Amazing Spider-Man #40: Last Chance

Nick Spencer should stop writing this book right now. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because he’s quickly moving up the list of my favorite Spider-Man writers, and the top of that list is set in stone. I can’t let him in there, but I can’t not let him in there and I’m not gonna do the b.s. “point” thing or “#8 is a tie between Nick Spencer and…”. But that’s playing the long game, what this means right now is that this is a hell of a comic book series. There is so much going on in this book, it’s crazy. You have Spidey vs. Chance, Spidey on JJJs podcast (Good God, everyone DOES have a podcast!), and you’ve got Chance’s “friends” watching things go down because there’s some kind of big wager being played out over the results of the outcome of the Spidey/Chance battle. One of Spencer’s strengths is that he can give you 4 or 24 different points of view of the same story or event and he makes them all interesting. He’ll write the bad guy/good guy battle, but he’ll also write the story of the good guy’s girlfriend sitting at home, the bad guy’s sister that’s on life support, etc, and he makes all of them a vital part of the story and better yet, he makes them all really interesting. Well played!

Artists Iban Coello & Ze Carlos hit a major home run with this issue’s art. This is comic book art at it’s best. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear these pages were moving. As you’re reading the panels, they seem to come alive, kind of like one of those motion comics, but only better. Coello & Carlos are master sequential storytellers, and they display that here in this comic. There are so many different examples of environments, and what’s so impressive is that they move from place to place with such ease and their use of continuity between the scenes. Some really fantastic work in this issue.