Amazing Spider-Man has been exciting recently. Peter Parker was lost somewhere in the cosmos after a battle with an alternate dimension gladiator cosplayer, and has since been palling around with space-faring extraterrestrials (like Rocket Raccoon) in a alien, not-quite-symbiote-style action suit.
At least, half of Amazing Spider-Man has been that hyperkinetic and endlessly exciting. The other half has been about Norman Osborn having a sort of superhero-flavored midlife crisis.
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Alternating issues, the twin stories of the book have had the effect of getting in one another’s way, making it hard to connect to one story or the other without being forced into a ‘hurry up and wait’ mentality. This is somewhat fixed by their trade paperback presentation: Vol. 3 – Resolute collects all of Norman’s adventure, while the next volume, Broken (out next month) collects all of Peter’s. This certainly makes reading the story easier than it has been than it was presented month-to-month, but it doesn’t make Norman’s half of the story any less of a bummer.
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It hasn’t been without its excitements: while Norman swings around in Peter’s costume, pretending to be a (let’s not say superior) more violent version of the Webhead, a shadowy group is sending repurposed Spider Slayers after Goblins. Characters like Ned Leeds and the Goblin Queen are being slowly taken out in this effort that is led, in part, by Roderick Kingsley, the current Hobgoblin.
This plot runs underneath a more standard plot of Norman Osborn trying to come to terms with what being a hero is. This soul-searching, occasionally broken up by skirmishes with the growing horde of Spider-themed heroes extant in the Marvel Universe (they know he’s not Peter, and they’re mad about it), becomes a sort of grating thematic stand-in, something not quite reaching the point of poignancy even as Norman comes to term with the fact that he can never measure up to the boy he’s been battling for years.
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The saving grace of these issues is the artwork by artists like Ed McGuinness and John Romita, Jr, who never place a stray line. That the story can’t seem to nail down those visuals to one cohesive artist, lapsing into several issues in which penciling duties are handed off every few pages, makes the conclusion feel ramshackle in a way that feels unplanned – as if the big guns like JRJR underwent stifling time crunches.
This all makes it sound as if Resolute is resolutely bad, but that isn’t exactly the case – the story is workmanlike, strong enough, and Norman Osborn makes for an interesting enough protagonist; the conflict is compelling if barely there. What Resolute mostly feels like is an unneeded ballast to the more compelling aspects of this series’ run: when we’re not following Peter in space, it feels like a burdensome drag.
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