**** (four of five stars)
Favorite Quote: "Working for Alchemax was doing the right thing...but I was important to all the wrong people. Being Spider-Man is the wrong thing...law-wise, health-wise...but he's important to all the right people." -- Miguel, insightfully summing up his dilemma
Summary
Dana, Gabriel, and Miguel are gathered around the boys' mother's bedside. Their mother, Conchata, weakly asks Gabriel if he's there, telling him it's "so hard to see." Gabriel confirms that he's there, with Dana and Miguel as well. She complains that she can't see Miguel (who's standing by the window) and Gabriel calls Miguel to her bedside just before she pretends to have a seizure and die. Miguel tells her to knock off the histrionics, because she's upsetting Dana. When he asserts that she's not dead, she remarks that she could be. Miguel is frustrated that she puts them through this ordeal every few months and she storms from the room, saying it's exactly the type of attitude she'd expect from him. Gabriel tells Miguel to go talk to her and he refuses, saying she always hated him because he reminded her of their father, George. (He confesses that he hates himself because he reminds himself of their father.) Dana and Gabriel insist and Miguel goes to find her. Dana rubs Gabriel's back, something she used to do, according to Gabriel, back "when life was wonderful." Dana asks if life was ever wonderful for his mother and Gabriel recalls the last time that he remembered seeing her happy. In a flashback, a young Gabriel is shown playing with Conchata while a young Miguel is on the computer. Conchata calls to Miguel to come play with them and, when he demurs, she tells Gabriel that Miguel is forgetting to have fun in his rush to be an adult. He promises to join them, but, before he can, George returns home, announcing that Miguel has scored in the top one percentile on his aptitude tests. Doing so qualifies him for special training at Alchemax's top facility, something that Conchata opposes, since he'll have to leave home. Prompted by George, Miguel says he wants to go and Conchata rejects that comment, saying Miguel is only saying so because he's more afraid of George than her. She refuses to allow him to go and Gabriel recounts Miguel holding him as their father beat Conchata. Gabriel then recalls Miguel again holding him when Gabriel climbed into bed with him later that night. He observes that Miguel used to care about him, about people, back then and Dana insists that he still does, despite the fact that he tries to hide it. She tells Gabriel about a time she and Miguel, on a date a year before George died, ran into him repairing a Public Eye camera. (George exposits that he helped invent them and couldn't fathom why people now resented them.) George asks if Dana is one of Miguel's airheads, who he can insult without her realizing. Miguel tells his father he's not 15 years old any more and, when goaded by George, screams at him, wondering if he's going to drive his new wife crazy like he did Conchata. When Dana tells George that Miguel didn't mean it, he disagrees, telling her that he meant every word and offers to allow Miguel to take a swing at him. Miguel walks away, responding to his father's insistence that he'll dance at their wedding with the comment, "I'll dance at your funeral." In the present, Dana tells Gabriel that she, in fact, saw Miguel cry at George's funeral when he thought no one was looking, insisting that Miguel cares about people.
Elsewhere, Tyler Stone is getting a holographic tour of a damaged part of Alchemax's Atlantis restoration project, learning that a group of "mutate freaks," who insist that its "New Atlantis" be the only underwater power, was responsible. He calls in his assistant, Winston, who arrives with an urn containing the ashes of Stone's son. Stone takes the urn, commenting to it that he doesn't know who killed him but that he doesn't care. He then flushes the ashes down the toilet. After Winston leaves, Tyler bows his head in the dark. At the home, Miguel is furious when he catches his mother smoking. She smacks him when he insists that he's sorry for not visiting, calling him a liar, and then smacks him again when he says that he isn't sorry, calling him fresh. When Conchata insists that she doesn't want anything from him, Miguel tells her that he's tired of her games. She tells him that they don't affect him, because he's completely self-centered. Miguel tries to defend himself, asking if she's going to yet again praise Gabriel for being a loving son, and Conchata says that she's not, since Miguel always makes fun of Gabriel when she does. She then opens a closet to show Miguel a series of clippings of Spider-Man that she's kept, telling him that Spider-Man is a "real man" who's "not afraid to spit in the corporate eye." She tells Miguel that Spider-Man sees the big picture and is trying to redraw it. Miguel counters that Spider-Man might not be like that, that he could just be a guy who's got caught in something and who might just want to be who he used to be. Conchata flies into a rage, telling Miguel not to criticize Spider-Man, since he's everything Miguel isn't. Enraged, Miguel tells her that he's Spider-Man. The revelation makes her laugh hysterically and she doesn't look at him as he tries to show her his talons. Recovering herself, she tells him that she thinks that he's jealous of Spider-Man. She tells him that he's still a lousy son, but that he's at least trying harder and thanks him for caring what she thinks.
Later, walking in the rain, Miguel exposits how all he ever wanted to be was important. He notes that working for Alchemax is what he should've done, but that it made him important to the wrong people, whereas serving as Spider-Man is what he shouldn't do, but that it makes him important to all the right people. He observes that he's been trying to ignore the right people for a long time, but that once he put on the Spider-Man costume he started thinking and acting differently. It was ""Miguel-in-the-costume" who saved the Specialist and almost got killed, whereas Spider-Man let the Vulture fall to his death. He observes that he doesn't feel sorry at all for allowing the Vulture to fall, realizing that Spider-Man doesn't disappear when he takes off the mask. He notes that Gabriel, Kasey, and Conchata see the world for what it is, but, despite all his smarts, he is only now seeing it. Later, when the Public Eye tries to break up a rally, with excessive force, being held by Thorites, Spider-Man intervenes. After dispatching the officers, he appears in front of a Public Eye camera, telling the corporations watching that "Spider-Man isn't kidding around anymore." He then destroys the camera. Later, Miguel visits his father's grave, telling him that he didn't hit him that day that they met on the street, because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to keep from killing him. He tells George that he wanted him to become a decrepit old man so he could feel what it felt like to be weak. He laments that George died before that happened, noting that Dana saw him cry at the funeral. He ponders what Dana made of it, but notes that the world is what we make of it. He announces that, until he finds a cure for his condition, he's going to try to make it into a vision that he can stand to observe.
