J. Michael Straczynski, or JMS, is a sci-fi TV writer who's also been a lover of comics, and Spider-Man from 2001 to 2007 was his big comics impact. He was tasked with making Spider-Man relevant beyond just his name recognition in the '00s, after the infamous Clone Saga muddled him in the '90s.

How good was his run overall?

JMS' Spider-Man features several key retools such as the Spider-Totem, Aunt May learning Peter is Spider-Man, the inclusion of the Avengers elements (which was also a case of Bendis' New Avengers bleeding over), The Other (which gave Spider-Man new powers like stingers, telepathy with spiders, and organic web-shooters), and of course there's two very maligned storylines that came from his pen: Sins' Past and One More Day.

Sins' Past was terrible, and he's fully responsible, to which he'll freely admit was his biggest regret. However, I can't really fault JMS for OMD considering the story was forced on him by Joey Q, he wanted nothing to do with it, he distanced himself from the story as it was being made, and I heard he only wrote it because he didn't want the next new Spider-writer to begin with that storyline (imagine if Dan Slott opened writing OMD... his rep would be damaged beyond repair from the start).

There are some things I didn't like besides that. I wasn't fond of Peter's new powers, especially the organic web-shooters, which felt like a needless tie-in to the Raimi Trilogy, and I'm glad that part was undone.

Overall though, the first 38 issues was solid and helped to keep Spider-Man relevant within the comics. I guess you take the good with the bad. I also liked the idea of Aunt May and Mary Jane living in Avengers Tower, something about that was neat. It only got screwed up because of Civil War, leading to OMD... but in the context as it was written I liked it.

I was actually reading some of it the other day, and I liked this part where Peter thinks it'd be ridiculous if a movie about Spider-Man was ever made -- of course, it was a meta joke about the first Spider-Man movie at the time, and that made me nostalgic.

What do you think?