SPIDER-MAN: LEGEND OF THE SPIDER-CLAN #1

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Thursday, October 10, 2002

There are few things that have come out of the Marvel line of comics that are more useless than the Marvel Mangaverse idea. (MARVILLE still takes the prize for "most useless comic concept ever spawned," naturally.) Don't get me wrong: I'm all for doing new and exciting takes on Marvel characters - but hasn't it already been done, and done better, in the ULTIMATES line? Do we really need some poor reinterpretation of a character like Spider-Man based in an even poorer interpretation of what "manga" are supposed to be?

Kaare Andrews seems to think so, judging from LEGEND OF THE SPIDER-CLAN, a new miniseries set in that most derivative of universes. The story introduces Felicia Hardy, a new student at Peter Parker's high school who's far older than she seems and who's not there to study trigonometry. She's out to steal an amulet from the ruins of the Alonso Aquarium, an amulet which will release an unnamed evil into the world. Or something like that. But before she's killed by the ridiculously dressed Devil Hunter, she manages to pass on the amulet to Peter, along with its dark and sinister powers. Yawn.

Seriously, if you have difficulty piecing together what passes for a plot in this book, you're not alone. The premises are bad enough: Peter has been trained since childhood as a ninja? Uncle Ben is a sensei killed by a rival clan led by Venom? Doctor Octopus as a schoolteacher? A school class going off to help rebuild an aquarium destroyed by the Hulk? But when the story is told with a minimum of attention paid to what we really need to know to understand the plot and a maximum of attention paid to what's supposed to pass as "humor" (which invariably comes off as simply dumb), the book moves from bad to worse.

Most of the problem comes from Andrews and Young's poor understanding of what makes a manga in the first place. Andrews's script takes some of the trappings of traditional manga but none of the style - a comic in Japan, for instance, would never be quite as talky as this. Additionally, Young's artwork makes the book seem more like a kid's comic - there's the sort of exaggeration we might expect to see in a traditional manga, all right, but it's a different sort of exaggeration. It doesn't have the sense of quick, rapid movement that the artwork in manga has, nor does it make use of any of the visual conventions we'd expect from the genre. Throwing a few ninja and demons into a script or into the artwork is not enough to make a comic a "manga," and anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be writing or drawing a book that claims to be one. If you're a manga fan, avoid this at all costs. If you're an anime fan, this book might work for you - visually it looks much more like it should have been animated (as a kid's series) rather than touted as a manga. But if you're a Spider-Man fan, forget it. If you want a good reinterpretation of Spidey, avoid this drivel and go read ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN instead. It's less likely to turn your brain into sushi rice, and you might just enjoy it more.

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