If I handed this book to a 12-19 year old and told them to read it, I would expect them to like me less afterward, and I’d probably deserve it! There are so many better options, both in and out of comics, featuring Spider-Man (Go buy Spideyzine) and other characters. In a lot of ways, that question ties into dumb ideas about marketing that honestly don’t really matter when discussing the content of a story, but I still think the context of this comic coming out right now matters when viewed through the lens of Marvel’s comics that are geared toward children and young adults, and I find it drastically lacking in some ways, and disappointing in others. Which in some ways, brings me to my main problem with this new version of this 60 year old story: who is this for (aside from me)? Their dumb accidents weren’t flaws in the writing, rather, they were features of it, McKelvie just couldn’t recognize them for what they were, because teenagers don’t think teenagers are stupid. He said that the mistakes characters would make were more frustrating to him when he was closer in age to those characters, but upon a rewatch when he was older, those mistakes became more understandable to him, because he realized that teenagers make stupid mistakes, because they’re stupid teenagers. It reminded me quite a bit of something artist Jamie McKelvie once talked about regarding fiction surrounding teenage characters. Now though, in my sunset years at the age of 25, I just wanna give this pitiful creature a hug and tell him everything’ll be okay one day, that one day he’d marry a supermodel and his aunt would (probably) never die (somehow). I think I would have felt like he was annoying, and honestly, the panels I had seen out of context had convinced me that early Peter Parker was an asshole, a stupid nerd who deserved to be bullied. If I had read this in 2013, or even in 2016, I likely wouldn’t have enjoyed Peter much. Much more surprising for me, though, was the depiction of Peter Parker. I feel weird about some parts of this book, but I do hope they at least get through Stan Lee’s run on ASM, if only so I can have it collected in this format.

His cover along with the digest size made me personally pay attention when this new Masterworks version was announced, and they are both a real highlight of the product. Cho is probably the best human alive to do this kind of work, which feels both modern in design and like it was pulled from decades ago nostalgic and fresh in one image. One is obviously the design, particularly the new cover by Michael Cho. Before I get deep into my problems though, I do want to highlight the things that worked for me.

Masterworks spiderman 1