There's a lot to like about Reign: I'm a big fan of Andrews' art, and I'm consistently staggered by his impressive ability to distinguish each new project with a markedly different style, matching his story ideas perfectly with the darkness of his images here and capturing the emotional content of the story well through his expressive characters. I'm also still enjoying his application of Miller's Dark Knight Returns template to the lighter character of Spider-Man, as it's quite an unusual approach for the character, and the elements which are "inspired" by Miller's highly influential work are becoming less jarring and distracting with each new issue. However, it's quite late in the day for Reign to have only just started to assert its own identity, and there's a real danger that the book has left itself too little time to make good on the promise of the concept. That said, I can't deny feeling a small thrill from Spidey pulling on his old red-and-blues at the end of this issue, and Read Full Review

I want to give it a higher score but admittedly some things just don’t make sense here. The reveal of how MJ dies? Oof. This makes it a lot more understandable as to why Peter is so broken. My issue is, Peter is always the one to rise up from the pain, the punishment. Here, he’s given in. His body almost has a kind of its own but his heart isn’t in it. Doc Oc. Oh Doc Oc. I feel like they just wanted to include him. He’s use as a driver to get us to the MJ reveal, but he really didn’t do anything. He was just a weirdo. I’m assuming a like from this is where they got the Superior Spider-Man idea. Lastly, I get why Peter wants to give up but his approach was, interesting.