Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #7

I am still bitter about One More Day. I doubt I will never not be. But there come times when Marvel lets Spider-Man be himself again. The quietly confident, quippy, adult that Peter had grown into sometimes gets to shine back through. And that's the guy I see in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man again, and man! I missed this guy. 

It doesn't hurt that Tom Taylor is a fantastic writer, with an eye for characters and plot that's pretty hard to match up anywhere else. I mean, c'mon, don't tell me you don't get a chuckle out of the following:

"ARE you mugging him?"
"No! But... I  can see how it would look exactly like that."

"Are you robbing the place?"
"I'm not! But I can see why it would look exactly like that"

Little things like this in plots please me a whole heck of a lot. It means the writer is paying attention, and it's just plain old funny to boot.

The story itself is exactly what I want out of a Spider-Man comic. Don't give me soap operas about the super-villain of the week, focus on the characters we already have. And Taylor uses these elements to incredible effect. I love that May has reopened F.E.A.S.T., and, while I dearly wish if they were going to kill Aunt May they would just leave her dead already, Taylor makes the best of editorial's inability to conceive of anything where Aunt May is dead and gone. I love how the narrative takes full advantage of her health plight, injecting a fair bit of pathos into the story.

Taylor's narrative had been moving a little slowly in the first six issues, but this issue takes all the things that I had been loving about those issues and amps them up, creating an issue where Spider-Man is exactly where he needs to be: near the ground, with the rest of us. Spider-Man is, at his core, an Incarnational hero, a god amongst us. And it's great to see Taylor not only recognize this but take it in new directions.