I have to admit, when I heard about Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I was really upset about what was going to happen to one of my favorite comic book characters. I admit, I am pretty new to comic books, having only been reading for about 6 months now, and when BND started, I had only been reading for a couple of months. However, I had known about Spider-Man since I was a kid and always enjoyed the character.

One of my favorite things about Spider-Man has always been his relationship with Mary-Jane. Yeah, I’m kind of a girl about that kind of stuff, but depth of character is really important to me in comic books, and I feel that Mary-Jane really made Peter Parker a deep character. I particularly notice this relationship in Ultimate Spider-Man (which just happens to be one of my favorite comics). Brian Michael Bendis does an outstanding job writing this series. Not only do you care about Spider-Man and love him for being the hero, but you deeply care about Peter Parker and I, for one, really enjoy the more “personal” drama of the series.

This is where I see BND going a little off. Sure, there has been quite a bit of drama with Peter wanting to move out of Aunt May’s house and needed to make money. But the Peter Parker drama is very separate from the Spider-Man drama. And this, I feel, is a major downside to BND.

That being said, lately, I have started to really enjoy Amazing Spider-Man. First, the writing on this series is amazing. The wit, the inside-jokes and most of all, the way the writers write to the reader. Also, another big problem I have had with Brand New Day is the way the arcs have been left wide open. It seems like the writers will start an arc, write for a couple of issues, go to a new arc, and then in 6 issues, finally get back to the first arc. Lately, however, the writers have been tying up a lot of loose ends and bringing everything together. Now that I see the way the writers are planning the series, I see how things end up working out.

So, to sum up this compliant, I really want the ASM writers to bring some great Peter Parker drama into the stories and have that tie directly in to the Spider-Man drama. Is that so much to ask?