It’s been almost two months since the release of Joe Kelly, Pepe Larraz, Marte Gracia, and Joe Caramagna’s Amazing Spider-Man #1, kicking off the honeymoon arc for this new era on the title. At the time, I gushed endlessly about how much I loved that first issue, how much they got right, and how much it left me excited for this new era of the title.
Here’s the thing. It’s easy to get jaded by this title. One moment it’s amazing, another you’re questioning why you’re reading it month to month. I mean, who knows, maybe the second arc is a dud. But, regardless of that, I know I’ll have this first arc, this beautiful, brilliant first arc, and that makes me happy.
The bottom line is this: even if the writing was bad, and let’s face it, it would’ve never been – maybe middling at best, but not bad – if you respect comics as a visual medium first and foremost, Pepe Larraz and Marte Gracia illustrating it alone gives it at minimum an A Grade. So it’s also great that underneath that spectacular art, we’ve got great writing to provide some form of structural support, and great lettering on top of the great art to really tie it up in a neat bow.
Even so, it’s really easy to write off top-tier artists doing a blockbuster book as the work equivalent of a “summer vacation”, where you can cruise by and relax until you get to a real serious project™️. But Pepe Larraz takes Amazing Spider-Man as seriously as he did House of X. He’s said previously that drawing this title was a dream gig for him, and you can feel that passion bursting from every line, every panel, every page. Dare I say it, if there’s a Mount Rushmore of Spider-Man artists, we need to put him up there already.
He approaches every page with such genius, making sure that whenever you’re looking at the book as it’s meant to be read (with two pages open, as opposed to the singular that a lot of digital comic readers do) that you’re rewarded for it, utilizing b-theory to give you a striking beginning of a sequence at the top left and end at the bottom right so you as a reader are even more interested to navigate through both pages in full. Even in the micro, sequences within pages using panel designs that you probably haven’t straight up seen before in a Spider-Man comic before, followed by wondering why you never did. Marte Gracia then proceeds to colour them astonishingly beautifully, bringing such a wide palette to sell the mood on every single panel. I mean, come on, Pepe and Marte manage to squeeze out such a wide range of emotion from the monochromatic flashbacks, and that alone is a testament to their power as a duo!
Joe Kelly might be providing the voice and context, but what you’re seeing is unequivocally Pepe Larraz and Marte Gracia’s Spider-Man.
That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to write home about the writing, of course. Joe Kelly has a really great voice for Peter, Spidey, and the world that surrounds them. Aunt May specifically is such a delight to read, and his newly introduced childhood friend Brian really works as a natural addition to the wide web of Peter Parker. Hobgoblin and Itsy Bitsy are also fantastic as villains for the opening salvo; the latter has great bits, and the former has such great presence on page, especially with those beautiful wings.
I quite dug the approach of intertwining flashbacks in moments that Peter is reliving due to a drug-induced hallucinatory anxiety attack. Not only does it introduce us to Brian, but it also adds a lot of texture to Peter’s upbringing by Ben and May before the bite. All the glimpses we usually get are rose-tinted, so it’s nice to see some roughness in the sand between Peter and them, and the way it concludes is very sweet.
At the end of it all, though, how I truly feel is that it’s nice to finally have a Spider-Man story that I can just pick up the trade of and give to people if they want to read Spidey without any explanatory baggage. It’s just pure Spider-Man goodness, and furthermore, my favourite arc on Amazing since New Ways to Die.
They really pulled it off.
