Gwen and the Mary Janes are on tour, opening for the stadium-filling Dazzler of their home Earth! It’s a dream gig, assuming your dreams include mortal peril: Someone’s trying to kill Dazzler. But who? And why? Spider-Gwen: Smash #2 is written by Melissa Flores, penciled by Enid Balám, inked by Elisabetta D’Amico, colored by Fer Sifuentes-Suho and lettered by Ariana Maher.
Look. Or listen. I might be the ideal reader for Spider-Gwen Smash at this time. All-ages girl-power stories about pop groups and touring bands are almost ridiculously my jam. The Jem and the Holograms series (2015-17) created by Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell remains one of my high-water marks for comic book creations of any kind (If you’re new to it, start at the start, and remember that Sophie Campbell, while she leaves the series, comes back a few issues afterward). I have been hoping that Gwen and the Mary Janes would get a road arc since I met them. And I know from last issue that Melissa Flores can get Gwen’s voice right.
You know how a road trip can feel like the most exciting thing in the world for the first hour or so, and then — around hour three — just gets repetitive no matter how much you love your friends, and your co-pilots, and your eventual goals? You know how your friends might just start trying too hard to entertain themselves, or to entertain you, to make up for the tedious ride? Ever drive across southern Illinois?
This issue’s like that. For one thing, the art just looks … off. Enid Balám has always been slightly cartoony, rubbery, comedic in her faces and figure drawings, and usually it’s a fun time, but here it’s too much: Gwen’s face, when she scowls at her bandmates on the tour bus, looks like she’s melting and her nose might fall off. MJ’s chin comes to a point, like the blade of a knife. There are minor tangency problems, too. (Is tangency always funny? Or is it just me?)
It’s not all technical errors, either. All the women are skinny, sometimes unrealistically skinny, in a way that’s still standard for Big Two comics but no longer universal in them: Do better, please, in 2024. Almost all the men are beefy, sometimes ‘roid-monster beefy (and that’s before we meet the Hulk). It’s all made worse by the contoured, digital-feeling, all too three-dimensional coloring, like paint on porcelain. That said, the art gets much better about halfway through, when the bands go on stage and then the fights begin: Whatever went wrong — Deadline pressure? Hurried script changes? — finally goes right. It’s like when you reach Springfield, or maybe Champaign.
Speaking of which, the bands — plural; the Mary Janes, opening for Dazzler and the Uncut Gems — are headed for Chicago, where they’re playing Wrigley Field. Dazzler’s fired Rick Jones from her band on the grounds that he’s full of rage and/or can’t stop drinking: “You need help, okay? … You couldn’t even make it on stage in New York!” (If he can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere?) Mary Jane, of the Mary Janes, just wants to play the music and get the attention, and maybe keep Gwen in the band. Gwen knows better: She’s on tour with Dazzler not just as the drummer in the opening act but also as a kind of bodyguard and assistant detective, watching for mysterious and conspiratorial threats, at Natasha Romanoff’s invitation.
That is, the Natasha Romanoff of her world, who travels with the Uncut Gems. Not the least fun thing about Spider-Gwen comics: We get to see other versions of Marvel characters we already follow, with other lives, sometimes happier ones, in simpler continuities. I haven’t had that kind of fun so consistently since the first 100 issues of Exiles. Maybe it’s time for an Exiles reread.
In any case, it’s time for a mega-concert. An Eras-style concert. A giant hologram of Dazzler over a baseball stadium crowd. MJ’s finally pleased: She’s playing guitar in Dazzler’s backing band. Until she’s not, because the Incredible Hulk attacks, with help from … maybe I’ll leave this one as a surprise? It’s about the only surprise in this otherwise steadily predictable issue, which looks bad, and then looks good, and then just kinda moves the plot along. “How is this tour still happening after tonight?” Gwen asks when it’s all over. But the intrepid, or headstrong, Alison Blaire insists that the tour just can’t not happen. That would be letting the bad guys win.
The show must go on. And if Gwen and Alison can stick with it, so can I. I’m having fun. Mary Jane is, briefly, having fun. Dazzler herself, to be honest, looks great: I’ll read almost anything with Alison in it, and I’m still waiting (as is she) for her genuine multiversal star turn. There’s something this series could say, keeps almost saying, about the way a pop performer becomes representative, just like her audience, every-girl, on the one hand, but exceptional, up there in lights, above us, on the other. That’s one way pop performers resemble superheroes, especially superheroes like Spider-Gwen (and Spider-Man, and Spider-Men). It’s something I think that Flores understands. Here’s hoping the action-oriented plot, next time or the time after that, gives her the space — and Balám the flexibility — to explore it.
Buy Spider-Gwen: Smash #2 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
