Comic Book Plot Lines: Spider-Verse

Something weird happened in the 80's and 90's to comic plots; they went completely bonkers. Superman is dead! Superman is alive again! Superman is from an alternate evil reality! Miss an issue and you are completely lost. Like many of my exact age group, we just didn't get hooked into superhero comics until they calmed down some (or at least we had reasonable reading guides available online).

Honestly, as much as I like graphic novels as a form of literature, I still don't read superhero comics much.

And then "Into the Spider-Verse" captivated me. Once it came out on Netflix, I watched the thing on a loop for a solid week. In response to this, Ryan started buying up copies of the related comic book collections. I think, in part, he just wanted to watch something other than Miles Morales on the T.V. thwipping around and learning how to be a hero. In hindsight, I can't blame him...I was obsessed.

The first big block of books came in for my birthday and he's been supplementing them as I move forward in the various series. I'm still working at it because in order to read the related material for that one movie, it involves reading hundreds of pages of graphic novel across a half dozen inter-related and inter-connected series. Get far enough along and you start getting into even more related series all of which are in the spider-verse. It's an aracnoplosion. :-P

I just finally got through the Spider-Verse collection which is this 648 page tome of crazy. There are all these alternate dimension spider people grouping up and splitting off to take on various tasks while being pursued by a family of energy vampires who want to destroy them. It sounds crazy complicated and it is crazy complicated but someone on that writing team is a plotting genius because it all works and is fun to read.

My only potential criticism is in how they cut all the various stories together. The editor (or whoever) decided to streamline the main plot line and push all the side missions off to the second half of the book. So the "story" is resolved about half way through the book and the rest of it, dips backwards into the narrative at several points to what groups of spiders were off doing in the meantime. It works, but I think it would have been better to read it all a little more chronologically. Maybe, it's hard to say. I guess the risk of that is losing the reader off down a branch and losing track of what is going on in the main story. *shrug*

Ok, so that's done and dusted, but I'm still not done reading all the Spider-Verse material. Back to it I guess.