Moons Over My Obsession

Kris picked up the last two issues of the Spider Island arc (ie. the final issue of the story and the epilogue) of Amazing Sipder-man and we really enjoyed it. I probably haven’t read a Spider-Man comic since the 90s AND we jumped into a multi-book event at the very last point, but it was still 100% approachable and enjoyable. Even without having read everything leading up to the conclusion, from the very beginning of the issue you know what is going on and can get directly into the action. I haven’t read anything that Dan Slott has written previously, but he is a great storyteller.

The end of Spider Island feels like Marvel is returning Spider-Man to its roots and creating a jumping on point for new readers. The same could also be said for what Marvel is doing with the X-Men by restarting the numbering for Uncanny X-Men and starting the new Wolverine and the X-Men book. In both cases, these starting points are steeped in the rich continuity that exists from years of comics. On the other hand, DC felt they had to get away from that continuity to create a new jumping on point with The New 52. It’s interesting to look at the two approaches and to see which of the two will work in the long run. As Kris has said from the moment The New 52 was announced, it’s a great jumping on point for new readers but it’s also a great jumping off point for old readers. We’ve definitely found the latter to be true as we’ve dropped a bunch of DC books. Kris gave the 52 books two full months, but has now dropped over 30 of them. I haven’t reduced that drastically (granted, I wasn’t pulling that many to begin with), but I can count the DC books I really care about on one hand. We’re not saying that DC’s reboot was wrong, but it definitely hasn’t taken us by storm as much as we hoped it would.