SpiderMan: Long Way Home #1 // Review
It’s the middle of the night. Peter Parker is getting a phone call. When he answers the phone, the voice on the other ends asks to speak to Spider-Man. Peter Parker tells the voice that it has the wrong number. The voice identifies itself as a representative of S.H.I.E.L.D. So there’s really no choice. Peter has to put on the costume and the mask and head off to find out what they want. S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to have a lot of explaining to do in SpiderMan: Long Way Home #1. Writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Adam Kubert open a promising new mini-series with colorist Arthur Hesli.
There was a squad of elites that were sent into the jungle on a dangerous mission. There was a facility there that they had been sent to infiltrate. Among the squad was a man named Frank who wore white skull face paint. Even then they were calling him The Punisher. The facility that they were trying to infiltrate was guarded by people in golden jumpsuits. Yeah: it was a facility occupied by Advanced Idea Mechanics. And it just so happened to be the case that A.I.M. was dealing with a cosmic cube. To make matters more complicated the giant green alter ego of a noted physicist happened to be on the premises...
Spider-Man. The Punisher. S.H.I.E.L.D. The Hulk. It’s a very clever combination of different Marvel Universe elements that all come together in a way that feels very logical...very rational. This is particularly crucial as all of the elements in question would feel very silly being put together into a single series were it not for the fact that Hickman has put time and effort into explaining why all of these thins fit together into a single series. The careful curation of all the different elements makes it all very conceptually cohesive.
Kubert frames the action with very tight shots that still manage to do a remarkable job of establishing the overall mood and tone of the series. The distinct feeling of a nighttime raid on in a jungle on the other side of the Earth is given a great deal of intensity thanks to Hesli’s coloring work. It all feels remarkably cohesive from beginning to end. Dramatic moments are held quite well. The overall tension of the action is given its place on the page. It all feels strikingly well-articulated.
It honestly feels kind of weird that everything fits together as well as it does. The one thing that feels perhaps a bit out of places, the idea of a pre-Punisher Frank Castle in something other than a Vietnam context. The character seems a very well grounded in the 1980s. And it only makes sense that his military service would've been somewhere in the jungle. However, the specifics of the time period on this particular series feel a little bit modeled given the historical grounding of all the characters in question. This might be a fairly minor concern, though. Fully removed from the background of the origins of all the characters that actually feels like a very fun series.
