Spider-Man #6: Spiders! Spiders Everywhere!

After a well-written origin story for our new Earth-616 in issue #5, we return to the artless chicanery of retcons, action with little character substance, and a bombastic plot that is as smart as it is fun.

I’ll give Slott his props for keeping each issue of this plotline purposeful and necessary to the story. At the very least, each issue is choked with things and developments in the plot. As a penultimate chapter, SPIDER-MAN #6 ties up plot threads left open, bringing together an assault on Shathra’s Nest that leaves the reader on a cliffhanger. Said cliffhanger is directly tied into a major retcon to the original Spider-Verse regarding Silk’s role as ‘The Bride of Spiders’. For some, this will be a change they love, and for others, a pointless reason for this story’s existence.

I do find myself wishing that this last Spider-Verse chapter had wrapped in some of our players from the previous two events in Dan Slott’s “Spider-Verse Trilogy”. While Miles, Silk, and Madamae Webb remain important, the relationships forged between the new Spider-people are weak at best and remain that way up into this issue.

There is nothing satisfying about introducing new characters on the promise of inclusion, only to give them nothing to do in the story besides function as plot devices. If you really want to give people characters they can see themselves in and relate to, then they should be fostered with the same amount of depth and care as Peter Parker. If not, you get stereotypical stand-ins that will fade into the night the moment this arc concludes. No one is satisfied by that. Both the characters of new and old severely lack any emotional arc or narrative, leaving little for the reader to engage with outside of the bloated plot.

Almost every character is window dressing that overcrowds a book with so much going on visually that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, Mark Bagley’s pencils devolve into an ugly mess. It’s sensory overload without any emotional resonance.