We’ve reached the point in the Amazing Spider-Man run that made everybody mad. Time to unpack the time that Wells and John Romita, Jr. made the most controversial comic of 2023.
Marvel Comics
This run on Amazing Spider-Man has been making people mad pretty much from the start—mostly undeserved, might I add—but this volume, the team switched it up by making a story that actually deserved the hate! How kind of them.
There are two main reasons why people reacted with hostility to the issues contained here. The first is everything having to do with MJ here, which is a completely foolish thing to get worked up about. For one, it’s a status quo in Amazing Spider-Man, it’s gonna change like the weather. For two, this is a good MJ story, especially what’s in this volume. She is a main character of this run. She’s constantly featured, Wells has a fine voice for her, and Paul seems to be good to her.
As a quick aside, isn’t it pretty hilarious that Kaare “MJ died from Peter’s radioactive sperm” Andrews drew the (FANTASTIC) MJ issue in this volume? I think it is very funny, and that he did a very good job!
Marvel Comics
Even all of that aside, I’d be willing to bet that Wells’ endgame is having Peter and MJ back together again at the end of the run anyway. This isn’t like when she gets shelved and doesn’t show up for entire volumes. She’s a core part of the cast here, and her story matters as much as Peter’s. He started his run with them talking about moving in together, and I fully expect the title works its way back to that point.
So let Mary Jane be with Paul for a little while, I say. It’s dumb that those kids were fake, and it’s dumb that they died, but other than that, it’s a solid storyline, and it’s been fun following it.
And now, for the worst thing Zeb Wells has written (including the ones where Connors ate his son):
Marvel Comics
Now, I wanna be clear, I don’t think Kamala dying itself was cause for the reaction that happened, or even saying this is the worst comic Wells has written. I can see the vision there, even. Kamala Khan is this generation’s Peter Parker, and putting them next to each other makes sense. Killing her in his book is a questionable decision, no doubt, but I can see it being a good idea if delivered properly. You know, like if, instead of two awful issues focusing on Felicia and Peter (trash relationship, no love there, she’s the one that should have died) we had two good issues about Kamala and Peter fighting crime, or Kamala and Norman doing some good. Anything to make this feel like Kamala was a part of the book.
Instead, this is the most rushed, cynical, and inconsequential death of a superhero that exists. It’s almost baffling that none of the people involved could figure out that this was the worst version of this idea that could have been published.
What’s kind of amazing is that the issue itself is actually pretty good, right up until her death. It’s paced well, and the weight of Kamala’s death hangs over the issue in a way that feels well-crafted. It’s jarring to suddenly see her as part of the cast—and I’ll be real, even as a fan of JRJR, she is real rough under his pen—but she still fits in pretty well. It feels like she should have been there all along. More frequently. Like maybe, if she was there more, the whole issue would have made more sense.
Marvel Comics
With such good setup, it makes the letdown of her death so much worse. The whole scene has so little impact. Nothing about it sold Kamala’s death as meaningful at all. It really felt like the cast lucked out by sacrificing the character they didn’t really care about or need.
The weightlessness of her death is as annoying as it is disappointing. At no point did this in any way feel like the end for the character. Death in comics is already a joke at baseline, but when mutants come back every day, she’s a mutant in the MCU, and the Hellfire Gala is approaching, there was no reason to think she’d be dead for more than a couple weeks. That was detrimental to the memorial issue, which didn’t have room to land between the bungled death and her resurrection a couple weeks later. Which incidentally also includes Emma Frost making everybody forget she ever died and also getting rid of any legal documentation of said death.
The cynicism is what gets me. Whatever reason this story was greenlit—the “gut punch,” goosing sales, MCU synergy—the result is a story that’s impossible to even rate on its own merits, or to even talk about without also referencing the surrounding nonsense. It’s like a formula to make the most people mad enough to hate-buy a comic that then leads to them buying other comics that immediately fix the thing they were mad about. They’re speed-running One More Day at a rate that just doesn’t make any sense. It’s a number of back-to-back idiot moves all regarding one ill-conceived storyline and it’s like they can’t stop making the dumbest decision possible everyt—
Marvel Comics
What’s crazy is the book is still pretty good.
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