Amazing Spider-Man #55: Just When I Think I’m Out…

Boy, when this weekly publishing schedule for Amazing Spider-Man stops, I’m really going to miss it. It’s been great getting weekly chapters of the “Last Remains” storyline, and it’s a story that deserves to be told this way. I think monthly would’ve really hurt this story. But in this epic almost-finale to the storyline, author Nick Spencer pulls out all the stops. You know what? All I’m gonna say is that if you’re still feeling okay after you’ve finished this issue, you can totally put off that cardiac test you were scheduled for. I don’t want to say that this is the part where the villain reveals their evil plan, because you have ZERO idea what it is at the end of the issue, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

This book is like a really great episode of Murder, She Wrote (there, now you know my guilty pleasure/secret shame). You keep getting new information that leads you one way right up until the end, then like an RKO OUTTA NOWHERE something else shows up and reveals something that makes the villain look as competent as the Wet Bandits. I hate having things spoiled for me, and I won’t ever spoil things for you, so when it came to picking out a page to display in this review, this is pretty much the only one I felt comfortable posting. 

Artist Patrick Gleason does his usual outstanding job on this issue. There’s a lot of moving parts in this issue, and Gleason pulls it all off perfectly. Some of the pages you’d swear actually move. The characters are spot on, there’s some flashbacks that are great, due in no small part to colorist Edgar Delgado’s work. There’s really zero bad in this issue, especially when it comes to the art and design of the book. It conveys every emotion that the author writes perfectly, but at no point does it ever “jump the shark.”