AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #26: In Which Ms. Marvel is Killed for Shock Value [SPOILERS]

Not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary tale…

Amazing Spider-Man #26 kills Kamala Khan in the most useless, meaningless, anticlimactic, disrespectful, outright boneheaded way possible.

Of course, she’s not really dead. Death is meaningless in superhero comics anymore; Uncle Ben is the only character to have actually stayed dead and you can bet that if Marvel thought they could wring a shiny new first issue out of his miraculous return, they’d do it in a short-sighted heartbeat. In fact, Ms. Marvel’s “death” is so inherently meaningless, leaks from Marvel HQ have surfaced that, if believed, she’ll be resurrected as soon as August as a mutant (flipping her from Inhuman to mutant brings her more in line with the MCU, naturally). And even if that isn’t quite true, it’ll happen prior to The Marvels‘ release in November with a brand-spanking new first issue to support it, all for the low, low price of readers’ dignity. Comic Watch has already done a deep dive into the insipid, beancounter-and-corporate-synergy-driven reasons behind Kamala’s demise, so for the sake of this review, we’ll just stick to the matter of the issue itself as much as possible.

The past few issues of Amazing Spider-Man have, in well-intended but ultimately banal detail, gone into the whole of “what Peter did” and why he and Mary Jane are estranged (she with a man-bun-sporting beau named Paul and two kids, he retrobooted yet again back to his single loser status, because gods forbid he and MJ just get TF back together or move on). In a nutshell – Peter and MJ got sucked into an alternate dimension by a guy named Rabin, who was intent to fulfill some hopelessly vague prophecy that would bring about the rise of his brain-mashingly dull god Wayep. In the effort to stop Rabin, Peter got sent back home, while Mary Jane got trapped in the Wayep-dimension with Paul the walking McGuffin. Peter, frantically trying to get back to her as quickly as possible, pissed off the whole superhero community by stealing bits and pieces from them to get to her in as little time possible and trying to fight everybody instead of acting like the intelligent person he actually is. What Spidey didn’t know, however, was that time in the MJ-dimension was moving faster than it was in the 616, so by the time he actually got back to her, four years had passed and she’d hooked up with Paul and adopted two little pasty orphans.

That’s… not a good story.

First, it’s been done before. Numerous times. Second, it isn’t even particularly well-executed, because, well, it’s hard to feel a strong sense of drama when a) the protagonist is acting completely out of character (yes, he’s supposedly acting out of desperation, but the degree to which Wells had him lashing out at his friends was ludicrous); b) the villain’s plot is so ill-defined as to basically be non-existent other than as a plot device; and c) the villain’s motivations are so paper-thin that readers couldn’t care less anyway.

All of this brings us to this issue, and the quick, cheap death of Ms. Marvel.

On paper, the heroic sacrifice is an easy go-to move to gin up a strong sense of drama. This isn’t exclusive to comics or pop culture; examples go back to countless myths throughout numerous cultures. Marvel’s more recent problem is, though, that they’ve leaned into the death of a character so much that it’s inherently become an exercise in tedium, a non-event eating its own tail. So – assuming the storytelling execution was actually on-point for this issue (and by extension, the arc itself), among a myriad of other factors regarding WHO was actually killed this issue, the whole thing would still result in a big, bored yawn and a well-earned nap.

Amazing Spider-Man #26 functionally serves as a tie-up for multiple plot points that have woven their way through Wells’ first year on the title, and in that regard, it accomplishes what it set out to do. We now know why Peter and MJ aren’t together all of a sudden; why the hero community has shunned Spider-Man; who Paul and and the kids are. There’s a sense of closure that, in the purest storytelling form, is met. Check that incredibly low bar of a box, then.

But what the story doesn’t require is the death of… well, anybody, really, to conclude or resonate. In fact, the story could have pretty satisfactorily resolved without Kamala’s “death.” Sure, some details would have had to change, but the bottom line is, no death was necessary. And in that sense, Kamala’s death is just a stunt – a cheap attempt at shock value (and not even an original one – viewers of the third season of CW’s Flash will immediately recognize the bait-and-switch that plays into it as lifted whole cloth). To that end, then, the story fails utterly, because the unnecessary attempt to drop jaws is tacked on at the last moment as a way to surprise; it adds nothing to the overall value of the story itself. Irving Forbush could have been the one to perish, and the story would have hit with just as little impact.

And then there’s the fact that it’s Kamala herself is the chosen sacrificial lamb. She’s been a sidebar to a sidebar to a sidebar throughout this last year of Wells’ run; she’s maybe spoken ten lines and had a two-issue tie-in to Dark Web that nobody bought. Yet suddenly, readers are expected to buy into the emotional stakes of her being thrust into a (very relatively) major role in this, the final issue of this arc, and her utterly needless self-sacrifice that follows. The moment of her death, meant to be so powerful, lands with a hollow thud. Kamala isn’t surrounded by her friends, family, or other assorted loved ones; she’s held by Peter and surrounded by his supporting cast in service to his emotional plight. And of course, Marvel is wringing this non-event for all it’s worth; a Fallen Friend one-shot where the whole of the Marvel Universe pretends she isn’t coming back from the great beyond sooner rather than later is scheduled for later this summer.

Beyond ineffective storytelling, there’s the much more urgent problem with the fact that Marvel – and editor Nick Lowe, and writer Zeb Wells – thought it was okay to casually, unnecessarily kill off a person of color in service to a cishet white man’s six-decade ongoing self-esteem problems. And as tone-deaf as that is, it’s made even more insulting by the fact that WE ALL KNOW SHE’LL BE BACK TO LIFE IN NO TIME FLAT.

On the art side, John Romita, Jr., phones in his usual late-career sloppiness. Each pages looks exceptionally rushed; Scott Hanna’s inks can’t save the pencils from themselves no matter how admirably he tries. At one point, Romita doesn’t even bother to draw the shapes of The Thing’s rocks – he just doodles a quick outline and lets the colorists fill in some orange hues. It might be one thing if there were stylistic choices at play; obviously, every artist should be entitled to experiment. But the downhill slide of Romita Jr.’s art for the past decade and a half or more is undeniable, and on full display during this vapid, cheap, cash-grab of a comic. It’s sad – he’s apparently more than comfortable with skating to the next big paycheck rather than show what he’s actually capable of.

Sort of like Amazing Spider-Man in general at this point.