Certainly the best thing about Wells's finale is the same thing as what was best about his run: the small character moments, like Tombstone's chat with Peter outside the courthouse that emphasizes the weaknesses of being a good man in a bad world. But the worst thing is what was worst about his run: the general lack of direction. The scenes with May are touching and well-wrought and could be a great capstone to a run that focused heavily on Aunt May — except that this isn't that run, it's been over a year since she's shown up in the pages of this book at all and she was hardly a regular before that.
Ultimately, Wells & JRJR simply tried to do more than they could handle with this series, and Nick Lowe failed to exercise the editorial wisdom to force them to kill a few darlings and focus their attention on the best stuff — with the result being a tangle of characters, plots and subplots that appear and disappear at random, rarely getting any meaningful resolution. As everyone else has already mentioned, most of the plots end in no identifiable change to the characters or their place in the world, with the only real movement forward in this issue is for Aunt May, a character who's barely been in the book. [EDIT: Also I misunderstood the ending and it doesn't even really move May forward, so I'm not sure why we're doing this story for a finale at all now.]
I won't damn this run outright. I think hate-reading comics is a waste of your one wild and precious life, and that reading a favorite character out of addiction alone is no better, so if I thought this run was irredeemable I'd have walked away long ago. I read it to the end because it kept drawing me back in every time I gave up on it, it was full of promise in its best moments: the Judgment Day and Blood Hunt issues or the best parts of the Tombstone plot, for instance. I absolutely believe there was a great run in there somewhere, if only they could have focused on it.
(As regards the prelude to 8 Deaths, obviously I can't judge a run on a three-page teaser but my first impression is that I'm going to have the opposite problem with the art that I had with this run: while JRJR's unreliable pencils were beautifully propped up by Menyz's gorgeous color work, it looks like next Mark Buckingham's wonderful draftsmanship will be muddied by murky-yet-overlit coloring that looks like it rose from the grave of the early oughts.) more
By: Zeb Wells, Ed McGuinness
Released: Oct 30, 2024
SPECIAL OVERSIZED FINALE!
Zeb Wells says goodbye to the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in style with his collaborators JOHN ROMITA JR., ED McGUINNESS and some other special surprise guests. When one era ends though, another begins as THE EIGHT DEATHS OF SPIDER-MAN gets a special prelude by JOE KELLY!
Rated T