The recently-released Spider-Gwen: Into the Unknown trade, written by Seanan McGuire with art by Takeshi Miyazawa, Ig Guara, Rose Kämpe and Ian Herring, collects issues #1-10 of the Spider-Gwen run from 2019. Spider-Gwen (now having officially changed her name to Ghost-Spider) becomes more comfortable with good ole Earth-616. Throughout these 10 issues, she ping-pongs back and forth between Earth-65 (her home and which letterer Clayton Cowles cleverly transforms to look like “Earth-GS”) and Earth-616, taking advantage of a scholarship program set up by Tony Stark to allow alien and other-dimensional young adults to attend college on Earth-616 on his dime.
The primary villain of the book is The Jackal of Earth-616, whose obsession with Gwen Stacy has never ended. He’s obsessed with owning her, body and soul, which is especially creepy considering he’s an old man on Earth-616 while Gwen from Earth-65 is still in her late teens.
Amidst The Jackal’s plans there’s the constant threat posed by Earth-65 Man-Wolf. He’s J. Jonah Jameson’s son on that Earth too, but where he’s a conflicted character on Earth-616, he’s 100% evil on Earth-65, running a criminal empire that’s knee-deep in every form of violence and vice.
So the book’s greatest strength is also one of its drawbacks. It’s always fascinating to see how things are different on alternate Earths and we see a lot of that throughout these first 10 issues, but it also gets confusing in places because Gwen changes Earths so frequently and effortlessly that at times I had to flip back a couple pages to see where we were at any given time.
Aside from the occasional confusion, though, I enjoyed the book. I can barely remember the Earth-616 Gwen Stacy, but I feel she was more morose and brooding than this version of Gwen Stacy, who’s relentlessly optimistic no matter how bad things get and I suppose in that way she’s very much like Peter Parker.
Though her story isn’t quite as tragic as Peter’s, she has still experienced a lot of loss and heartbreak for her young age, but it never dissuades her from wanting to help the world and drop anything she’s doing at the moment to rescue someone. In a universe of dark brooding characters, she’s a refreshing change of pace.
The book spends equal time showing Gwen’s daily life and her superhero side and I appreciated that. Many comics these days jettison character development, hurtling the main character through one crisis after another, but here we spend a lot of time with Gwen at home with her dad as well as her first weeks of college, where she desperately wants to make friends. She does, though we don’t see too much of them because Peter (acting much like a mentor to her) always seems to be around. She seems very much like a daughter to him and he worries about her. The relationship between the two is sweet and something that happens at the climax of the book promises to have him become even more of a fixture in her life.
The most fascinating part of the book is the second half, where the Earth-65 version of Susan and Johnny Storm pop up and they are FAR different from their heroic counterparts on Earth-616. I won’t say any more than that, but be prepared to see the Storms as you’ve never seen them before!
The artwork by Takeshi Miyazawa and Ig Guara is markedly different, but the transition from one to the other was still very smooth while reading the book. Miyazawa’s artwork is dynamic and Ghost-Spider seemed to burst out of the panels. The fight scenes were especially animated. Ig Guara’s work was more detailed and I loved how he drew Gwen’s facial expressions throughout the issues he drew. Both artists perfectly complemented their chapters of the story.
If you’re wanting to catch up on Gwen Stacy and Ghost-Spider, this is a great place to start. Take the dive into Earth-65, but try not to stay there too long, because we need you back here!
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