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Review: Scarlet Spider #11
Talking about burying the lead. Minimum Carnage was supposed to be a team-up between Scarlet Spider and Venom, as they join forces to take down the super-villain serial killer Carnage. But the two characters haven’t even been in the same room together since the start of the crossover. Instead, this is one big space alien story that just happens to involve Scarlet Spider and Venom on the side. It’s as if writers Christopher Yost and Cullen Bunn were huge fans of the Micronauts back in the day, and Marvel agreed to let them write the ultimate Microverse story, but only if they could slap some existing characters into the tale. Then someone came up with the pun ‘Minimum Carnage’, and they were off!
Scarlet Spider #11
This story is turning out to be a weird, convoluted political tale about characters we’ve either never heard of before or haven’t heard from in decades. No thank you.
Comic rating: 3/5: Alright.
I can’t even be sure if this story has anything to do with the Microverse of the past. I’m only vaguely familiar with the Micronauts, but who is the Redeemer? What is the Enigma Force? Or Marquis Radu? I imagine these are all characters and concepts thought up by Yost and Bunn to tell their story. But none of it has anything to do with Scarlet Spider or Venom, and very little to do with Carnage. They might as well have used any combination of heroes and villains in this story. Nothing that has happened so far, at least as far as I can see, has any direct impact or importance to either hero, especially Scarlet Spider. He is just along for the ride, and doesn’t even particularly want to be there.
The decision to set this tale in the Microverse was the completely wrong decision. Nobody cares about the Microverse anymore. Nobody is interested in that kind of story. A comic where Scarlet Spider and Venom team up to fight Carnage is a good idea for a comic. But Yost and Bunn have instead buried that cool seed of an idea into tainted soil, and as a result, a crummy story has grown. And that’s my metaphor of the month!
Join me after the jump for a full synopsis and more review.
Review: Scarlet Spider #10
It’s crossover time in Scarlet Spider, where our favorite wall crawler teams up with Venom to take on Carnage…and the Micronauts, for some insane reason. I’m not going to review the entire crossover, just the issues of Scarlet Spider that are involved. But I’ll provide recaps to make sure everyone is up to speed. This review will focus entirely on Scarlet Spider #10, the second part of the crossover. It’s a pretty good story, hampered only by the general silliness of the plot itself. It’s just my own personal taste, but I don’t particularly enjoy some of comics more fantastical elements. Especially when writers can’t modernize those elements and make them work with modern day comic reading sensibilities.
Scarlet Spider #10
This is basically my way of saying that I just don’t think it works when street-level or military characters are suddenly thrust into a magical micro land full of wild, random characters. But such is Minimum Carnage.
Comic Rating: 3/5: Alright.
There’s nothing particularly special about this issue or this crossover so far. I like the interactions between Scarlet Spider and Venom, and there’s a…minor sense of menace when it comes to Carnage. I’ve always liked Carnage. I wasn’t reading comics yet when his most famous story, Maximum Carnage,came out in the 90s, but I’ve read an issue or two here or there. And there was this palpable terror in the comic. Carnage is a serial killer given extreme super powers, and Maximum Carnage was all about him cutting free and just killing at random in the streets of New York City. People were terrified, the hospitals were overflowing with the injured and the superheroes were pushed to their limit. The Joker always has some kind of game or plan in the works when he kills people. But Carnage just killed indiscriminately, and few have the power to stop him.
Time, of course, has dulled Carnage’s menace. But there are hints and shadows of it in this series so far, not to mention the fact that Carnage has been treated like a pretty important character in recent years. Minimum Carnage comes on the heels of two separate Carnage mini series, one in which he took over an entire town and captured the Avengers. So Carnage has been on a pretty good streak recently, but this new series kind of goes off the rails…
Still, it’s readable. And it’s nice to see Kaine interacting with some other people from the Marvel Universe.
Join me after the jump for a full synopsis and more review!
Henchman-4-Hire 