Epicentre
Give the referers what they’re asking for, I rarely say.
Please find enclosed one short review of The Amazing Spider-man volume 2, issue 36. Words by JMS, pictures by John Romita Jr.
Though the logo is still amazing, the cover is black. This is Marvel’s official response to the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center buildings.
I suppose the problem starts there. The rest of the world falls away and New York becomes the world. Everyone’s there, all of Marvel’s notable heroes and a handful of marquee villains. Everyone except you, again. There are no foreigners here. Inside, no one watches, horrified on their sofas. JMS goes with the kneejerk in most ways for this issue and the first is for the action, for the writer, to be there, and the audience to sit watching.
(I’m going to place most blame on JMS as the story goes that this was formed whole from his godhead.)
There is evidence even in this quick issue that it needn’t have been this way. In smart ways JMS pulls the narrative back and forth in time, with, for instance, a panel there of the fireman rushing up one of a tower’s stairwells, a panel here of FDNY funeral. In two of the most courageous panels we move momentarily to the fourth plane a moment before the hijackers are themselves hijacked.
The major problem is that this comic might be better titled JMS, for it is his voice that pours strongly forth through inappropriate vessels, ending in his stereotypical destination, the final moments of The Parliament of Dreams.
Spiderman is not allowed his voice. No Marvel superhuman speaks here, they are rendered as cheap symbols. No real human voice speaks here.
There’s no opportunity taken to deepen the works JMS writes, nor draw on their existing depth to talk about what happened. Nothing to be said about the relationship between reality and fiction. Just kneejerk JMS holding forth.
JMS holds Captain America up as the sorry heart of this story, but surely that belongs to Magneto. His voice is the biggest omission. JMS presents a Taliban scholar and Jerry Falwell, but fails to place Magneto alongside them. In a kneejerk bit of symbolism, Magneto is equated with the foreign non-amicable states who mourned America’s tragedy. A thoughtful thing to do would be to place him in the category of the holy warriors, and worse, with Bin Laden.
(Sickly inappropriate: Juggernaut is seen mourning the tragedy, yet he is the destroyer of the WTC in the Marvel Universe.)
This issue is just so disposable. It can be read in a few minutes with little missed. JMS tells us that there are bad people out there, and we already knew that. And he tells us we are good. And we knew that too.