Spider-Gwen, Vol. 0: Most Wanted? by Jason Latour
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I don’t know what it was about this book, but I just did not give two fucks.
Okay, I kinda know what it was.
I’m kinda over the whole thing where we have an alternate Earth where everything is different…but not.
Wha? Gwen Stacy is Spider-Man instead of Peter Parker? And she, essentially, behaves exactly like Peter Parker and is Peter Parker’s soul in Gwen Stacy’s body?
No way! Captain America is a black woman whose origin seems nearly identical and whose story is the same?
In fact, let’s talk a little more about this Cap.
She’s a black woman who was subjected to a super soldier process of some kind. Then got displaced from her time or dimension or whatever for 75 years, after which she returned to her Earth without having aged and with society having moved forward 75 years. So instead of being frozen in a block of ice, she was off on dino world or something.
The thing is, I feel like books that take place on alternate Earths sometimes bend over backwards to make things different while also maintaining the same status quo. Which I find boring. I don’t see the purpose of it. Why create a Captain America backstory where it seems the bookends and end are the same and the middle part is different but with the same result? It’s not so much an alternate universe as a universe that took a different path to arrive at the same place.
By the way, I don’t mean this in a “Steve Rogers is MY Captain America kind of way.” I mean this in a way where if I’m going to read a “new” Captain America story, then give me a new story. It’s totes rad (I put that slang in there for the kids) to make a black Spider-Man, and what they didn’t do was remake Amazing Fantasy 15 using different colors and the exact same story. It’s totes #bazinga (I’m out of slang now) to make a black female Captain America, but if she’s going to be very much the same kind of person as Steve Rogers, from what I can tell, then I need you to tell me a new story. A new character AND a new story would be nice, but a new character OR a new story is the minimum I’m looking for.
Take it outside the Captain America thing, in this book Punisher is basically the same dude except he has a 401k. What the hell is the point of that? He’s a big, intimidating asshole who has a brutal vision of law. Which one am I talking about? This alternate Earth or the regular one we’re used to? Haha, you’ll never know!
Also, assuming history of a different Earth is different, I have no idea what black history might be there, I have no idea about women’s history. So is having a black female Captain America a thing on this Earth, or is it status quo? Again, I have no idea. I don’t get any of THAT backstory.
What it comes down to is that sometimes these alternate worlds feel like cheating to me. If you read this having never read stories from Earth-616 (that’s the standard Earth for you non-comics people) then it would be a bunch of insane, meaningless gobblidiegook. Yoosaplatz. Gilgamoosh. But this alternate world uses our familiarity with Earth-616 to basically shortcut the need to make characters distinct. I know nothing about the new Captain America, but she seems to behave and talk and occupy the space of Earth-616 Cap. In fact, the fistfight between Spider-Gwen and Cap seems to be almost an exact mirror of the fistfight between Spidey and Cap during Civil War. Maybe this is cute fan service or something, I don’t know, but I also just don’t really care.
All of it begs the question, why am I reading the same story again?
So I quit.
Rather than offering something brand new, I felt like we were re-treading everything Spider-Man. And I’ve read those stories already. I’m ready for something new and fresh. I think there are some interesting What If? elements going on here, but it’s not enough.
Some might say that this is fine because, hey, some people want to grow up with Spider-Gwen as their primary Spider-Man, so why not just do a more diverse remake? I can dig it, but the problem is that there’s almost no story here that makes any sense, really.
There’s that old saying that goes like “Any comic book could be someone’s first.” If this was your first comic book, I can’t fathom what you’d derive from it. I just don’t see this book accomplishing and establishing an existence that’s outside of and independent of Earth-616 Spidey. There’s virtually no discussion of her powers, there’s really no explanation of who the hell these side characters are. It wouldn’t mean anything to you that Uncle Ben was alive or that some guy named Peter Parker was the Lizard.
Also, why in the fuck does Spider-Gwen need to be in a rock band? Seriously. There are a couple things I generally have a problem with in comics. One of them is music. I can’t hear it. I have no idea what it sounds like. It doesn’t move me in any way. This is true of books of pure text too. My god did I flip past the songs in Lord of the Rings. My kingdom for a version with the songs redacted. Or Dio lyrics in there instead. At least I can imagine the song that way.
The other thing that kills me is food. There are some exceptions, but again, I can’t taste it, I can’t smell it. I can’t feel the temperature or texture. The only information I get is visual, which is possibly the least important information regarding food. It matters, but not as much as those other senses. Notably, CHEW does a great job with food stuff because it doesn’t really talk about flavor so much as narrative. Imagine that. In a narrative form, we use something like food to unlock narrative.
I guess what I wanted was simple.
What I wanted was new characters in a new story.
What I would have settled for would have been new characters in an old story OR old characters in a new story.
What I got was the same characters in a story that didn’t feel particularly new to me.
And perhaps I didn’t read far enough. I didn’t finish the book. I honestly was so confused and bored at the same time that I just wasn’t having a good time reading it. So maybe the book finds its spider legs (ew) and things improve quickly. But I just couldn’t hang.