Over at Multiversity Comics, I reviewed a Spider-Man comic that means much more to me now that I’ve been married nearly five years. Click on through for a look at a classic issue from J. Michael Straczynski’s The Amazing Spider-Man run, as well as some ruminations on what goes into making a marriage work.
I know I’m not the only reader who swore off Spider-Man comics in 2007. When one of your favorite heroes makes a literal deal with the devil, negating a relationship you’ve been invested in for the last 20 years, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
As a result, it was a long time before I read any of the recent Spider-Man titles written by soon-to-depart Spidey author Dan Slott. But over the years, my “outrage” faded. When Brand New Day and Slott-era stories began showing up in my local library and cheap on comiXology, I began picking them up.
One story in particular served as the perfect jumping-on point for Spidey’s new world, smoothing the way from “One More Day” to where we are now. That story also just happened to be Dan Slott’s first big Spidey event, so I thought now would be a perfect time to look back at it.
If you’ve been out of the loop since “One More Day,” and you want to see what Spider-Man’s been up to before June’s upcoming Amazing Spider-Man relaunch, there’s no better place to start than “New Ways to Die.”
An interesting thing happened to me at Barnes and Noble the other day. I was perusing the Graphic Novels section, deciding what to buy for my monthly comics purchase, when a polite young man who’d been browsing the shelves beside me walked up and asked:
“Do you have any recommendations?”
I thought about this question for a couple seconds. The young man looked to be around 11 or 12 years old, which narrowed down the options some. But Barnes and Noble has dramatically improved their stock of comics, leaving lots of appropriate choices left on the table.
So I did what every comics reader should do when someone asks them for recommendations. I asked the kid what he liked.
