It is an objective fact that Bendis and Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man run is as close to perfection as you can get. I’m sorry if you disagree, but there it is. It’s not often you get a competent run anymore, particularly for the exorbitant price of modern comics.
Not this.
It’s worth far more than the buck I was charged. A lot more.
Otto Octavius was put into a coma trying to inject Oz, the wonder drug partially responsible for Peter Parker getting spider-powers, into Norman Osborn. Oscorp exploded and Octavius became a plot time bomb. Peter knew Otto would take one look at his Spidey costume and see right through it. Peter knew that one day Otto would wake up and probably come right for him.
He was half right. Otto woke up, but with no memory of the explosion that almost killed him, or even why he was there. Instead, Otto wakes up to find his metallic arms grafted to him, along with the horrifying knowledge they were left on him… just to see what would happen. Dazed, grieving, and impossibly angry, Otto begins a rampage for revenge and knowledge.
But that’s not the end of it. Kraven, a twisted Steve Irwin, has decided that he’s going to track down and kill Spider-Man. On a reality TV show. Y’know, because of his show’s dying ratings. His powers of tracking appear legit; Kraven shows up at Peter’s high school.
Can Peter help Otto, keep his identity secret, not get killed by Kraven, and keep his curfew?
And it just keeps getting worse.
Peter finds himself up to his neck in corporate espionage, greed, human tragedy at every turn. He doesn’t have context, just some powers and the determination to never turn a blind eye, ever again. Unlike Ditko and Lee’s version bad child struggling to be a good man, Bendis portrays a good child trying desperately to stay that way in the face of an increasingly complex world. Whereas I wouldn’t put it past Ditko’s Spidey to be constantly tempted to kill Otto and kick himself for not doing so, Bendis’s Spidey simply doesn’t have those qualms. It’s something I miss from the Ultimate version.
But the plot? Oh, Lee never wrote like this. The plotting is immaculate. Completely. Bendis used to weave a web of sci-fi noir no one else ever could. It’s so good I would read it without the titular hero… but the contrast between Peter’s world and his antagonists’ is so compellingly crafted you’d miss something.
If you can get your hands on this volume you owe it to yourself to read it. While I regret Peter’s defanging (a common trope of Bendis’s that only gets worse) the plot and characters and world of this book are so compelling that I can’t not recommend it wholeheartedly.
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