Rating the "Beyond" Spin-Offs of "The Amazing Spider-Man:" Good Reads or Wastes of Ink and Paper?

 

written by Jed MacKay, Geoffrey Thorne, Zeb Wells, and Cody Ziglar

 drawn by Elonora Carlini, Jan Bazaldua, Jim Towe, Luigi Zagaria, Bruno Oliveira, Fran Galan and Mark Bagley 

Having written about eighteen of the nineteen issues of the "Beyond" saga that has featured in "The Amazing Spider-Man" for the last five months, and just before I write my review of its conclusion in "The Amazing Spider-Man" #93, I would like to share my thoughts on three of the four "Beyond" tie-ins that I bought, which were numbered as #78.BEY, #88.BEY and #92.BEY. There was one issue featuring Doc Ock and Aunt May, but I missed that one. They all spin out of events from the main book, but it's not really necessary to read them to understand what's going on in the main title. There is one reunion I liked quite a bit, though. 

The first of these side stories features the Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, also known as the Daughters of the Dragon, who on the surface work for Beyond as Ben Reilly's support team, but who, when asked to perform an errand for Beyond to retrieve some missing tech, report to their true employer.   

The second issue I have narrates how one-time Prowler Hobie Brown came to lead a reunion of the original Slingers, a bunch of young heroes who assumed a quartet of abandoned superhero identities that Spider-Man assumed sometime in the 1990s when he was on the run.  This time, though, the Slingers work for Beyond.  

Finally, and most gratifyingly, the last issue features a Nextwave reunion of sorts as Monica recruits her former teammate Aaron Stack, aka Machine Man, to help her kick Beyond's ass.  Chaos ensues. 

During Nick Spencer's run, I found all of the "adjacent" issues that ran alongside the main story irritating as they really cluttered the narrative and well, made collecting more expensive than it needed to be.  These issues  show that Marvel has learned from that as they only came out every few months and contained what were pretty much "done-in-one" stories which were pretty well made and entertaining in their own right. They weren't anything particularly special, but I did get a genuine kick out the Nextwave quasi-reunion.

7/10