Despite numerous trips to outer space, Spider-Man isn’t exactly an intergalactic hero. For most of his career, he’s been a thankfully terrestrially-based hero, more street-level than star-flung.
That all changes in Joe Kelly and Pepe Larraz’s Broken, in which Peter Parker is jettisoned to some remote planet and left for dead. What follows is a rollicking, space-faring adventure filled with alien weirdos, intergalactic arena battles, and star gates. Peter is, however briefly, an intergalactic hero.
Marvel
The more cynical among you might say that this is simply a story in which Spider-Man gets to run his own branch of the Guardians of the Galaxy, with not quite all the characters swapped out for lookalikes (except Rocket Raccoon, who plays his role perfectly); there’s a Gamora-like seasoned-killer love-interest woman, a Drax-like stoic, and even a Baby Groot-level cute sidekick in the form of a sort of symbiote puppy.
Luckily, Broken doesn’t get mired in those comparisons. The characters are more varied and interesting than simple Guardians analogs, for one. The stoic, in this case, is a member of New Mutant Warlock’s race, the Technark, and he’s more Marvin, the Paranoid Android than he is Drax. Along for the ride is an evil scientist, massive and deadly, who Peter and his ragtag crew sort of arrest for his person-trafficking cruelties (but who serves as the team’s tank).
Marvel
The adventure itself never gets as grandiose as a Guardians story, either – in part because this story ran alongside the Norman Osborne adventures collected in this series previous volume, Resolute, and in part because the team has no clear objective from installment to installment. What the book is is a series of fun mini-adventures in space, wherein Spider-Man can play leader. It’s all leading to something, but that something is barely flirted-at in the book’s climax: a brief confrontation with this series’ mostly absent big bad, Hellgate, and the looming but obscured plot hiding behind him.
It’s truly a relief that this book is, right down to its floorboards, capital ‘F’ fun. So often Spider-Man can be a slog of internal melodrama and self-centered second-guessing. Peter is sometimes a bummer to be around, but by and large Joe Kelly’s series has avoided that mopiness (or relegated it to Norman) in favor of big action and compelling new experiences. The series doesn’t feel like Amazing Spider-Man has felt for a long time.
Marvel
This volume also benefits from the jaw-dropping work of its art team, largely headed by Pepe Larraz and colored with glowing precision by Marte Garcia, Eric Arciniega, and Marcio Menyz. Larraz’s space feels dangerous and dynamic, and each of his protagonists feels sharply defined and unique, which continues for a brief issue by Emilio Laiso. When artists like Nick Bradshaw, Todd Nauck, and Nathan Stockman, as Peter returns to New York, things take a more concrete feel, less otherworldly and more cluttered by real-world detail.
Broken takes Peter Parker to unfamiliar places, and the book as a whole feels high-wire tight in terms of pacing and action. It stumbles a little in tying its smaller adventures together, but the new cast does a lot of heavy lifting in building a narrative continuity that readers can care about and thrill over. It’s a nice (outer) space to inhabit.
You must be logged in to post a comment.