Rate Dark Web

[Kevinroc]

Dark Web is now over, and I want to know what you thought of the event.

[Matt Rat]

What could have been an opportunity by Marvel to justify and truly dabble in the highs and lows of Ben Reilly's latest turn to villainy was utterly squandered in a cookie-cutter cartoon cavalcade that benefited nobody and entertained only a select few. Art was on point, if art was all that was needed to sell you and not characterization, then sure, top marks. But we want to read about heroes, duality, two scarred sides of a fractured coin, broken brothers, and the people in their lives.

We got nothing of the sort. Instead we got Rek-Rap, King Chasm, and 90s Venom, we got Norman Osborn of all people carrying the event (and this era) with a far more compelling narrative to call his own. We have Black Cat scared to tell MJ she's dating a boy, we got MJ with fancy new tech and more mystery (at least even that was somewhat advanced) and Paul being a human shield for the kids and largely forgotten about in favour of them being brought up more in conversation by MJ.

And Peter? the title hero? He stands by and watches everyone else make the moves for him, all the important stuff just goes on without him while he promotes a new toy, and in the final battle he contributes nothing. Maddie's redemption could have happened without this event in the pages of the X-Books. It was entirely unnecessary.

[CrimsonEchidna]

I'm going to be real, this is neck and neck with Civil War 2 as the worst event Marvel has put out in the past decade. Civil War 2 edges it out because of the line-wide forced tie-ins, but Dark Web easily has the most laughable villain motivation I've ever read. The X-Men side of things even undermined the entire conflict by having Jean show how easy it would be to resolve everything. And it'd be one thing if Wells acknowledged this fact and played up the event as an avoidable tragedy but instead he leaned into it being a irreverent farce instead.

[Jman27]

i gave it a mediocre event score. Stuff I like was the Maddie and Jean making up. Peter fight with Venom. Rek-Rap. Stuff I didnt like was Ben role as villain he wasnt that threatening at all Hollow Eve didnt do much of anything.

[Frontier]

This did not need to be an event and it did not need to happen the way it did.

[IamnotJudasTraveller]

i gave it a mediocre event score.

Same- if we got Ben out there eating kids for lunch or something or Slott-tinted Clone Conspiracy remarks ("you're not my brother!" and so on) I'd land it on terrible, but it seems like Wells was too terrified to even go near there. As a result, we saw both Peter and Ben basically be passengers on what ostensibly should have been their tale while other people actually moved the plot forward (even Ben's "big" King Chasm moment only happened because Janine stole the scythe for him; even Ben "kicking the shit out of Osborn" feels more like a tantrum because he didn't even actively DAMAGE his suit, while Cantwell quickly had Kafka wreck his helmet to show her strength).

It's a story that has no clue on what it wants to do other than slap overly quick slapstick humor and elevate Madelyne, and as a result feels afraid to do literally anything else (and, somehow, shows that there could have been a worse outcome out of all of this).

[TinkerSpider]

I didn't read the Ms. Marvel, X-Men or Venom tie-ins.

But this was such a waste of...everything. I feel the most for Ed McGuinness and Adam Kubert and the rest of the art team, because if there is any charm to the story it's from their work.

Wells wasted every opportunity, and there were plenty. Explore Ben and Janine as twisted mirror images of Peter and MJ, as the opening of Dark Web: Dusk seemed to suggest? Wasted.

Explore who Peter Parker would be without his core memories? Is Peter a hero because of his memories or because of something more intrisinic? Slott gave Otto 31 of Peter's core memories in Superior so this could have been a fresh take: wasted.

The Black Cat and MJ miniseries is rendered wholly inconsequential: we know Maddie remains ruler of Limbo, Felicia gets over her guilt to go on a spa weekend trip with Peter, and MJ goes back to being a housewife who isn't wearing her power watch despite the freak weather in ASM 21: wasted.

Venom is turned back into his mindless '90s brain seeking version and then disappears completely for those who don't read his tie-in: wasted.

And the story could have easily been solved by the omega level telepath - two if you count Maddie - just standing there in front of Peter and Ben but for some reason this plot hole big enough to fit the moon through with room left over for Saturn and its rings is never addressed: waste of the reader's time.

[IamnotJudasTraveller]

I didn't read the Ms. Marvel, X-Men or Venom tie-ins.

About the most you'd get from the tie-ins is that they literally contradict Wells' book - in it he says Madeylne is the one who messed up Eddie's memory, yet in the Venom tie-in Ben does it, with a power that would have solved his own problem that Wells acts as though does not exist. Ms. Marvel's tie-in doesn't exactly contradict it full force, but the other books behave as if getting in or out of Limbo takes some expenditure and in it Kamala basically gets blasted out of the place because some demons literally got annoyed with her.

[Lukmendes]

Objectively speaking, this is the best Spider-Man story.

10/10.

[HypnoHustler]

I was caught between ‘mediocre’ and ‘terrible’ because I enjoyed seeing him beat up Norman in the beginning, but eventually the sum of its parts meant it could only be ‘terrible’ lol

[Kaitou D. Kid]

It was so bad it wasn't good to read for free. I couldn't get through it.

I'm not kidding.

[The Negative Zone]

At least I laughed at some parts of it.

[CaptainUniverse]

This ranks right up there with OMD and OMIT as among the worst Spider-Man stories I have ever read.

[Batman Begins 2005]

One of the worst events ever. Horrible as is this run

[Kurolegacy]

One of the worst Spider-Man events I’ve seen. It basically only exists to force Ben and Janine into villain roles and makes neither compelling as villains. Janine comes across as entitled. Honestly, what Starling said to Rabble in Miles’ book sums up my feelings about Janine’s turn “Trauma doesn’t give you license to inflict it on others.” She may claim that she’s doing it for helping Ben but that rings pretty hollow when you decide to put innocents in harms way because you’re not getting what you want, even more so when your actions don’t even hold any correlation to what your original goal was. This could have been an emotional clash between brothers as one tries to pull the other back from the brink but instead this was just treated as a joke and a means to an end. And it really just showed how terrible of a concept Chasm is especially with how in the end Peter flat out tells Ben he wants to help him only for Ben to act like a moody teenager. This story has basically instilled in me that I don’t want to read any future events penned by Wells and as I don’t see Wells improving in ASM any time soon, I may just drop the book once the ‘What Did Peter Do?’ story arc in a couple issues finishes. And even if I don’t, I refuse to buy any future issues that feature Chasm. The only positive is that I stuck to my guns, voted with my wallet and didn’t buy this dumpster fire of an event.