Miles Morales: Spider-Man #15: Brooklyn Beat Down

I’ve been both openly critical and openly adoring of everything Cody Ziglar and Federico Vincentini have done with Miles Morales since their very first issue on the title together. From high highs to messy lows, I’ve always felt the book was consistent in voice and solid enough to still deliver a strong title for Brooklyn’s best Spider-Man. When I was at my most critical, the book had seemingly decided to go a hundred different ways at once in order to cram in as many ideas as possible before the narrative was swerved yet again by another event, this time one that wouldn’t put Miles in the spotlight like Carnage Reigns had. Well, it seems that all that cramming paid off, as Miles Morales: Spider-Man #15 has decisively taken every loose thread left over post-Reigns and embedded it into the Gang War conflict, turning what should’ve been a disaster for the run’s pacing into a chill-inducing semi-finale for everything the run has been about since day one.

Piggybacking off of the simultaneously released Giant-Size Spider-Man #1, this issue picks up with the big bads of this arc, Hobgoblin & Rabble, as they continue to up the ante in their goal of taking Brooklyn for themselves amidst the wider territory war between New York’s worst and gangliest. Both villains seem to be at their most unhinged, both coming off massive losses that have resulted in them posing as more radical threats than they had been previously in this run. The use of Rabble in this arc comes as a surprise but a welcome one, as her motivations and broken psyche prove to not only blend well with Hobgoblin’s own past with psychological damage but also act as a great foil to Miles’s own struggle with security, anxiety, and ego after the intensity of the book’s initial two-story arcs.

It’s paying off that emotional arc by blending it all into big, exciting superhero drama. The team-ups in this issue are immaculately done, the team Miles has assembled playing off some loose threads from the run that, by bringing them all together, create an air of excitement that is especially satisfying from a plot standpoint. The truth behind Aaron taking up the Prowler mantle once more was predictable, but the way in which Ziglar played it out from the last issue into this one was genius and helped rocket the pace of this book forward without rushing back the developmental details needed to make this climax rich outside of just the incredibly illustrated action sequences from Vincentini.

The subtle character moments between Miles and Kamala in this issue have been sorely needed and really helped bring the book’s rousing ‘Avengers Assemble’ to a thundering explosion that even the current Avengers title hasn’t been able to achieve. While the book’s importance to Gang War continues to decrease, that’s only to the benefit of this title and will, hopefully, spill out into the main conflict after resolving everything the team continues to accomplish with this arc.