It’s “en media res” the comic book by Joe Kelly, Chris Bachalo, Tim Townsend, Marco Menyz, Dale Eaglesham, Morry Hollowell, and Travis Lanham!
After a year of delays, Non-Stop Spider-Man finally hits stands this week.
The series is built around the concept of a high octane, all action Spider-Man story, a literal interpretation of the title. And it delivers, as the story opens with Peter Parker diving out a window in pursuit of bad guys.
Marvel’s tradition of a “secondary” Spider-Man title goes all the way back to 1972 with Marvel Team-Up. I have to applaud Marvel’s attempt to ensure that these series offer something different from the core Amazing Spider-Man since around 2009. This series is clearly no different.
Kelly’s start to the story en media res is disorienting, without a doubt. However, as the issue goes on, and the readers learn more and more about what’s going on, the opening makes more and more sense. It’s an effective use of the narrative trope, even if it does cause confusion at first.
However, Kelly’s dialogue does feel inauthentic at many points, falling into the trap of an adult writing a teen or young adult in a way that feels more like “I saw this on Twitter” or “I heard my kids say this.” It doesn’t ruin the experience, but it’s glaring and awkward. It also has a weird sense of time and place, which is partly due to a lack of catch up with Peter’s current status quo (which the main title has barely touched itself in months).
Bachalo does his best to capture the high energy feeling of Kelly’s script. He sets each of the action pages on a 20 to 45 degree angle, and while that’s disorienting at first, as the reader gets deeper into the story, it shifts into creating a feeling of movement, especially as the characters bounce around the page, spraying webs and blasting lasers.
It also helps that he shifts into a more standard panel orientation during flashbacks and slower moments. It helps the story a lot that there’s only one inker, and Townsend does a very good job. He does a lot to clear up the pages, and sharpen the details, while Menyiz uses a bright color palette that keeps it clear and easy to follow.. However, it is still often too busy, with SO MUCH detail on the page that it can sometimes be difficult to understand what is happening.
However, it’s impossible to talk about the book without looking deep at the back-up illustrated by Eaglesham and Hollowell. Though it’s illustrated extremely well, we see the book use the much too common fallback of Nazis as the bad guys, specifically Baron Zemo and Hydra. Sure the text does its best to try to separate Zemo from his Nazi roots, but there is no doubt that the Hydra chapter he dismantles here are white supremacists. They even look like the “alt-right” neo-Nazis that plague our streets today.
This is an issue that my friends and colleagues here at ComicsXF have discussed more than once recently in different stories. This is not the way to engage with white supremacy in fiction, even if it could be seen as satirical. Kelly tries to step Hydra back from white supremacy, tries to recenter them on “survival of the fittest” but all that is is white supremacy under a different name.
Nazis and the hateful disgusting rhetoric they spew are a genuine, real life concern in our world. If our fiction cannot engage with that in a meaningful way, it may need to avoid them. This back up is a perfect example of that, with Zemo tearing through the Aryan terrorists with a winking “Nazi, please.” This is not how we should be engaging with real life hate in our world today. It’s simply wrong.
At this point, I don’t know if I can totally recommend Non-Stop Spider-Man. It’s deeply flawed, and features two lead creators who don’t put their best into this story. However, it does offer plenty to like, AND there’s a lot of time to address and resolve its issues across its run.
As it stands now, I’ll give it another chance. Even with its pandemic spawned delays, it could change and be made better over the course of this run. We can hope at least.
Tony Thornley is a geek dad, blogger, Spider-Man and Superman aficionado, X-Men guru, autism daddy, amateur novelist, and all around awesome guy. He’s also very humble.
