Hey everyone! How're you all doing today? I'm pretty good. I've got a few posts for you today. I've got four trailer reviews coming up later today, and this post is going to be the first in my series of comic book reviews on The Amazing Spider-Girl series that Marvel published from 2006 until 2009. I have all 30 issues of the series, and I've been wanting to talk about it for a while now so that's what I'm going to do. I'll be reviewing the series six issues at a time the way they're collected in the trade paperbacks. So without further ado let's talk about the first six issues of The Amazing Spider-Girl!
I wasn't reading new comics in 2006. I was volunteering at a local hobby shop that also sold comics, because we had to have 40 hours of community service in order to graduate from high school, but I mostly bought trade paperbacks and single issues of Batman related comics from the 90s and earlier in the 2000s. Back then I wasn't reading comics published by Marvel. Up to this point I only really knew about Spider-Man from reading a few issues and watching the 1967 cartoon and the 1994 animated series in the 90s, and then seeing Spider-Man in 2002 and Spider-Man 2 in 2004, and the X-Men from the first two movies that came out in 2000 and 2003 respectively. This was two years before Iron Man hit theatres, and six years before the MCU would explode with the release of The Avengers in 2012. Because of this, I didn't know that Spider-Girl was ever a thing as the most recent Spider-Man comic I had in my collection at the time was Spider-Man #87 from 1997 that had a cover date of January 1998. So I was almost ten years out of date with Marvel Comics, and the hobby shop didn't have these issues when I was going there. Even when Brad and I started going to the Comic Book Shoppe in 2009, this series was just wrapping up, or had wrapped up by that point and the first few trade paperback volumes were either out of print or just not available at that store.
Fast forward to 2013 or 2014, I was just starting to watch YouTube for more than just music videos and movies that were broken up into parts due to the time limit imposed on videos back then, and had discovered Geekvolution, which I've talked about on this blog before. I was going through some of their backlog of episodes of their comic book review show, The Comic Vault, and one of them I watched was one from 2012 where Captain Logan, by himself, reviewed these first six issues. So that's how I discovered Spider-Girl. Unfortunately the trade paperbacks were completely out of print, and nobody had the single issues so I wasn't able to get my hands on them. Then in 2019, Brad and I were at the Ottawa Comic and Card Show, which was a monthly event where people sold comic books and trading cards, with the occasional seller of novels and DVDs, but primarily comic books and trading cards. One of the tables actually had all thirty issues of this series plus the 0 issue which serves as a recap of the previous Spider-Girl series that started in the 90s. I wasn't going to pass up on this chance, so with Brad's help I bought the entire series and it's been in my longbox waiting for me to pull it out and read the entire series. I reviewed the first issue on my old blog, but never got around to reading the entire series. Until now.
In these first six issues we're introduced to May Parker, the daughter of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, whose nickname is Mayday. Which is great because it helps to differentiate her from her great aunt, May Parker. Mayday has quit being Spider-Girl, due to the Hobgoblin having tried to kill her in Spider-Girl #100, and MJ freaking out as a result, as any good mother would. But, her sense of "With great power, must also come great responsibility" forces her to become Spider-Girl once again to stop the Hobgoblin.
I love these first six issues. They set up the characters so well and it allows you get invested in them without ever having read the previous series. I also like that Peter has become a forensics specialist for the NYPD. I thought it was too easy to just use the Hobgoblin as the villain right off the bat, but given this continues where Spider-Girl #100 left off, it wouldn't make sense for the villain to be anyone else. Plus, I like the Hobgoblin. I've never actually read any comics that he's in, but I remember him from the 1994 animated series as he showed up quite a bit on that show from what I can remember.
I also like the balance between the superhero stuff and the normal high school stuff which comic books and by extension comic book TV shows, tend to have a hard time doing. Unlike with Robin's supporting characters in the early issues of Robin in the 90s, Mayday's friends and classmates all feel like fleshed out characters with histories. Even if the way they were written came off as the typical cliche teenage stereotypes that were being written on shows like The O.C. and One Tree Hill. It still felt more fleshed out than Robin's friends and classmates did in the 90s.
What drew me into the story though was Mayday's struggle to keep her promise to not be Spider-Girl anymore with her sense of responsibility as a person with super powers. Peter Parker had that struggle as Spider-Man all the time but it doesn't always work when you try to do it with other characters. It works here because Mayday is still a teenager and she's got a life at school with friends and activities. Which is an improvement from the way Peter was as a teenager when he first started out as Spider-Man while still in high school.
