by Dylan Duarte, CMRO Contributing Writer
Amazing Spider-Man
Issue #676
Written by Dan Slott, Art by Humberto Ramos
Published: February 2012
From what little I’ve read of Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man, I like it, I really do. Which is why issue #676, an apparent one-off titled The Sinister Six in Tomorrow the World, is so disappointing. The first mistake? No Spider-Man. Now, I do think it’s possible to write an issue in which the titular character doesn’t appear. It’s been done before and it can work. But it’s a gamble, and here, it just didn’t pay off. Spider-Man’s presence is sorely missed. Mysterio makes plenty of wisecracks in his absence, but it’s just not the same.
There’s a real pulp-horror vibe to a lot of it, especially with Doc Ock and the dialogue, but at some point it just becomes too much. It would have worked better if Slott had made the pulp-ish content exclusive to one or two of the villains – of which there are a lot in this issue – but instead you get a bunch of different characters speaking the same way and it just doesn’t work.
Humberto Ramos’s pencils are top notch, and even though I dislike Doc Ock’s new design, Ramos still makes everything a lot of fun to look at. His work on M.O.D.O.K. in particular is fantastic. He took a character with a very far-fetched design and makes him look incredibly menacing. I don’t know if I’ve ever taken M.O.D.O.K. seriously before now.
At the risk of sound naive, I don’t know if one-off issues really work in comics – at least in standard 22-ish page issues. It’s just not enough space to tell a complete story of any real significance, and they’re often relegated to this light, fun, and ultimate fluff tales. I don’t doubt that Amazing Spider-Man #676 is setting up something down the road, but that something is probably just the resurgence of the Sinister Six, something that could’ve benefited more from an actual story arc than a supervillain battle royale.
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