Miles Morales has become a household name at Marvel, thanks to the vastly successful Into the Spider-Verse, which nabbed the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday.
With no word as to when we can expect the sequel, fans must look to the comics if they want more adventures starring the Web Warriors, such as the newly-released Spider-Geddon collection – but does it climb anywhere near the heights of 2018’s best-animated movie?
Spider-Geddon is written by Christos Gage, co-writer of the critically-acclaimed Marvel’s Spider-Man for PS4. Gage begins the story with a prologue featuring the very same Peter Parker you play as in the game, where he is recruited to fight against a group of spider-eating vampires called the Inheritors.
These villains first appeared in the original Spider-Verse comic from 2014, which differs substantially from its animated adaptation. This makes the transition from the movie to this book less than smooth, as Gage makes numerous references to their initial outing and various stories that have been published since.
The prologue is clearly intended to make the book accessible to fans of the PS4 game, but it wastes the opportunity to get them suitably up to speed by turning it into a drawn-out fight scene against an inconsequential baddie that you’ll either want to skim or skip entirely. Still, Clayton Crain’s art is nice and successfully replicates the feel of the game.
Despite featuring villains the reader might not be familiar with, the rest of the story is relatively straight-forward as it simply revolves around several different versions of Spider-Man trying to defeat them. Gage’s main strength lies in giving nearly all of these heroes a distinct voice and a moment to shine, which is impressive seeing as it stars far more than the six we saw in the film – there’s also plenty of humorous exchanges throughout.
Unfortunately, most of Gage’s dialogue is rather clunky and far too much time is spent on the heroes bickering with each other. Lines like “My friends inspire me. To do things like combine the Enigma Force power…and my Venom Strike!” make it a challenge to read more than one chapter at a time, which is a shame as the overall plot is pretty fun and will inevitably reverberate across future Spidey books.
A number of different artists bring the main five chapters to life, including Jorge Molina and Carlo Barberi. Their adherence to Marvel’s house style makes it hard to discern where one illustrator is substituted by another, preventing any jarring differences from page to page.
Included in the back of the book is the ‘Vault of Spiders’, a collection of short stories from guest writers and artists. Some of these are arguably better than the main story, especially the manga-style Final Galaxy Battle and a retelling of Spider-Man’s origin story inspired by Tarzan – one of them even features Aunt May as the ‘Spider-Ma’am’ of her universe.
While Spider-Geddon is a nice package that fans of Into the Spider-Verse will appreciate, anyone expecting it to be near the film’s level of quality will be extremely underwhelmed. Less chat and a tighter plot might have made it a better jumping-on point for new readers, but for now, they’re best-off reading the original Spider-Verse if they want more multiversal web-slinging action.
By Jamie Morris