Umm... so I have a LOT of thoughts about this comic. Maybe the biggest one is... I don't hate it? I think it's kinda okay-ish, not-bad-not-good-but-more-good-than-bad?

I KNOW I KNOW. Hear me out, put the pitchforks down.

Let's start with the good. I said, put the pitchforks down.

I kinda liked the art. Especially whenever Rabin was on scene, his ritual scenes were great. Everything looked kinda amazing. Faces tho, JRJR I love you and always will, but... yeah. Not as amazing to say kindly.

And the writing? Well it's mostly good. I re-read the previous issues of this arc and they felt better? A bit? And I was invested on this comic too. I cared what happened and, there were many good scenes. As a singular comic, I liked it.

And then came the death scenes. I must be honest, the idea works, how it goes down and all. I think had it not been spoiled, it would've kinda worked...

...had it not been Ms Marvel who dies. I'm not going to pretend that I'm a huge Kamala fan or anything, but this was not the place for it. Not the ASM book. Kamala has been barely a presence here, so her being gone just feels wrong. I remember when I first heard about it and I thought "this must be a troll or something, this is so stupid." I actually laughed becayse I was so sure it was a joke. But it wasn't. So no, this doesn't feel right, nor was it done well.

So if you are a massive Kamala fan, or just like her in general, and feels this to be a massive injustice to her, I get you, I won't disagree with you. It's not the worse thing ever for me, but I can recognize how badly it was done.

Then the other big thing. Like I said, I still kinda enjoyed this comic. As a singular comic, it's mostly good. As a finale to this "Death Language" -arc, it's still mostly good. As a finale to the first year of ASM, it's terrible. It's bad.

I hope you are still hearing me, because I feel now some of you might agree with me more.

During the past year, ASM has been plagued by this mystery box and the run has suffered for it. Heavily. There has been good issues (opening arc, Hobgoblin arc) and atrocius ones (#900, Dark Web). It has been hard to sometimes enjoy this run and while this finally gives us some answers, it doesn't make it better in hindsight.

Paul finally gets some character. Which is nice. I never hated him (although I love the memes), but this could've been brought up so much earlier to make us care about Paul. Especially since we have barely seen him. The flashbacks do work, but I would've wished to see them previously.

Same with the kids. A lot people enjoyed seeing them gone, and while I'm happy I was right about them being related to Wayeb'/Rabin, I just wish we would've seen them more. That I would care about them being gone more.

And Rabin as a villain was just poorly done. There was nothing interesting about him, and this family relation would've improved a lot, had it been brought up previously. His previous appearance in #555-557 worked much better for me (although that might be the nostalgia speaking, those were my ASM first comics I got when my mother started ASM subscription. Not my first ASM issues, but the first storyline I got to read fully).

To a lot of people, this arc is too little, too late. And I kinda agree. It doesn't justify the poor writing and messy pacing this run has had, nor did we need to wait this for a year. It doesn't feel like it's worth it. And this is coming from someone who has liked (parts of) this run and this storyline too.

Had the run started with this arc and then concluded with #900 with someone else dying, I feel like this would've worked a lot better. But, now as it is, this doesn't make this run retroactively better. It just makes me dislike editorial more.

So in conclusion/TLDR: not to the worst comic. Not the worst storyline (like seriously, Dark Web exists and it was WAY worse than this). Better than you might think it is. Ms Marvels' death still doesn't work, nor does storyline this save this run.

However, I won't give up on this run. I feel like we can FINALLY move forward and to some interesting storylines. And just move past... whatever this is. I still somewhat-ish trust Wells, but if you stop this run because of this storyline and how it was handled (Ms Marvel's death especially), I don't blame ya.

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Comicsfan1994 - May 31, 2023

It’s nice for logic to break through once in a while. When people go way to far in criticizing something like we have seen with this arc it tells me they have an agenda and are not actually giving the story a fair shot.

daspidaboy - May 31, 2023

I personally gave up on spiderman because he has gotten either good writers that had editorial messed up or bad writers or good writers that stayed way past their limit. It's good u didn't hate this issue but for me spiderman gets treated like trash, loses a lot, and his stories aren't good. Probably gonna drop this ans read miles morales and batman more

DeathStroke7505 - May 31, 2023

@dasipidaboy I think that's the reason they're shitting on Peter so hard, they want to push Miles as the "real" spider-man , see also Miles getting new powers all the time.

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