What in the web-slinging hell did I just read? Spider-Man Blue languished on my comics shelf for years, awaiting the day when I needed a quick read and an easy win. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are the teams behind The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, two of my favorite Batman comics. Their take on Spider-Man should have been a slam dunk, like any of Peter Parker’s dad-joke quips while fighting a supervillain. It wasn’t.
Spider-man Blue ostensibly tells the story of how Peter Parker fell in love with Gwen Stacy. The primary narrative gimmick is that we’re hearing Peter narrate the story through tape recordings from the present, recounting the past. Like any other Spider-man story, it juggles Peter’s fraught personal life with his (great) responsibility as a superhero slash moral force for good. The story certainly has both of those elements, and there’s a shadowy supervillain pulling the strings in the background to boot. As Peter nurtures his burgeoning friendship with Harry Osborne and Gwen Stacy, Aunt May introduces him to Mary Jane Watson. She shows an immediate interest in Peter, and MJ becomes part of the crew. Peter must balance his two suitors and his web-slinging alter-ego.
I have encountered an issue with many graphic novels that rears its ugly head in Spider-Man Blue. Most recently, it happened with Harleen, which focused far too much on the Joker to reasonably be the Harley Quinn origin story it claimed to be. In Harleen, the Joker stripped Harley of her agency and of her story. She was inextricably intertwined with someone who, frankly, was a much more intriguing character. Blue suffers from a different branch of this same problem. The book focuses far more on MJ than it does on Gwen Stacy. Context is important here. Peter is telling us the story from the present, and we (the readers, Peter, etc.) all know Gwen’s fate. Present-day Peter is married to MJ, making his perspective hard to parse. He remembers Gwen as an idea and has trouble parsing her as a person. Through this reading, I’m willing to forgive the odd focus of Blue, though it’s worth mentioning because the book becomes more cerebral through that lens.
Even so, Gwen’s sidelining is further exacerbated by the narrative choices in Spider-Man Blue. Is it a new take on the Gwena and Peter love story, which—as any Spidey fan knows—does not end well for anyone involved? Yes, sure, fine. It is a new take. But new doesn’t mean good. The entire book is so narratively imbalanced it became almost impossible to understand from a storytelling perspective. Like Stacy, the Green Goblin is sidelined early on in favor of a shadowed and mysterious villain who drops hints as to his identity along the lines of “I crave the hunt.” By the time the villain reveals himself, the story has advanced so far that a conclusion must be reached. The villain’s motives are foggy at best and completely unsatisfying at worst.
By favoring Kraven’s (oh, sorry, I spoiled it) storyline, Blue leaves precisely zero space to tell or show us what actually happened to Gwen. It leaves the climax off the page, and Peter laments her loss in the present, using Uncle Ben’s tape recorder in the attic while Mary Jane eavesdrops.
I closed the final page stunned and dazed. Spider-man Blue siphoned all of my hopes and dreams for the book out of my brain with some sick, modified web. I recommend any Spidey fans reading this skip it entirely.
The art was cool, though.
Rating: Spider-man Blue – 3.0/10
-Cole
