Doc Ock gets brutal. A member of the band goes solo. And the fight goes mecha! All that and more in Spider-Punk: Arms Race #3, written by Cody Ziglar, drawn by Justin Mason, colored by Morry Hollowell and Rico Renzi, and lettered by Travis Lanham.
Picking up where issue 2 left off, issue 3 starts with Doc Ock greeting the Spider-Band with a small speech about how much of a problem they are. Most notably, Doc Ock says they made things worse by killing Osborn, because at least he had a plan on how to change the world for the worse.
After the Spider-Band lands a few blows at Doc Ock, Spider-Punk literally throws Doc Ock right where he wants him. With the push of a button, Doc Ock unleashes a bunch of killer bots on the Spider-Band.
Soon, The Spider-Band struggles to fight back against the bots, who seem to adapt to their powers. One bot grabs Spider-Punk’s wrists while he is shooting webs to throw him across the room and another grabs Captain Anarchy’s shield to throw it back at him. On the bright side, Morry Hollowell’s colors and Travis Lanham’s letters look great in these series of panels.
While the Spider-Band is distracted, Doc Ock uses this chance to escape outside somewhere. The Spider-Band tries to do the same using Mattea’s powers to see a way out, but only finds more bots. They also send visuals of the bots to Shuri and Riri on the Wakandian airship, resulting in a determined Riri heading to her lab with Shuri in tow. It turns out she’s been working on a big secret project that will soon be unveiled.
Back at Doc Ock’s factory, The Spider-Band is still brawling with the bots in a nice double page spread showing Justin Mason’s dynamic artwork. In order to cut the bots off at the head, Spider-Punk goes after Doc Ock alone.
After finding Doc Ock hanging on the side of another factory building, he and Spider-Punk go at it a bit. At one point, Spider-Punk tries to whack Otto with what looks like a stop sign and says, “You’re lucky I left my guitar at the Spider-Base.” It would’ve been sweet to see Spider-Punk hammer Otto with it.
Soon, the two of them seem to reach an impasse until Otto reaches inside the building, presses a button and says, “You think I would start a fight, that I wasn’t sure I’d win?” This line demonstrates Cody Ziglar’s adeptness at writing great dialogue for heroes and villains alike. Emerging from the building is Otto atop his ultimate project, a massive sentinel with eight arms called Spider-Slayer Prime. The Spider-Band manages to regroup at ground level but they seem to be in over their heads this time.
Just then, Riri swoops down in her Ironheart armor atop her secret project that is unveiled on the comic’s final pages.
You might recall Hobie begging Riri to build a new Spider-Van in the comic’s previous issues. It turns out that Riri built a giant robot that uses the Spider-Van as its head! It’s morphin time as the Spider-Band prepares to match Otto bot for bot and I can’t wait to see who is left standing.
Buy Spider-Punk: Arms Race #3 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Latonya Pennington
Latonya Pennington is a freelance contributor whose comics criticism can be found at Women Write About Comics, Comic Book Herald, Newsarama and Shelfdust, among others.
