Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
Slott generally works best when he's working in other people's sandbox rather than his own. If you look at Slott's history, he worked for a long time in licensed and tie-in comics before coming to Marvel. Stuff like Batman Adventures, Batman Gotham Knighs, Justice League Adventures which tie-in to the Bruce Timm cartoons. His stories for Justice League Adventures are great, including two stories that made Chronos the Time Thief one of my favorite DC bad guys. His best Spider-Man story -- Spider-Man/Human Torch -- has him operate in the status-quo of different Spider-Man and Fantastic Four eras.
Slott also doesn't have experience as an ongoing writer. What I mean by that is coming in after an earlier writer wrote a status-quo and left a situation and all. Most of the time he's revived cancelled series like She-Hulk or Silver Surfer, or Fantastic Four and so on. His Iron Man run where he's following on from Bendis is like the only exception but I haven't read that so I can't comment though I do know the usual issues of delays and Jim Zub doing scripting while he plots and other stuff that Slott got up to on ASM continue there. When he began his run Post-BND you had this huge retcon and manufactured blank slate where they basically tried to recreate the Bronze Age (i.e ASM#193-293), right down to similar beats (i.e. May has an elderly suitor -- Lubensky and Jameson's brand new daddy, MJ written out of the books for some 40 issues and so on) and did it badly.
One of the reasons why I feel his run doesn't hold up too well. If civilians stop being civilians then there's no longer a friendly neighborhood or real suspense and tension for Peter to save people close to him. Because apparently, Jameson can do it by operating a Spider-Slayer robot all fine and dandy.
I get that Slott was interested at looking Spider-Man and Peter from the outside. And in all fairness, a lot of great Spider-Man stories comes from doing that. Slott's best Spider-Man work, the Spider-Man/Human Torch series is essentially Johnny Storm's book, it's basically looking at Peter from his point of view, and the entire crux of that is the fact that in all that time Spider-Man never once considered telling Torch his secret identity until the right hostage situation called for it. Roger Stern especially was the best at doing that -- "The Daydreamers" above all. As was Paul Jenkins. JMD of course in Kraven's Last Hunt did a story that looked at Spider-Man from the outside while also doing some of the best work showing Peter's interior thought processes (apparent in that "There is no Spider-Man monologue thought caption at the start"). But Slott is no Stern and Jenkins. There's an absence of human feeling in his stuff. Stuff like "No one Dies" mines emotions out of "villains seem to come back from the dead more than good guys in comics"...here's the thing that's not remotely comparable to real life nor does it make actual sense since we as readers know those reasons. The artwork by Marcos Martin is better than that story deserves.
Slott's interest at looking at Spider-Man from the outside went to the extreme in Superior Spider-Man which is basically removing Peter from his own story for more than a year in real-time, and all centered on Ock making the same observations and insults people had long known and heard before. Spider-Man holds back his powers, he operates small scale, his lack of work/life balance is both a blessing/curse, he comes across as someone wasting his academic life away and so on. There's literally nothing human communicated there.