Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "paul-jenkins"

Peter Parker: Spider-Man: A Day in the Life by Paul Jenkins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is a dark book that swings too far to an extreme in Spider-man's world. Personal problems and even personal tragedy have always been part of the Spider-man world but this book takes this to an extreme.

In some ways, you can't quite blame Paul Jenkins for this because Marvel mashes together a three part story from the Spider-man magazine Webspinners from 1999 with Jenkins earliest work on Peter Parker Spider-man a year later. Both visit similar themes and are somewhat redundant when shoved into the same trade.

The first three part story "The Scoop" is somewhat inane with the Chameleon going around in a ski mask and being emo in the first two parts with the last part of the story being Spider-man sitting around recalling all the tragedy in his life including the deaths of Captain Stacy and Gwen Stacy.

Jenkins first work on Peter Parker Spider-man in Issue 20 has his moaning and crying at the grave of Uncle Ben about the unhappiness of his life and the death of Uncle Ben. To be fair, he had good reason for this as he was deeply depressed after his wife had apparently been killed. And so the sadness and grief in Issues 20 and 21 were appropriate in the context of the original comics. In this trade, it means we start out with five consecutive issues of almost pure depression.

At the start of Issue 22, we get to see Jenkins potential beyond merely showing Spider-man depressed as Peter goofs off and has a moment's reprise.,,before getting see the Sandman reach an ignominious end that's as depressing if not more so than the Chameleon's.

Then we see Issue 26 which is a great premise that has police officers sharing their thoughts on Spider-man including opinions and some fun mini-stories. Of course, as Jenkins is writing it, it also revisits the death of the Stacys. Although there's a fair bit of lighter stuff thrown in to give a more balanced portrayal.

In the end, this book isn't so much bad as it is unpleasant. Even accounting for how Marvel's decisions in printing this trade account for many of its shortcomings, Jenkins delves too much into Spider-man's past. However, Marvel amplifies this by collecting so many depressing stories in the same book.



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