Writer: Dennis “Hopeless” Hallum

Art: Emilio Laiso, Rachelle Rosenberg, VC’s Travis Lanham, and Skan

Price: $3.99

Release Date: August 28th, 2019

Well I will admit that when this book was first announced I was ecstatic! A Spider-Man story on a different earth that I won’t know what will happen. That was my biggest issue with City At War. I have played the PS4 game, so some things didn’t get my shock factor and the time gap between issues was pitiful. None of that should be an issue with this miniseries. Let’s dig in and see what we have here…

Right away, we get some action with Swarm, a villain that really, if you haven’t been a Spider-Man fan for sometime, you won’t know. Unfortunately, the battle ended too soon and with an anticlimactic finish. While I do enjoy seeing a villain we don’t usually see, the action couls have been better. Maybe Hopeless is only good at action scenes that he has already seen in video games.

Next up we see MJ doing what she does, reporting with Ben Urich.  Boy, I am not looking forward to reading what she is up to, especially with her being one of he negatives I have with the PS4 game.  Oh well, it looks like she will play a big part in this story. As we see one of her investigations leads her to an adventure that she was not expecting, but she does get some help. Guess who? Spider-Man! One thing I have to remember is that this is on a different Earth so this isn’t the same Peter Parker I am used to. It should be obvious, though, since the dialogue for Peter is terrible!

Time for research as MJ and Peter are at the Daily Bugle and I really wish we knew the backstory on Peter and the Paper.  The majority of the Daily Bugle scene is really wasteful and could be used for something else to either tell us about this world or advance the story.

After Peter’s fight with Swarm, he decides to build a new suit. That was something that the marketing did well so we already knew this was coming, but four pages of it and then him failing seems a bit excessive. We don’t really see the suit do anything cool, and if it was meant to show us an epic fail, it should have done that at by page two and just end the scene.

Final Thoughts:

Well, I feel like my hype was what kind of left me a bit disappointed. We do get a bit of information, but some of it comes to quickly and is forced. There are some wasted panels and pages that could have been used for more imprtant things, but at least most of the dialogue is good. The art goes between good and just okay and nothing about this issue makes me want to recommend it to anyone just yet. Hopefully, issue two gets me excited again for this story.

6.5/10