The Review
David does a great job exploring Miguel's motivations in this issue, bringing together the various plots and sub-plots that he's been building over the last nine issues to lead Miguel to an epiphany. It's the first time that we've seen Miguel actually intellectually ponder his role as Spider-Man and view it as an agent of change. Previously, he's fought mostly on instinct. He more or less had no choice but to try to fend off Venture, the Vulture, and Mutagen and he also more or less instinctively responded to Kasey's need for help against the Specialist. Here, Miguel actually considers what being Spider-Man means to him (and everyone else) and he realizes that it brings him the chance to stop helping the "wrong people" and start helping the "right people." As a fellow overachiever, I actually identified with a lot of the challenges that we see Miguel confront here. He realizes that he's always been driven by his need to be important, but he now starts to consider to whom he should be important. But, David also gives us a darker motivation than just an overachievers' inherent need to succeed. David makes it pretty clear that Miguel's drive comes as a direct response to his difficult childhood and troubled parents. Moreover, David uses these glimpses into Miguel's past to expand on the idea that he planted in issue #2, implying that Miguel's over-confidence was an act meant to separate him emotionally from people. (If we remember, it's this over-confidence that motivates Delgato to get revenge against him, setting up him becoming Spider-Man in the first place.) Moreover, David delves into Miguel's decision to let the Vulture fall in issue #8, using it to show how Spider-Man is starting to loom larger in his personal narrative since Miguel doesn't regret what Spider-Man did. These two examples of David taking a lingering question and using it to flesh out Miguel's character shows how careful David has been in constructing the various plot lines of the last nine issues. He uses them here to have Miguel question his motivations and realize that Spider-Man offers him the chance to be the man that he wants to be. It's this realization that will definitely drive the action for the rest of this series and it marks the first time that Miguel really commits to being Spider-Man. This issue is a real tour de force of character work, the type that David does better than anyone else.
The Good
1) Conchata is a hoot. I mean, I know she's also compellingly sad, having lost her grip on reality due to the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her husband. But, "dying" in full-on crucifix position? Funny stuff. David makes her into a true character, one that I hope that we get to see again soon.
2) OK, we don't often talk about letterers. Rick Parker is one of the best, obviously, and I've come close to mentioning his work several times in these reviews. But, he's really key to this issue, because he gives Conchata a font all her own that shows when she's in her own sort of reality. It's essential to conveying the way that she's engaging with the boys and the world around her and I'm not sure if that nuance would've gotten across as well without Parker's work. So, a kudos to the letterer!
3) It was interesting here that David gives us a brief glimpse behind Tyler Stone's mask, showing him suffering quietly over his son's death. Stone so far has been nothing more than a facile caricature of a corporate shark, so it's interesting to see David open up the possibility that he may just be more than that.
The Unsure
I didn't want to title this part "Bad," exactly, so I'm making it "Unsure," because I'm not entirely sure about something Miguel said during his soliloquy. He talks about the fact that the views he finds himself more or less instinctually having as Spider-Man are more in line with the views of people whose opinions matter to him. He talks about Gabriel, Kasey, and Conchata seeing the world for what it is, namely comprehending the excessive control that contemporary corporations exert over 2099 society, and he laments the fact that his drive to succeed has long blinded him to the problem. I get all that. David makes it clear that being Spider-Man has helped Miguel realize that companies like Alchemax are the enemy and that he should be working to help people like Kasey fight them. In theory, it's supposed to be a humanizing moment, allowing Miguel to stop being the corporate patsy that he's always been and become the superhero he's longing to be. What seems odd to me, however, is that he directly connects Spider-Man letting the Vulture fall to being more in line with the person he wants to be and Miguel saving the Specialist with the person he doesn't want to be. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't the hero show mercy to an enemy and the villain let an enemy fall? I think the point that David is trying to make is that the Hobbesian world of 2099 leaves someone like Miguel no choice but to embrace violence to change it. But, the problem as a reader is that this position essentially runs counter to the Marvel Universe's entire ethical structure, where murder equals bad. It's why Miguel, at the end of the day, still feels like an anti-hero to me, because I'm applying our current value structures to his actions. The editor, in his column last month on the letters page, talked about the challenge of the 2099 books being to show how society, and not just technology, is different and I think that's what David is doing here, showing that Miguel can't be a superhero unless he's willing to serve as a sort of avenging angel. But, it still made me raise an eyebrow, equating ruthlessness with virtue and mercy with patsy. On the plus side, this soliloquy does bring Miguel to an understanding of his role as Spider-Man that I thought we were going to eventually see. He's no longer merely trying to distract Alchemax so that he can cure himself. We're definitely moving past the original story with this issue and I'm excited to see where we go and how Miguel's view of his role (and violence) evolves.
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