“This was a nice ending to the series, although the parts that strayed a little were off the mark.
I had to write a review for this because of one simple thing:
I am 100% convinced that the run of Ultimate Spider-Man that spans about a decade is the best singular run in comic book history.
The writing is great. This series is one of the most consistent as far as making me laugh, and at the same time the softer moments are handled just right. The writing does so much to help even a hardened nerdo like myself understand why it sometimes sucks to be Spider-Man. For the first time ever, I’m sold on the idea that being Spider-Man isn’t always totally awesome. The movies make it seem totally awesome, right? Okay, maybe he’s always late for class. Who gives a shit!? I was always late for class, and that was simply because I was dumb. Or maybe I was dumb because I was late for class…no, it was definitely the first one. Believe me, the extra 5 minutes in Senior World Studies spent drawing the rivers on the African continent wouldn’t have made me into a winner.
The art? Mark Bagley kills it. His Spider-Man is fantastic. And he can also actually draw people too, ones that have different faces and can be told apart. The trick to drawing Spider-Man is to express the action and to convey the idea that Spider-Man is almost creepy in the way that he moves around, which is part of why people just hate him. Bagley does a perfect job, and it’s no small surprise that the writer/artist team beat the record for the longest continuous collaboration on a mainstream Marvel book, which was previously set by none other than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two legends.
And for being as long as it is, spanning 10 years, there really aren’t the kinds of duds we expect and allow in comics. What’s the longest run of Incredible Hulk? MAYBE a year? Batman? A few months? Superman? 13/22 pages? Keeping up this level of goodness for a decade is absolutely incredible.
Finally, because the storyline is contained within these volumes, ALL available in trade paperback, a person could pick up Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 1 and read the entire series without screwing around with a bunch of crossover nonsense, getting confused by unexplained outside characters, having multiple timelines and events confusing everything, and all the general craziness that comes with comics. This is a full series, beginning to end, and this is the superhero comic I would recommend to anyone that just never enjoyed a superhero comic.
You can get issues 1-39 in this one volume http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Spider-Man-Omnibus-Volume-1/dp/0785164758/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1378259771&sr=8-5&keywords=ultimate+spider-man
Which I recommend that you all do.
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