If there’s a central theme of any Spidey book, it’s the constant balancing act of guilt and responsibility. All-New Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider #8 takes that balance and shoves it right in your face, delivering what may be the most compelling issue of the character’s ongoing adventures since she debuted nearly a decade ago.
Reeling from the trauma she experienced last issue, where she webbed a falling criminal whose neck snapped, mirroring Gwen’s death in the 616, we’re given a desperate Spider-Gwen, haunted by her choice. She stands over the criminals body, justifying that he was a bad person who inspired bad in the world around him but she’s still so shaken by the responsibility she feels for his death, that even words of encouragement from her father fall on deaf ears.
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Later, when she comes across a routine robbery that she’s stopped a thousand times before, she’s paralyzed with the fear that she’ll go too far and be responsible for more pain, more death. She’s haunted by the ghost of Nicholas Vance, the man whose death hangs over her head, she’s falling apart at the seams and all she needs is someone to come out and make sense of it all to her.
That’s when Norman Osborn shows up and turns the story on its ear. He doesn’t try to make her feel better. He doesn’t try some longwinded speech about the greater good, he simply understands how she’s feeling, and as the reader, there’s a sinking feeling that all of this is maybe pushing her in a new, more dangerous direction than you’re used to seeing the character in.
This isn’t cosmic Spider-Gwen. This isn’t torn between two realities and saving the whole of space-time Spider-Gwen. This is a street-level Gwen dealing with real problems that feel infinitely more relatable than we’re used to seeing her, even earlier in this series. This is Homeland levels of mentally-frayed protagonist dealing with stuff.
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Now, Gwen doesn’t know that Mysterio is involved, coldly calculating these scenarios and manipulating her into breaking down, and that’s where the real juicy part of this story is. Mysterio is the most menacing he’s been in years, Norman’s icy demeanor feels more natural here than in other Spider-Man titles, and Gwen’s breakdown is completely understandable. But again, the mystery for the reader is figuring out just how involved Mysterio is in all this. Did Nicholas Vance actually die? Did Spider-Gwen really kill him? Did any of this happen? Is it all in Spider-Gwen’s head? I genuinely don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.
I loved this book way more than I was expecting to. The last arc was fun superhero fights mixed with generic teen and early 20’s melodrama, but this feels like a deeper dive into the character that’s really trying to pull her apart and examine what makes a hero.
Stephanie Phillips has written a really tight, fast-moving story that pins a world of guilt on the shoulders of Spider-Gwen in a very natural feeling way. Artist Paolo Villanelle and colorist Matt Milla have crafted a stylized world that looks slick and moves fast. I especially want to shout out the color here because the diegetic use of green in the world makes it look both real and hallucinatory, so that final page reveal has me on the edge of my seat trying to guess where the story goes next.
It’s too bad this volume of Spider-Gwen is ending, especially now that it seems like the creative team has real chemistry together as they craft one of the more memorable and compelling Spider-Gwen stories I can remember reading. The mystery is rich, the characters are frayed and spiraling, and pages couldn’t be flipped fast enough as we race towards the end of this story and this chapter of Spider-Gwen at large.
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