Time travel can really screw things up, even if you’re a superhero. Maybe especially if you’re a superhero, as Peter Parker learns in this issue. It’s one thing to screw up your own life, but it’s another to screw up your own life…in the past!
So what’s it about?
Read our preview.
Why does this matter?
As the cover suggests Peter may have put himself in a Gwen Stacy moment only with his younger self. Yikes. Zdarsky has been writing a great series and Joe Quinones has given this arc a great old school feel — so good you’d be silly not to finish this arc out.
Fine, you have my attention. What’s good about it?
It’s times like this you wonder why someone won’t off this bastard.
This issue opens with a clusterfuck of things going wrong for our heroes. You’d think with the upper edge of being from the future you’d accomplish your tasks, but it appears messing with the time stream can make these even harder. Green Goblin is now running amok in New York, knowing full well there are time travellers messing with his city and Teresa comes close to bungling the entire operation midway through the book. Spider-Man has even more to be mad about considering he put Aunt May into a dangerous situation. Zdarsky has been making me annoyed with these characters since the start as they’ve never really cared about the consequences of messing with the timeline, and here it appears that is catching up to them.
Quinones draws some lights-out pages in this book with three of the more climactic pages requiring little to no dialogue at all. There also two iconic Spider-Man images homaged in this issue which should have longtime Spidey fans’ hearts aflutter. Emotional beats with Peter looking through broken eye holes are made more gripping due to Quinones’ ability to capture the pain in Peter’s face.
It’s all up to Peter Parker.
It can’t be perfect can it?
The resolution to both conflicts — Peter stopping Green Goblin and Teresa getting the info she needs from Tinkerer — are way too easy. Given all the buildup, and how dangerous Green Goblin was in the last issue, it comes as a disappointment to see things resolved so easily here. By the end it’s clear the heroes going back in time will continue to mess with the time stream so there’s more yet to be revealed, but the good guys win too easily, and for that matter, too quickly.
Is It Good?
A good issue, though it does resolve things much too neatly. That said, this time travel story isn’t over yet and there’s sure to be some kind of fix to all that Spider-Man, Jameson, and Teresa have done to the time stream.
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