In the wake of SPIDER-GEDDON!!!! there are now a few different flavours for the Spider-Man connoisseur if the Peter Parker version is just too mainstream for you.
Both Superior Spider-Man and Miles Morales: Spider-Man came out with brand new Number Ones recently. Both do what a first issue in a new series should do: they both explain who their hero is, what their current situation is, and what their relationship to the OG Spider-Man is at the present continuity moment. Both feature classic supervillians from the OG canon. But both seem headed in very different directions.
Superior Spider-Man features Doctor Octopus as a Spider-Man, currently inhabiting a cloned body made of both his own and Peter Parker's DNA, making him look like an older, more severe Parker. He calls himself Ellitot Tolliver, and has a sweet university gig as a lecturer when he isn't out swinging around San Francisco doing a better job as a vigilante than that layabout Parker ever could.
Miles Morales: Spider-Man focuses on a teenage boy who spends his weeks at an upscale private school, worrying about things adolescents worry about when he isn't out swinging around the same city as his hero, Peter Parker.
Where these two books diverge is in tone. Christos Cage and artist Mike Hawthorne give Superior a feeling of a goofy time bomb. Doc Ock's haughty sniffiness and sky high superiority complex seems destined to ruin something, sooner or later. As well, this first issue sets the tone by having the ridiculous Stilt Man as an initial enemy. This tone is continued as we see Spider-Man teaming up with the Night Shift, which includes a Frankenstein monster that speaks in Stan Lee like publicity bubbles. If that isn't enough for your wacky bone, a giant clanking robot shows up later. It even whirrs and clicks.
Under writer Saladin Ahmend and artist Javier Garron, Miles Morales takes a more earnest tone. Using the framework of Miles having to keep a journal for his creative writing class, Ahmed has Miles narrate this issue, giving us front row seats as Miles reflects on his happy family life, great friends, his maybe girlfriend, and the wrongs he perceives in the world.
Where Gage centres Superior clearly in the Marvel Universe and superhero problems, Ahmed includes references to migrant children being taken from their parents, as well as poverty in New York. This is a time honoured tradition of Marvel Comics--referencing current social and political problems--but as been proven before, there's not much you can really do with that, narrative wise. Ahmed clearly wants to have Miles be more socially conscious, but there's a hard wall for that, editorially. Ahmed seems to understand this, because after Miles is swinging through the city, considering social problems, he encounters a robbery being perpetuated by robot like beings. You can almost hear him sigh as he says "Well. This, at least, I understand."
I enjoyed both issues, with perhaps a lean towards Superior because of the off in left field characters. As with all new comics, I just hope both titles will be given the time to find their audiences and their writers to do something memorable with these characters, before the appeal of a new Number One!!! sways Marvel to cut them off at the knees.
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