting in on the action...or at least he says he is. Vulture’s ready to kill the guy, but Tombstone wants to hear him out. He’s crazy enough for entering a space that’s so totally crammed with people who would be happy to see him dead. What’s Spider-Man doing in the one place his life is most at risk?
Kelly moves the narrative back and forth between Peter Parker and Spider-Man. Peter finds out more and more about Aunt May’s past as Spider-Man gets into deeper and deeper danger in the world of the street-level underground of Marvel Manhattan. It’s actually a pretty natural alternation from one end of Peter Parker’s life to the other. It feels comfortable from cover to cover even if the two narratives don’t seem to have significant enough thematic parallels to make a whole lot of sense sharing the same issue.
Gleason does a good job of bringing Killington House to the page. The feeling of a massive underworld dance club/fight club style atmosphere feels quite vividly present on the page. Individual personalities like Tombstone, Vulture and Tarantula all seem to find their own personality on the page. It feels distinctly well-executed throughout even if the overall premise doesn’t feel particularly interesting. The visual reality that Gleason is bringing to the page is amplified by atmospheric style with Menyz’s colors. Drama. Action. Legacy. It all feels reasonably intense as it rolls across the page.
Revelations about the past of Aunt May would seem all the more intense were enough for the fact that Peter Parker's past has been so thoroughly analyze from every possible angle. As it is, Aunt May’s past doesn't really seem all that interesting in life of everything that's been going on. Invariably it's going to fall with some sort of us in a plot or something like that. That's the way these things that usually work out in the Weber corner of the Marvel universe. But it's difficult to tell. And it's even more difficult to care.
