Reviewer: Tim Stevens
Story Title: N/A
Written by: Tony Bedard
Pencilled by: Manuel Garcia
Inked by: Raul Fernandez
Colored by: Chris Sotomayor
Lettered by: VC’s Cory Petit
Editor: Warren Simons
Publisher: Marvel Comics
The past 12 months or so, American comics have fallen in love with supervillains battling one another with heroes stuck in the middle. Over on the DC side of things we’ve Batman embroiled in some War Games (awful!), Flash is doing all he can to contain a three pronged Rogue War currently (great!), Deadshot just finished kicking the snot out of some of his past partners (impressive!), and almost all of the villains in the DCU are uniting in a Society and planning to convert the six that rejected membership (looking good!) as we speak. Marvel, however, hasn’t really been taking part in this fiesta. That is, until now.
Growing out of the events of the Riker’s prison escape in New Avengers, The U-Foes find themselves on the run from a team of B and C-list villains like Mr. Fear, Mandrill, and Crossfire. See, two years before, the U-Foes’ Vector had a big plan set up to escape from prison and take several of his closest friends with him. Everything was set up and then, suddenly, Vector’s plan was derailed by a snitch. Strong circumstantial evidence said that snitch was Crossfire and the two had been…less than friends since. Now free, Crossfire is planning to close the book on that particular grudge with…ahem…extreme prejudice.
Given the lower profiles of these villains, I don’t have a preconceived notion of how they should and should not act. Thus, I can’t comment on the accuracy of their portrayals. I can tell you, however, that the U-Foes, with all their pseudo-family trappings, are nicely sketched out here. They are still baddies, of course, but Bedard makes it easy to empathize with them. Sadly, the rest of the villains are not nearly as well fleshed out.
You’ll notice we are three paragraphs in and there is no mention of Spidey until this moment. Why? Well, ol’ Webhead does not really have the spotlight here. At this juncture, he is more of a supporting player, thus giving us the impression that calling this title “Spider-Man” anything was a bit of marketing ploy. I know, I know, a marketing ploy in comics…shocking.
What we do see of Spider-Man amounts to a tender scene with Mary Jane and one of his trademark quips. It’s good. It’s always nice to see Spider-Man do the Spidey thing: talk with his wife about the conflicts in his life and then swing away and fight some villains. Maybe its because I haven’t really read a Spider-Man title continuously in a time, but it feels like its been awhile since I’ve seen that.
The rest of Bedard’s writing on this issue is fine. Wildly decent even. That pretty much sums up my feelings towards him as a writer. Since being hailed a good “old school” superhero writer while doing his part of Negation, I’ve only read a few issues of his work on Exiles before deciding I was done with the title. His work here is stronger, but not significantly so. I’m not sure he deserved all that praise back in the day, but he is a solid writer, the kind that seem to get lost in the cracks.
