Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus a hard cover collection:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”Spider-man: Spider Island” by Dan Slott, Humberto Ramos, and others

This is the first Spider-Man book that I’ve picked up in a few years. I mainly picked it up because I’ve liked Slott’s previous Spider-Man writing. That was back when Marvel consolidated all of Spidey’s various series into one weekly Spider-Man series. That meant they rotated writers a lot and though I bought a few collected editions I had a hard time keeping track of the Dan Slott written stuff as it was often in collections with issues written by other writers. I gave up on it.

But here we are a couple of years later with “Spider Island”. All of the Spider-Man issues are written by Slott plus there are some other cross-over issues in there too. Mostly issues of “Venom” written by Rick Remender. I generally like his writing too so that is a plus.

“Spider Island” is a fun story. A villain, the Spider Queen, decides to take over all of Manhattan and then try to take over the world by turning all the people on the island into spider people. It has something to do with the mystical mumbo-jumbo that has grown up around Spider-Man and his spider powers since the early 2000s. At first the people are thrilled to have super powers but then they turn into spider monsters and it’s not as much fun.

I enjoyed most of the art work in this book. I’ve never been much of an Humberto Ramos fan but I like his stuff here. I think he’s one of those artists where I don’t like the way his art looks but I like the ways it reads. Flipping through the book it doesn’t do much for me but when I actually sit down and read it I like it. I have no idea what that phenomenon is but there are a few artist who are like that for me. I can now say I like his work though because I do.

“Spider Island” is a fun crossover event book. There are lots of New York based super-heroes to be found in it as they all pitch in to help with the spider virus outbreak. Slott has a lot of fun with the dialogue and pokes wise at a lot of super hero tropes. There is generally always a bit of humor to be found in his writing so don’t expect the overwhelming seriousness of a lot of modern comics. Give it a read.