Spider-Man spends a few issues in limbo with Robbie and Jonah (Robbie's more of an afterthought, but Jonah has some good moments responding to all the weirdness and forced to play-act for demons.) Some demons are turned into weird variants of Spider-Man enemies, and a demon Spidey saves is inspired to become Rek-rap. There's a theory that Ed McGuinness likes drawing weird variants of characters (Lots of Bizarro stories in his Superman runs, Red Hulk in his Hulk run, the Spider-Man/ Deadpool fusion in that title) so this plays to his strengths.
Madelyne Pryor seems to have changed her mind due to events in the Dark Web: X-Men mini-series, pushing Ben/ Chasm to go rogue. That leads to a final showdown, which is a relatively standard crossover structure, but it often works.
The big finale one-shot works as a conclusion to the Amazing Spider-Man issues of Dark Web, as well as the Gold Goblin, Ms Marvel and X-Men mini-series. The details remain accessible even if I'm not eager to read Venom or the X-Men mini-series just yet. The big battle royale is okay, but just not as clever as other sequences in the same storyline.
Grade: B
There is a weirdness here about time. There's a news report talking about people old enough to remember Inferno, but due to the sliding timescale, that would be like five years ago. It'd be like a reporter talking about people old enough to remember the few seconds
La La Land won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Amazing Spider-Man #14 suggested that Inferno kicks off with winter, but here it starts with December 13, just before. And Wells' next story in
Amazing Spider-Man kicks off with a sudden snowstorm on a day that's supposed to be in the 70s.
That kinda takes me out of the story, although it's more of a pet peeve that's often weird with most comics shared in shared universes. Movies are able to use time-sensitive events as story engines, mainly because the characters don't have that many adventures, and it works in TV, although that may be about there being more content, and generally close to real-time (with exceptions like
24 or
Succession.)
I sometimes think that if I was EIC, I would mandate consistency, so that comics published 2025-2028 would cover one calendar year, and there would be some kind of organized chart about when events occur in relation to one another (I wouldn't kick off my stint this way, just in case that might interfere with existing stories.)
Before I tackle Dead Language, I'll go for the Mary Jane & Black Cat mini-series, Gold Goblin mini-series, Dark Web: Ms. Marvel, Slott/ Bagley's End of Spider-Verse, the Joe Kelly/ Terry Dodson fill-in story. I might also reread
Amazing Spider-Man #555-557, since that story introduces the main bad guy.
So far, the stories do make sense and seem to have a consistent flow, but it's a bit odd to have this big crossover at this point in Wells' run. We get a showdown between Peter and Ben Reilly, which is something we kind of need after the end of Chasm, but it is a bit weird with the Peter Parker side of things, especially with Norman Osborn mainly off to his mini-series and Mary Jane & Black Cat mainly off to theirs. The main narrative for
Amazing Spider-Man focuses on Peter's relationships with Ben Reilly & J Jonah Jameson, which is fine, but doesn't do the best job of seeding Wells' next storyline, which has a lot of hype.