Analysis - Here Comes the Spider-Man

So I’m likely seeing The Amazing Spider-Man this week and I’m actually really pumped for it, much more than I was a few months ago when that really “meh,” vaguely Twilight-ish first trailer hit the Net. By all rights, I should be irked by the film’s very existence—the final part in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy came out only five years ago—but I can’t find it in me to generate even a modicum of outrage. And that’s because, as unpopular an opinion as it might be, I didn’t really dig Raimi’s trilogy. Specifically, I don’t think the movies did the character and his universe justice, even the critically-lauded Spider-Man 2.

But glancing over the smorgasbord—some might say plethora—of trailers and clips released over the last couple months, I’m seeing glimpses of a movie that is as true to the character of Spider-Man as Batman Begins was to its eponymous hero.

Review - Walt Simonson: Writer, Penciller, Auteur

The other day I purchased perhaps the heaviest tome that will ever sit upon my bookshelf: a Marvel Comics omnibus containing the entirety of Walter Simonson’s run on The Mighty Thor. A hardcover with over a thousand glossy pages, the compendium collects Simonson’s nearly four year run writing the Mighty Avenger, the bulk of which was also drawn by him (Sal Buscema pencilled 18 of the 45 collected issues).

With the exception of a few high profile scribes, Grant Morrison and Brian Michael Bendis chief among them, it’s rare nowadays to see a single writer dictate the course of a character and the surrounding universe for so long. And after reading most of the omnibus—I still have yet to read the final two fifths or so—I want to see more of these auteur efforts, because Simonson’s run contains some of the best superhero comics I have ever read.