Are We Really Supposed to Care? A Review of The "Amazing" Spider-Man #40-41

 written by Zeb Wells

penciled by John Romita Jr.

inked by Scott Hanna

colored by Marcio Menyz

So the much-hyped "Gang War" crossover storyline continues in the pages of what is still (unfortunately) the flagship book featuring Marvel's favorite wall-crawler. Things heat up as Richard Fisk, aka the Rose, makes his move to take down Janice Lincoln, aka the Beetle, while Janice's dad Lonnie, aka Tombstone, who has made a surprising recovery from his life-threatening injuries, makes moves of his own to protect his territory from incursions from rival gangs, with no less than Spider-Man and She-Hulk to back him up. The superheroes, of course, are helping Tombstone because he's basically the least of several evils, especially when the Rose's dad Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin himself, approaches Tombstone with a threat he can't afford to ignore.

Marvel has promised a major status quo shift with the end of this crossover, quite stupidly promising to make Spider-Man's life even more miserable, as if that's some kind of come-on for readers, many of whom, quite frankly, have gotten sick and tired of the grossly contrived train of misery that Peter has been riding for the last couple of years under this "creative" team's watch.

I get that Marvel wants to build up to Spider-Man's 1000th issue by setting up something auspicious, which would go some way towards explaining the constant need to kick his legs out from under him, but if I'm honest it's gotten truly monotonous at this point, and the ultimate cruelty of imposing "Paul" on readers just when they were so close to seeing Peter and MJ get back together again has quite frankly cast a pall over Zeb Wells' entire run.

Nor does "Gang War" read particularly well on its own merit because like the more truly obnoxious crossover events it requires readers to check out tie-in titles to have a truly coherent idea of what's going on, and for the record, I was never a fan of that approach. Even Civil War, for all its flaws, had the sense to keep all of the important stuff in the main miniseries.

Much as I'd love to praise John Romita Jr.'s work here, which, quite frankly, is actually pretty good, I really can't shake the feeling that it's wasted on Wells and his delusions of grandeur.  Like I said previously, gang wars in this title actually had more weight when they had Kingpin fighting Mexican werewolves.

5/10