Amazing Spider-Man #74 Ends With More Questions Than Answers. The Biggest One Is Why We’re Reading It.

The Kindred meta-plot is resolved, more or less. The Devil gets his due. Nick Spencer bids farewell. Does any of it matter? Amazing Spider-Man #74 is written by Nick Spencer with Christos Gage, Penciled by [deep breath] Marcelo Ferreira, Mark Bagley, Zé Carlos, Dio Neves, Carlos Gómez, Ivan Fiorelli, and Humberto Ramos, inked by [deeper breath] Wayne Faucher and Marcelo Ferreira, Andrew Hennessy and Andy Owens, Zé Carlos, Dio Neves, Carlos Gómez, Ivan Fiorelli, and Victor Olabaza, colored by Andrew Crossley, Edgar Delgado, and Alex Sinclair, and lettered by Joe Caramagna.

I want to ask you, my dear comic book reader, one simple question.

Why are we reading this?

After 83 regular issues, 4 oversized specials, 4 Sinister War tie-ins, 3 2099 event titles and a Free Comic Book Day Special, Nick Spencer’s run on Amazing Spider-Man comes to a close. As I reflect on the years of work, I wonder what Spencer wanted to say with this brass ring, this opportunity afforded to few in the field of comics, because in my professional opinion, in the last 3 years the man said nothing.

I could complain about the continuity obsessed nature of the run, especially in the end game where the 95 preceding issues weren’t sufficient preparation for his wet fart of an ending. One where you had to have a detailed working knowledge of infamous and infamously bad Spider-Man tales from nearly two decades prior to even start to make sense of the damn thing. I could scream about Spencer’s obsession with regression of the character to some platonic ideal of what Spider-Man is, one that mostly becomes set dressing for arcs that make Bendis look concise. I could yammer on about the uninspired art that started the moment Ryan Ottley left and capped off with an arc involving Mark Bagley and six other guys doing a Mark Bagley impression. But I keep coming back to that haunting thought.

Why are we reading this?

Is it because we’ve done it for years? The obsessive, collector part of our brain can’t break a solid thirty years of collecting so we keep shoveling money over to Marvel for one more arc here, and oh how about these variant covers too. Is it because we remember coming back from a mission trip to Mexico (a place that, in retrospect, already knew more about Jesus than us) and getting to go watch Spider-Man 2 with the same buddy we watched Saturday morning cartoons with? Is it because we want to claw and bite and grab onto any last memory of our fleeting childhood so we inject radioactive spider stories into our optical lenses, trying to feel something like the joy we once remembered?

Or is it because we love this medium and want it to be so much better than even when we’ve been let down by Nick Spencer 94 times already, we give him a 95th shot and are still upset when he lets us down? I don’t know why I’m reading this. It’s sad at this point. There’s a limited number of breaths left in my life, and I’m spending it here. Writing about a comic I hate, by a creator who had as much passion for making this as I have for filling out expense reports.

I wanted this to be something else, I think everyone did. No one wants to see their heroes fail (Spider-Man, not Nick Spencer. I kinda love seeing Nick Spencer fail). That regressive caveman brain of mine wants to be filled with high quality work that pushes the medium and expands what the idea of a comic, or hell, even a superhero comic, can be. But I’m filling up my yap with these empty calories that amount to a reminder that Spider-Man feels guilty about a ton of stuff and maybe you should read some of those stories instead. Kinda makes you want to stop, doesn’t it? And if I know I want to stop, I feel it in my marrow, I have to wonder.

Why are we reading this?

There’s a promise of change coming at the end of this issue, a preview of the “Beyond” era, but is it just an illusion? They are going back to the idea of a weekly Spider-Man book with a rotating cast of writers, a la the “Brand New Day” era, even to the point of involving Zeb Wells. The hook is the return of the forgotten love interest of Ben Riley, Spider-Man’s much maligned clone brother. It asks you to remember Nextwave and how cool and goofy it was. It has interstitial issue numbering that uses decimal places and insider abbreviations to further alienate anyone trying to figure out what order they should read these books. It’s the same bag of tricks Executive Editor and VP of Content (Digital Publishing) Nick Lowe has been using since he got the books in 2014. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for seven years and I’m starting to think I’m pretty dumb but you’re just kinda being an asshole too.

There’s been some irate and frankly asinine fear mongering from fans about recent legal actions between Marvel and the estate of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. Marvel faithful with no understanding of copyright law fear that Marvel may lose their ability to put out Spider-Man comics if the guy who designed one of the most iconic characters in the world was properly compensated for his life’s work. If this is the soulless shit Marvel is doing with Spidey, folks should be glad to see someone take him off their hands. Until then, well, I have a question to ponder.

Zachary Jenkins

Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.