Mysterio! The Gauntlet! Dan Slott! Oh my!

After not reading comics for almost two months, I finally went and picked up all of the comics I hadn’t bought and in this monstrous stack was Amazing Spider-Man #618. Penned by Dan Slott with art by Marcos Martin, this was the issue I have been looking forward to for months (since I heard word of it back in August) that was apart of Spider-Man’s “The Gauntlet.”

In case you haven’t been keeping up with Amazing Spider-Man, what’s been happening is this: all of Spidey’s old villains have been coming back… with a vengeance. The thing is, they’re not coming back to get Spider-Man, but they’re coming back to do what they do best: do selfish things. So far, we’ve had Electro, Sandman, Rhino (2.0) and this weeks baddy–Mysterio.

It’s been all very good so far, but this week’s issue… I wasn’t feeling it so much, which is a huge surprise since I have an absolute love for Dan Slott’s Spider-Man. But let’s talk more after the break.

*some minor spoilery after the break*

As I said, I was very excited for this issue. Mysterio’s coming back. Who couldn’t be excited for that?

Well, let me first just say that this issue was all over the place. We had ties in to Mr. Negative, the Maggia mafia family, Aunt May and J. Jonah Sr., cyborgs, and all sorts of crazy things. Could this be the intention of the author? Perhaps. Is Mr. Slott trying to mess with us only to build to a bigger picture? Perhaps.

A cyborg? In a Spider-Man book?

Nevertheless, it was nearly confusing how off the wall some of these twists in the story were. First of all, I’m not a fan of this whole “Aunt May and JJJ Sr. are back, oh wait they’re not” plot point that some of the authors have been using. It’s really random and sometimes pointless. Dan Slott used it to further the story, but it felt really out of the blue to me and could have been left for another story arc.

But without giving away much more story, I will say I am interested to see where this all goes. The one thing I will say is that the twists and turns of the story weren’t so random that it didn’t make sense (see: Batman & Robin #4) and the whole tie together with Mysterio adds some subtle explanation as to what may be going on with pretty much everything–which is probably the best feature of writing with Mysterio involved.

The only serious issue I have with this issue is that there is too much going on. This isn’t an issue an old fan of Spider-Man can just pick up on a whim to get back in the game. Yes, the pre-text to the issue helps explain something of what’s going on, but as of this week, I’m not sure how this all ties together. My guess is that a person who would pick up this issue because of the cover wouldn’t get what’s going either and won’t get the next issue.

Of course, I’ll be keeping up with this series because it’s Spider-Man and Dan Slott and you really can’t go wrong, but we’ll see… we’ll see.

Oh, and there was this thing that happened with Martin Li...