The Amazing Spider-Man #9: The Aftershocks

The Amazing Spider-Man series has been defined by the interpersonal connection between its readers and its main character from the very start. Peter’s constantly running internal monologue has always allowed the creative teams to explore the character in the deepest ways possible. When that internal monologue is stripped away, a somewhat dizzying alienation between the readers and the story can occur. Immediately, the book’s tone shifts completely, and it’s with that intent that Joe Kelly pens a strangely disconnected issue of the title with this week’s The Amazing Spider-Man #9.

To start off on a clear foot, this issue’s most tangible positive trait is Michael Dowling’s excellent artwork. It picks up with a similar tonal style as Pepe Larraz, but with a more mechanical feel than Larraz’s fluidity. There are a ton of exciting panel angles, storytelling beats, and effective splashes that tell an even better tale than Kelly’s own script could. The final page of this issue is delicious—Dowling has come a long way from his last time working on the title, way back in 2022. The coloring team does an excellent job evoking intense tone and atmosphere from Dowling’s work. If any artist deserves to get a real, consistent crack at this title going forward, it’s definitely Dowling.

For the story itself, we pick up in a very weird place. An unconfirmed amount of time has passed since Peter’s defeat at the hands of Hellgate, and he has once again shut himself off from most other people. The reader is shut off from Peter’s internal decision-making as well—Kelly sparingly utilizes textboxes, leaving us completely in the dark as to why Peter has hung up the mask for a little while, outside of what we can infer on our own. He’s broken and has brought the threat of Hellgate to New York because of his notoriety as Spider-Man—but we can’t know for certain. As we follow him in his day-to-day, we see him succeeding at work, talking to a mysterious new girlfriend on the phone, all while his side cast struggles with his detachment.

There is a lot of intrigue that surrounds this, and conceptually it’s a really interesting approach to exploring Peter’s darker side in a new way—even if we have seen this dilemma countless times in the last few years. The issue with that comes in the decision to include a specific monumental encounter between two characters here that squanders the excitement in a sudden subversion of potential, seemingly for the sake of maintaining the disconnect between character and reader. Even more so, it does not flow well from the conflict of the last issue, and it feels as though you’re picking up in a completely different run of Spider-Man altogether.

Intermixed with all this is a focus on the Shocker as the main antagonist of this story, with Hellgate nowhere to be found. Despite all the fun that surrounds that development—along with seeing how Peter is excelling at work—you get a strange mix of status quo development and a total tonal shift that left me thinking of Tom King’s run on Batman, in terms of strange scripting choices alongside an inherent love for the classical.