Written by Brian Bendis
Art by Mark Bagley
Published by Marvel
[Note: Cover Image not available at press time]
With only one month before their 100th consecutive issue, Bendis and Bagley continued to showcase the best work of their careers. With some of the most dynamic plotting seen in any comic of the last year, Bendis focused nearly every page on a five minute conversation in a dark kitchen. With only the beginning as exception, where the reader is shown the awful and terrifying situation Mary Jane is stuck in, one which we can no longer pretend she is "sure to escape from," the comic, like a filmed version of a play, focuses it's attention solely on three terrified players: Aunt May, arriving home to find a frightened Peter trying to explain to Gwen Stacy why they all think she's dead (because she has been). As the hurried conversation unfolds, Peter, lost and confused, blurts out what he's been hiding from her for 99 issues: that he is, in fact, Spiderman--the cause of a vast majority of his Aunt's pain and emotional turmoil of the last few years. After an embarrassing and demoralizing attempt by Aunt May to deny what she, most likely, has suspected she orders him out, screaming the classic words that no adopted son wants to hear, that Peter is not "her child." Bendis then ups the stakes even more, revealing what no reader of Spiderman reader could expect by having Peter's long-lost, and assumed dead, father walk in the door.
While the storyline leads one to believe more nefarious circumstances are at work is unimportant. Whether Bendis and Bagley knew they were headed here or not, they've spent 98 issues preparing the reader for this moment; the moment when a 16 year old boy with no father is finally given one. Throughout the years portrayed in Ultimate Spiderman, Peter has tried to form relationships with every adult man he can find to fill the gaping loss that has informed the majority of his life. Either openly rebuffed, cruelly used or outright manipulated, his very lonely and desolate existence has gone from bittersweet to downright heartbreaking. Without any hope for happiness, his struggles to look after and protect his tiny family continue to wear him down; meanwhile, the gallery of sociopaths who wish to hurt him grow stronger and stronger. Unlike other comics (or movies, for that matter) which depict youth as wise versions of mini-adults, Bendis chooses to portray Peter exactly as what he is--a lonely, melodramatic child out of costume, and a goofy, excited-to-be-free boy while in. What's even more exciting is that Bendis has scored all of this realism against a very honest backdrop of loss--the absence of a family that understands or supports what he's going through. Unlike most comic books that use the trials of being a superhero as metaphors, Bendis has openly left those standard realms often--having once spent an entire issue devoted to Aunt May's therapy session, or using multiple months to deal with Mary Jane's heartbreak over Peter ending their relationship.
Ultimate Spiderman has, with the last few issues, cemented a legacy of quality that is sorely needed in comics today. It remains one of the best comic books ever published, and this latest issue contained some of it's finest hours.
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