Green Mamba
Member
I've always been a big Spider-man fan, ever since I was a kid in the nineties collecting Venom pogs (I think I still have those somewhere), but as I got older, I read less and less comic books. The last one I followed issue to issue was Ultimate Spider-man (all the way from the beginning) and dropped it after Jeph Loeb shat on the Ultimate universe with Ultimatum. Never really got back into it, and have kind of ignored pretty much everything Spider-man related.
Including this show! Which was wrong on my part. I had heard good things about it, but never got around to it, and it just slipped out of my mind. But I finally watched it after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 kickstarted my Spider-love back into existence by sucking so much and realizing what a wasted potential it was.
And I have to say, I was not expecting it to be as good as it was. It was awesome--probably up there as one of the definitive Spider-Man works as far as I'm concerned.
It most closely resembles the early Ditko and Romita era comics, which I think are still some of the best Spider-man stories out there and hold up surprisingly well for how old they are. The Spectacular Spider-Man does a stand-up job of adapting the original themes and story and character arcs while updating them to modern sensibilities and including a lot of the best later era classics in a marvelously seamless fashion. Venom in particular is well handled and fits right in with such disparate stories like the Colonel Jupiter episode that you would think he's a classic Stan Lee character himself.
But even following the classic Spider-man arcs so closely it still manages to twist them in such a way they still end up keeping an old Spider-fan's attention. Like, they actually managed to pull off the mystery of the Green Goblin's identity in a way that had me second guessing myself.
The art doesn't look like much in stills but its simplistic nature helps it really sell the fight scenes, which are usually very easy to read and just plain fun (though the conspicuous CGI for the more complex vehicles was a turn off, kind of ruined the final battle in the last episode).
Though if there's one main criticism I have of the show is that sometimes the fight scenes themselves can go on for too long, occasionally taking up too much of the show's focus when at a crucial moment in Peter's social life which is sometimes offered too little focus and as such can feel to move at a much slower pace. The back and forth with Peter and Gwen in the second season is a little maddening because of this.
Gwen herself is probably the most disappointing character in the show as she doesn't really ever seem to do much. We're told she's Peter's best friend, but we're rarely offered any insight into why. I mean, I liked it when she had a more central role in episodes, but it happens too infrequently and instead spends much of her screentime being silently angry at Peter or staring silently at Peter wistfully. Peter's relationship with Liz in the second season felt frustrating due to her feeling like a roadblock for Gwen that just would not go away, which I suppose isn't really fair to Liz, but it was the show's creators' faults for dangling that Gwen plot in front of the viewer at the end of season 1 and then continuing all through season 2.
But then again, that can all fall back onto the show's main problem that was absolutely no fault of the creators'--being cancelled after only two seasons. I want more, damn it, and it ends at such a frustrating point. Some of the plots felt satisfyingly enough concluded (Sandman's was fine, for instance), but a lot was left at a critical moment. Black Cat hated Spider-man's guts, Norman Osborn had faked his own death, Harry was obviously starting down his dark path, Gwen and Peter were still not together despite Peter dumping Liz (and now she's angry at him), and they were clearly setting up the Clone Saga for season 3, which is the biggest thing I think I'll miss.
Anyway, that's my big ramble on The Spectacular Spider-Man. Pretty depressing knowing that there will almost certainly never be a Spider-man show this good in the future. But it was a lot of fun while it lasted.