Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #14: I’ll Be Here When You Wake Up

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is an interesting aberration in that the solicitation blurb for this issue promised what sounded like an action-packed issue in which Spidey and the Fantastic Four track down the person who tried to kill Spidey a few issues back. We saw the scramble to tie up lingering plot threads in the last issue and this issue looked on the path to do the same. Until it didn’t. Instead of attempting a rush job to close this series out, the book went out as it lived—full of beautiful personal moments.

The work that Tom Taylor and his many artists did in this series was not flashy in the typical sense. He notes in the afterword that it was never intended to be “a big blockbuster book” and throughout most of the fourteen issues, he stuck by that design. Instead, he used Spider-Man to take on big issues that affect millions every day, from cancer to poverty, and told stories that will stick with readers long after Spidey has moved on to new threats and new creative teams. The flashback of May comforting a young Peter comes full circle in this issue as Peter is able to be bedside when May comes out of surgery. It isn’t flashy but it feels important. That feeling has permeated the series. Other Spidey books just don’t seem to have time for these sorts of moments, or if they do, they occupy a single issue between other arcs. This series was mostly constructed of important feeling moments and that concept, not often seem in the mainstream of superhero comics, helped make Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man stand above the crowd to be one of the highlights of 2019 in literature.