One of my absolute favourite scenes in these issues occurs in issue #2. Mayday is in detention for "skipping" class (she was fighting crime at the time), and MJ comes to get her, realizing that her friend, Courtney might be in trouble due to the Hobgoblin sending out his henchmen to confront any of the teenage volunteers who worked at the shelter, and gives her her Spider-Girl costume back, telling her she can be Spider-Girl again, as long as Peter doesn't find out. I both love this and hate this. I love it because it not only shows that MJ is going to support Mayday in her chosen profession as a superhero, but it also shows that she will do what it takes to get Mayday out in the field as Spider-Girl, including barging into detention and telling the assistant principal she's taking Mayday home. I felt like that was a very Beverly Goldberg thing to do. Lol.
The weakest issue for me in this first story arc was issue #3 with a villain called Bitter Frost. The issue felt like filler as it had almost nothing to do with the rest of the storyline. There were still some connections, but the overall plot of the issue had nothing to do with Hobgoblin's plot. It almost served as a practice issue for Mayday, since she hadn't been Spider-Girl for a few months and was out of practice.
Speaking of the Hobgoblin's plot, I thought it was kinda dumb in a way. So he's after this CD/DVD that contains all of Wilson Fisk's information that he used to run things as the Kingpin. Naturally that information would be very valuable to the Hobgoblin, who is trying to replace Black Tarantula as the current Kingpin, who also wants that information so that it doesn't fall into anyone else's hands, since Black Tarantula has no use for the information since he's already the new Kingpin.
The character I like the least is Mayday's boyfriend, Gene Thompson, the son of, you guessed it, Peter's friend/former high school bully, Flash Thompson, and Felicia Hardy, a.k.a. the Black Cat. I thought we'd gotten away from the stereotypical jock and mean girl characters in recent teen dramas and comedies, but then I have to remember that this was published in 2006, at the height of the 2000s high school stereotypical trope. So I guess it works under that stipulation, but it still sucks reading this in 2021 when that's not really something we see on TV and in movies anymore. I hope he grows as a character as the series goes on, but honestly, judging by how things go at the end of this arc, I think Mayday will kick him to the curb in the next arc. I hope she does anyway.
The ads in these issues are interesting being they're from 2006 and I wasn't reading new comics back then as I already mentioned. For example, in issue #1 there's one for wall decorations for Pixar's Cars, which had just come out earlier that year. there's also an ad for Marvel children's costumes, featuring Spider-Man. The mask actually reminds me of Miles Morales's original costume from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with the eye holes. What's weird is that the Cars wall decorations ad is in the book twice. The second time it's in the inside of the back cover of the issue. I don't normally see comics that print the same ad twice. At least not in a really long time. I think I remember comic from DC from the early 2000s that has that, but I don't see it very often. In the other issues, there are ads for Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 on DVD which were actually re-releases that came out ahead of the theatrical release of Spider-Man 3, which there's also an ad for on the back of issue #6. There are also ads for other Marvel movies and TV shows on DVD as well. Issue #5 has an ad for Civil War #7. Yeah, this series started around the time Civil War was coming out. Which is bizarre to think about considering how the Marvel Universe changed because of that storyline. Most of the time I have to remind myself that it was Civil War II that came out in 2016, not the original Civil War.
That's all I have to say about this story arc. It's fantastic and I love that I get to continue with this series for four more weeks after this (there are five sections I'm splitting this up in). I think Marvel Unlimited has this series available, but I can't tell you for sure, because I don't have Marvel Unlimited. If you find any issue of this series in back issue bins or quarter bins or at any comic book convention or geek sale, PICK THEM UP because that's the only way you're likely going to be able to get this series, since the original trade paperbacks are out of print and they haven't been reprinted in a Complete Collection trade paperback edition yet like the original Spider-Girl series is right now. I'm excited to read the next arc. Especially because I have no idea what happens in the rest of the series. Nobody talks about this series, so I'm actually spoiler free on this series, which is great.
That's it for me for now. I'll be back in a little while for my trailer roundup where I'll be taking a look at the trailers for Dune, Star Trek: Lower Decks season 2, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife and the teaser for Star Trek: Prodigy. So stay tuned!
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