The Amazing Spider-Man: Edge of Spider-Verse (2014)

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this comic-book volume.  All I really knew going in was that it featured the debut of Spider-Gwen, a character I’ve heard about and am interested in getting into.  While Spider-Man itself is a comic franchise too long and entangled for me to start exploring too much, I did enjoy the stories collected here.

The basic premise is that some interdimensional baddie is trolling the multiverse for Spider-Men, trying to take out incarnations of the web-crawler in various iterations.  At the same time, Peter Parker (presumably original recipe, or at least as close to that as comic canon can get?) is also dimension-hopping, trying to get to his parallels first and convince them to join him in fighting the baddie (this volume, however, is mainly about setting up the different Spider-Men, not any actual team-up.)

There’s a lot of variety in the different universes here, and I like pretty much all of them.  The first gives us Spider-Man in a noir-ish setting, complete with gangsters, a retro/gritty costume, and Mysterio masquerading as a traveling magician.  Cool and stylish.  Next up is Spider-Gwen, the aforementioned reason I checked out the comic in the first place.  It’s probably the most straightforward take on the story, simply imagining what would’ve happened if Gwen had been bit by the spider instead of Peter (also, I really dig her costume.)  Spider-Man #3 is my least favorite, a hero of the scientist-who-intentionally-experimented-on-himself variety, with a bonus high-tech suit.  The story of the villain he’s fighting is interesting, but I’m not as interested in the man himself.  The fourth story is the most disturbing, a dark twist on the classic tale.  There, the pushed-to-the-edge bullied kid (named Patton instead of Peter) gives into the dark impulses of the hunger the spider-bite awakens in him, using his powers to exact vengeance on his tormenters.  Finally, we go high-tech again, with a now-deceased Spider-Man’s daughter taking up her dad’s mantle and forming the required symbiotic bond with the spider that enables the suit’s powers.

Since I picked up the volume for Spider-Gwen (and, with her prominently featured on the cover, I assumed she’d be featured in more than 1/5 of it,) it is a bit disappointing to see how little there is of her, but I do like this book.  Even though it’s clearly a preamble to a main event, it shows a lot of creativity in bringing the different Spider-Men to life, and I enjoyed pretty much all of them.  However, I can see why this brief appearance eventually led to Gwen’s own comic.  The format of it is very “classic Spider-Man,” juggling crime-fighting with being a teenager (and the added complication of being hunted as a vigilante by her police-officer dad,) and I’m interested in checking out more of her.

Warnings

Violence (very graphic in some of the universes) and some strong thematic elements.