Amazing Spider-Man #678: "I Killed Tomorrow" Part 1

**** (four of five stars)

Favorite Quote:  "Full Acclimation Combat and De -- aw who cares? -- Slott."  -- Slott, in the editor's box, giving us the acronym for F.A.C.A...aw who cares?

Summary

Peter wakes up Monday morning and makes his way to Horizon Labs, where he's pulled "double-check duty," a Horizon Labs requirement whereby each member of the think tank occasionally double checks the work of another member "just to make sure they don't pull a 'Victor von Doom' and blow their face off."  Pete has pulled Grady, who created a time-traveling device, namely a doorway that creates a 24-hour window.  Grady demonstrates by walking through the doorway and returning with a newspaper from Tuesday.  Excited, Pete walks through the doorway...to discover a completely destroyed New York.  With Grady looking in dismay from the doorway, Pete finds a watch frozen at 3:10 in the rubble.  Returning to the present, Grady hypothesizes that, by going into the future, Pete wasn't present for a whole day, causing a disaster that he was meant to stop from happening.  Pete notes he's "friends" with Spider-Man so he must've done something or said something to help prevent the city's destruction.  As they look through the doorway, Grady notes that it's an observed event; since Pete knows about it, he does something different, thereby causing the event.  Pete realizes they've got Tuesday's newspaper and tells Grady he'll get Spider-Man so that Grady can walk him through doing everything he did in the paper.  ("We make sure he steps on all the right butterflies!")  In leaving Horizon, Pete notices that the watch he found in the rubble is Max's.  In the alley behind Horizon, Pete is changing into his costume when he's interrupted by Julia Carpenter (a.k.a. Madame Web) who tells him that he can't call in the Avengers or FF, because they have their own destinies and disturbing them could screw up the timeline.  She tells him he has to do it alone, but that she trusts him to do it.  Spidey launches into the sky and starts to communicate with Grady via his Bluetooth.  He proceeds to stop a bunch of purse snatchings, deliver a baby, stop a runaway limousine, and foil a super-villain (F.A.C.A.D.E.).  Grady observes that he still has "bad Tuesday" on the other side of the doorway, noting that they're cutting it really close.  (It's 3:02.)  Meanwhile, we see JJJ, Jr. and Silver Sable launch the Symkarian Pride Parade (the photo of them is on the front page of the newspaper Grady is using), and we see Flag Smasher and ULTIMATUM observing from the shadows.  Flag Smasher laments the amount of money wasted on an event to celebrate a national identity and asks his minions if "the device" is ready.  Spidey tells Grady that they only have a minute left as he lands on a giant clock on the side of a building and Grady comments that he still has "bad Tuesday" as the clock on which Spidey is sitting strikes 3:10.

The Review

Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows that I hate time-travel stories.  Hate.  Them.  I find that even the best author struggles to buck the clichés inherent in these stories:  the main character struggling to find the one thing -- often small -- that created the future disaster he's trying to prevent in the present (or past), the endless debates over the ethics of using future knowledge to affect past (or present) events, the personal stakes involved in saving loved ones from the future disaster.  Moreover, even the best author often stumbles over logical inconsistencies inherent in time travel:  they don't really have the time to take a position on whether the "butterfly effect" is an accurate theory on the effects of changing events.  However, I have to say, Dan Slott, I think, actually accomplishes the impossible:  I liked this story.  Slott still has to give us all the clichés mentioned above, but he manages to do it in a way that totally makes sense and that doesn't take itself too seriously. 

The Good

1) First, I loved Pete walking to work.    Both Slott and Ramos really get to shine here.  Slott takes time to give a glimpse into Peter's life, something that so few authors of Spider-Man ever do.  I know I've made this point countless times previously, but part of the reason I read Spider-Man is for Peter Parker.  A lot of other characters -- like Batman or Captain America -- really aren't that much more than their secret (or not-so-secret) identity.  But, Peter has always been more than that and, unlike any other Spidey author other than maybe just Stan Lee, Slott totally gets that.  He doesn't view it as a waste of space that could be "better" spent on action to give us a two-page spread of our man Pete walking to work.  It's a funny sequence, from Pete running into Bambi (Bambi!) to giving directions to a tourist ("If you walk into the East River, you've gone too far.")  Ramos takes the ball and runs with it; having had a pigeon crap on me in New York City, I particularly laughed at that moment, depicted on the side of the action.  Ramos is such a great match for Slott because he, too, takes the time and care to draw a full world around Peter, and this spread is a great example of that.  I know it's totally irrelevant to what happens later in the book, but it definitely merited praise in my book.

2) Again, I feel like time-travel stories often get themselves into trouble quickly, failing to explain all the various inconsistencies and dubious consequences that these stories inevitably generate.  Slott somehow totally sidesteps that here.  I totally bought Grady's explanation that Peter stepping through the doorway a day into the future inadvertently resulted in him disappearing for 24 hours.  (We learn later that it means that he wasn't present to prevent ULTIMATUM. from detonating its bomb.)  Moreover, I liked that Slott has them use the paper that Grady fetched in the future to plot out Spider-Man's day.  It's exactly this problem that I have with time-travel stories, that the characters inevitably wind up doing things that they wouldn't have done normally, making it questionable that they would be able to change just the one thing that created the future they were trying to prevent and not inadvertently create a different future.  (Geoff Johns actually had the guts to admit as much during "Flashpoint.")  Instead, Slott hands Pete a blueprint for his day so he can avoid exactly this problem.  Genius.  Seriously, genius.  I can't believe, in all the time-travel stories I've ever read, no one has ever thought to use this sort of device.

3) I loved the scene where Julia Carpenter interrupts Peter changing into Spider-Man.  Between the hilarious face he has Peter make to Peter hunching over his street clothes like a teenager caught before he can moon the football game, Ramos just really sells this scene.

4) I thought Slott did a great job of keeping the issue light by having Pete use Grady as "tech support."  Normally, we'd see Peter memorizing everything he's supposed to do and then frantically trying to make these events happen.  By using Grady, instead, as the guide to Spider-Man's day, Slott opens the way some great banter, making sure this story doesn't become one of those stories.

5) This issue also has a whole bunch of small, nice touches.  I thought Slott's use of F.A.C.A.D.E. was hilarious, and Ramos was really onto something with all the time pieces that appeared through Spidey's day.

6) Knowing Slott's tendency to turn small moments into larger plots later, I wonder if we're going to see Bambi again...