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or: Spider-Man and Doc Ock reenact 50 Shades of Grey
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Collects Amazing Spider-Man #'s 682-687, Spider-Man: Ends of the Earth #1, and Avenging Spider-Man #8
by Dan Slott, Stefano Caselli, and more
Over the course of ten years, writer Dan Slott has shared an embarrassment of riches with Spider-Man summer blockbusters. There was Spider-Verse, a worlds-spanning tale about Spider-Men (and -women, -robots, -cats... you get the picture) from different universes and their natural predators, "The Inheritors." You had Spider-Island, an epic about what happens when Manhattan gained all the powers of a spider, without the lessons learned from an Uncle Ben.
Point being, he's got a lot of ideas, and Ends of the Earth is another one of them. It's about a dying Doctor Octopus, who in a bid to leave an honorable legacy, convinces the world's legislators to use his "Octavian Lens," a series of orbiting octahedral robots that could save the planet from global warming. All he asks for is help from every nation to complete his satellites, and a memorial to honor his contribution to society (and cash and exoneration for the people that helped him, the Sinister Six).
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| Otto's Octahedrals orbiting Earth |
Issues are spent questioning Otto's true intentions, the will-he-won't-he of saving the world from global warming. But Spider-Man knows in his gut that Otto is up to something, recruiting the help of the Avengers and later Black Widow and Silver Sable, to run hits on Otto's global satellite factories. They go to the "ends of the Earth" destroying these things and getting into the occasional superhero fight. There are great action movie moments where Spider-Man introduces some new tech of his that helps him take down the Sinister Six -- innovative variations on old fights that we've seen before.
The dynamic between Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus in particular is taken to a whole new level for me. Dr. Octopus is a brilliant person, and there's a page with a Stefano Caselli-drawn Stephen Hawking -- Stephen Hawking -- confirming that the Octavian Lens (later called a shield) truly would repair the ozone layer and stave global warming. For several issues, Spider-Man seems like a bully, parading around the world with his entourage and blowing up Otto's factories. Just check out this scene of Spider-Man, "acidboarding" a captive Sandman.
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| Rest assured, Spider-Man tells us in a thought bubble that he wouldn't go so far as to kill. . . |
There are so many brilliant moments in this comic, you'd be better off reading it yourself. Spidey yelling "Avengers Assemble" after a page of donning the various pieces of his new costume. The Sandman defeating Captain America by using an ice pellet. Here's one, where it's really Dan Slott and Stefano Caselli's riff on Amazing # 33's Spider-Man lifting the rubble. Doc Ock has Spider-Man trapped in his arms, while his robots will complete their lens sequencing in space. Out of his supplies and unable to get to Ock's Abort button, Spider-Man realizes that he can't gadget his way out of the situation, and that he doesn't need to:
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| The greatest gadet in his arsenal. . . was his heart ALL ALONG. |
After six issues of seeing cool Spider-tech, it was refreshing to read this moment here. For the comic book event, it was rare to see Spider-Man unmasked, and the focus was far more on the Spider, rather than the man. Dan Slott has a fundamental understanding of Spider-Man, but at times I think it's too fundamental that it lacks emotional resonance. We get it -- Spider-Man is wracked with guilt over the death of people close to him because of Spider-Man. That doesn't mean he needs to go through a whole storyarc of how "no one dies" around him. We get it -- Spider-Man uses jokes to relieve the tension when he's fighting a supervillain. But it gets to the point of bullying when it comes to Doc Ock, a dying man who simply wants to save the world. It got to the point where I sympathized more with Otto, than with Spider-Man.
Some people just want to watch the world burn. For Otto, he needed to leave a legacy -- to gain notoriety as a mass murderer worse than all of history's murderers combined. What a disappointment. I think there's room in a Spider-Man story for the upheaval of the superhero-beats-villain trope, and all the previous issues had primed me for it -- a Spider-bully, a villain seeking to reform in his final days of life. While it wasn't exactly how I wanted it to pan out, I can only say that it was intentional -- to tease the reader for an otherwise-typical, but now unexpected reveal, so my kudos go to Slott for going as far as he did with the tease.
There's a focus on Silver Sable, a longtime Spider-Man ally from the comics of the '70s ('80s?), but rarely visited otherwise. Avenging Spider-Man #8 is something of a postscript, honoring Silver by looking back at one of their first adventures together -- it's a solid character piece from the point of view of Spider-Man that builds an emotional investment, albeit retroactively.
Ends of the Earth left Otto in The Raft, a prison for super-villains, which teased the events of his takeover of Peter Parker's mind and body in the excellent, Superior Spider-Man saga. Check it out!
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