Amazing Spider-Man #65, written by Joe Kelly with art by Cafu, has a strong, smart hook for a Spider-Man book. The gist of it? What if all the power and all the responsibility Spider-Man has had throughout his career wasn’t enough? What if he was faced with the fact that ultimately, we all die? And what if the Marvel book kept driving that home, over and over again, until it was too much to bear?
That’s the idea of what happens here, but to get into specifics — and spoilers past this point — in the issue, Peter is going up against yet another Scion of Cyttorak. While the previous ones have all presented physical challenges, this one is mental. He’s presented with visions of all his friends, family, and lovers dying, one after the other, and all he has to do is not put down the magic ball that’s causing these visions to continue.
Kelly doesn’t waste any time going for the jugular here, starting with a vision of Aunt May dying in a hospital wing in the middle of the “Essex Virus.” While he’s giving it a Marvel Universe spin, this is clearly any number of loved ones who died, alone, in hospital wings during COVID, and it’s a punch in the gut. But what Kelly smartly does here is not let it affect Spider-Man. Yet.
See, loss is part and parcel for the character. He knows he’s in a fight for the fate of the world. So while a vision of Aunt May like this might hurt, he’s been through hurt before and come out the other side. Instead, what he’s presented with here is how the sum total of his epic deeds in his lifetime, and everything about his friends and family don’t mean thing to the scale of time of the universe. Basically, sympathy and pain don’t work on Spider-Man; Philosophy 101, does.
It’s a tricky line Kelly walks here as it is the gut punches like the Aunt May scene that impact the reader; but of course, Peter would be smarter than that, which punctures a bit of the emotional impact. And while one can sympathize with his eventual realization that nothing he does, including standing up to the Scions, matters, it’s a bummer of a conclusion — particularly when we can feel confident that later on he’ll likely realize that if nothing matters, everything matters… Or at least we do what we do now because we are living for now, not tomorrow.
Anyway, bargain basement philosophy aside, the point here is that the emotional climax of the issue is muted a bit because of this. But thanks to Cafu’s layouts we get to see dozens if not hundreds of deaths, from known characters to unknowns, and it’s all impressively laid out.
The issue is that this ultimately ends up being a mental exercise rather than an emotional one, as we’re pummeled into submission by the sheer scale of what Peter is going through. But given the challenge, another well-structured and intriguing issue of this “8 Deaths of Spider-Man” arc — even if we can be pretty sure how Spidey will get out of this one.
Amazing Spider-Man #65 Rating:
Amazing Spider-Man #65 Official Synopsis:
THE 8 DEATHS OF SPIDER-MAN CONTINUES! Spider-Man has faced four Scions and is running out of extra lives. This issue’s scion, CYRA, represents the very power of Death Itself and makes Spider-Man watch everything he loves die. Can Spider-Man possibly withstand this punishment?
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