ICYMI! Spider-Man ’94 #1 – Kaine On The Brain

The name says it all: Spider-Man ’94 #1 marks the promised return of the classic animated series that infamously ended on a massive cliffhanger. While intrepid readers may be excited to treat this new series as a supplement to a long-lost season, they’ll be hard-pressed to find any direct continuation from that ending here. Instead, this comic becomes an exercise in mythological blending, as the team combines the animated series’ aesthetic with the writing flavor of mid-’90s Spider-Man, all while repurposing villains pulled directly from the early 2000s era of the webslinger. The result is a book that feels both nostalgic and jarringly messy—a project born out of the readership’s love for a bygone era but crafted by a team with aspirations that lie beyond it.

J.M. DeMatteis pens the kind of dramatically dense Spider-Man story he’s best known for, pacing the issue with a serious consideration of what could be told rather than simply shown. His voice for the cast feels undeniably at home in the series’ setting—unsurprising, as DeMatteis has been a defining voice for the character from Kraven’s Last Hunt to The Clone Saga, particularly in the stronger stretches of the latter saga. Here he blends all that experience into a script that elicits familiar tones without falling back on gimmickry.

That strength also comes with drawbacks, as the script leans into hard-headed drama and a dour tone that initially bog down the excitement of this first issue. It’s mired in the same sense of misery that defined the era, failing to ease new readers in with a setup scene before immediately unraveling it within just a few pages. Rather than continuing the original series’ cliffhanger, the story skips ahead to deal with Peter’s emotional fallout—something that might have been more engaging if we actually experienced the events leading to it, instead of being told it’s a “story for another day.” This choice deflates the weight around the introduction of both a ’94 Kaine and Morlun as the series’ primary villains.

On top of that, any visual spark is almost completely lost, as Jim Towe’s only consistent skill in the issue’s art is its inconsistency. While he can occasionally craft a solid page with a clean—if flat—pacing that matches DeMatteis’ verbosity (for worse), his rendering of faces and dynamics only works when everyone is behind a mask. Stripped of that, the art becomes ugly without style. It’s the sort of lesser-than visual work that immediately undercuts a project like this, especially one invoking an era defined by phenomenal Spider-Man artists.