Brand New Day : Amazing Spider-Man 547 & 548

Amazing Spider-Man 547-548

There's An Easy Way To Take Out The Mob, And A Hard Way. This Is The Hard Way

First, let's get some very bad things out of the way. 547 starts off showing a full page liplock between Peter and J. Jonah Jameson. The next issue starts off with Spider-Man almost kissing a corpse. I know Slott is trying to be clever but it just comes off as disgusting. Particularly the one with Peter and J. Jonah. Yechh!

Why is this good? There are three subplots in this story arc: Mr. Negative's assassination plot, Peter losing one of his web-shooters to a mugger, and the Daily Bugle being sold off without J. Jonah knowing about it. Pacing is faultless - the story moves along at a nice pace. Art is McNiven, that is to say: gorgeous. The three subplots transition into, and out of, each other smoothly.

So we have Mr. Negative brewing up a poison that is DNA-specific. It will only kill members of a particular family - in this case an organized crime family. In order to create this poison Mr. Negative and his henchmen, the Inner Demons (I love that name), go into the trouble of getting an ancient relic and setting up an elaborate lab facility to create the poison and kidnap a member of the maggia (Marvel's mafia) to get his 'blood signature' for the poison. That 's a lot of trouble. Why doesn't Mr. Negative just use regular poison gas. It's a bit stupid really unless its meant to reveal something about Mr. Negative's nature - this guy is not some thug, he kills with some level of finesse. Or he could just be stupid.

We leave the tale with Mr. Negative getting a sample of Spidey's blood - allowing him to create a Spider-Man specific poison (Sheesh! Just use regular poison d*mb*ss. One web shooter missing and J. Jonah still doesn't know his newspaper's been sold.

Posted by Pete Albano - June 21, 2011

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