Amazing Spider-Man Gang War: First Strike #1 – All Roads Lead to Harlem

Gang War has arrived, and it is as many could’ve predicted given the wobbly current state of Amazing Spider-Man, leaves little to be excited over. The narrative here is as generic as can be, and its personal connections to Janice, Robbie, and Tombstone are all very thin. While Zeb has tried his darndest to develop Robbie’s activist goals and his relationship with Janice throughout his run, it’s always felt like an afterthought, him playing janitor for plot threads leftover by Nick Spencer’s run previously.

That level of disconnect, and the seeds of this event having been relegated to soulless background pages since issue #31 of this run, has left First Strike to be a vessel for nothing more than setup. It’s hard to care about Peter and Miles’ distant relationship, the Anti-Superhero Laws left in the wake of Devil’s Reign, and the personal struggle of the Robertsons at the heart of this story because no one, not even the creatives, gave a care about these things before an event was demanded from them.

So, going into this, there hasn’t been a well-seeded reason to care for what’s going on, but First Strike could have salvaged this by focusing on giving readers personal reasons to care about this story. Still, the book focuses quite heavily on the event’s plot, which sees a string of B/C-tier mob bosses angry at one another for reasons as personal as a public bathroom. It’s a schlock trope, with none of the villains featured here having any substance, merit, or weight in any Spidey title since Wells took over besides Tombstone, who’s hospitalized, and Hobgoblin, who isn’t even seen anywhere in this issue. While this building war plays into the theme of Peter being so focused on himself that he’s missed the problems that the world around him is facing, it’s a theme that’s just here to give him interpersonal conflict with the other heroes who we will see in this event and was only touched upon once in The Amazing Spider-Man before this.

The issue is working without any visual prestige, either. Its art, which is good in theory, doesn’t fit a story of this (attempted) tone. It dilutes and fails to help the writing’s rushed execution stand out or have an impact. “Gang War” doesn’t have atmosphere and doesn’t have a visual world that’s easy to believe in. Valenza’s colors, which are normally able to salvage and establish necessary tones that the penciller may fail to achieve, are exhausted in this title. There is a singular scene of artistic genius towards the end of this issue both in writing and in art, but because of the aforementioned failure to naturally build into this event, even that ending scene, which is chilling in concept, has little to no impact.

There is a chance that, as the event goes on, it can build itself into something strong retroactively, but this prelude issue reeks of editorial mandate. With how rushed and underdeveloped everything is, it’s hard to see the reason for this book even existing outside of Marvel needing a new Winter event to close out their end-of-year sales numbers. It’s a bad comic, through and through