Civil War 2: The Amazing Spider-Man #1
Written By: Christos Gage
Art By: Travel Foreman
Colored By: Rain Beredo
Lettered By: VC’s Joe Caramanga
Release Date: 6/8/16
Price Tag: 3.99
Last week Civil War 2 #1 hit comic stands. One of our first mini series connected to the event is Civil War 2: The Amazing Spider-Man.
Plot
This issue opens up with Spider-Man battling a few Vulture type villains. After the battle he meets Ulysses, an inhuman who can see the future and the catalyst for Civil War 2. Spider-Man gives Ulysses a tour of Parker Industries. This is where he meets Clayton Cole, also known as Clash, one of Spider-Man’s first villains. Ulysses has a vision and tells Spider-Man that Clayton will become evil again in the near future.
Story
Before opening up this issue I expected this tie-in mini series to deal with Iron Man, since MJ is working for him. So I was surprised to see the series tie into Ulysses instead. Most of the issue introduces Ulysses to Parker Industries, and if you’ve been reading The Amazing Spider-Man this gets boring quickly. Of course, you need these scenes for the build up towards the Clayton Cole cliffhanger, but the issue could have taken less time on explaining things about Spider-Man’s new status quo. I am glad that the story was new reader friendly, but I think even for new readers those scenes became boring.
The Clayton Cole cliffhanger was kind of interesting, but not enough for me to get excited for the next issue. I read the .1 issues (“Crawl”) with his origin story. So I have background on the character, but in the current The Amazing Spider-Man series Clayton is just a glorified background character. There isn’t a lot of build up to him turning evil again, which granted we may learn more about in this mini series.
My favorite thing about this issue are the small scenes we get between Johnny and Pete. I love their friendship and I thought Johnny’s connection with the Inhumans was a good way to connect Peter to the Civil War 2 event.
Art
The art style was the biggest disappointment for me. I really liked the cover art and expected the same art style for the interior. There was a lot of overuse of inking in this issue, it was hard to look at other details in the artwork because of it.
I also didn’t like the thin lined art style, It made everything look small and lanky. My favorite aspect for the art was the coloring. Even though there was a lot of dark inking I liked the bright colors.
Verdict
I was disappointed with this issue. This mini series could have focused on connections to other characters that are involved in Civil War 2. I am not sure if this issue gave enough for me to want to pick up issue 2.