Well, this is fun. \u00a0Annuals have long been a bit of a sidebar to Marvel’s ongoing titles, even when the regular writer is on board. \u00a0And this is no different. \u00a0Instead,\u00a0Tom Taylor has\u00a0taken it as an opportunity to do an endearingly random team-up story,\u00a0on similar lines to the team-up with Squirrel Girl that appeared in the main title.<\/p>\n
This time, it’s Spider-Woman –\u00a0that is, the\u00a0Gwen Stacy version of Spider-Woman from\u00a0Spider-Gwen<\/em> – with the added gimmick of doing a body swap. \u00a0And that’s pretty much the entire concept: Laura and Gwen swap bodies and\u00a0team up. \u00a0It’s\u00a0a nice, fun little\u00a0idea: Gwen finds Laura’s powers pretty much horrifying except for the enhanced senses, and Laura is utterly lost trying to make sense of Gwen’s supporting cast, completely lacking the social skills to bluff her way through it.<\/p>\n There is a plot. \u00a0There has to be. \u00a0I mean, you get a sense that\u00a0if\u00a0they could have gotten away without having\u00a0a plot, and just had them hanging out, they’d have gone for that. \u00a0But it’s a team-up, and if they’re going to team up, they kind of have to do something. \u00a0“Something”, in this case, is finding out what’s happened and getting their bodies swapped back. \u00a0Because we need some arbitrary bonus drama, this must be done within three hours or\u00a0They Will Both Die. \u00a0None of this greatly matters. \u00a0It’s a delivery vehicle for the\u00a0gimmick.<\/p>\n Fortunately,\u00a0that\u00a0gimmick\u00a0carries the story just fine. \u00a0Artist Marcio Takara handles the different body language pretty well, and gets the swap across. \u00a0He’s a pretty solid choice in terms of matching the established visual tone of the series, too. \u00a0The details\u00a0of Laura and Gwen\u00a0trying to fathom out each other’s powers are nicely figured out. \u00a0Laura struggles to recalibrate for being so much stronger, but\u00a0quickly figures out that the sensible thing to is not to\u00a0waste her time\u00a0trying tricky stuff like web slinging. \u00a0Gwen is just\u00a0horrified and baffled that\u00a0anyone would want powers that involve\u00a0sticking knives through your own hands and\u00a0so forth, and understandably reluctant to use any of Laura’s powers beyond her\u00a0enhanced senses. \u00a0Admittedly,\u00a0the final pay-off for Gwen’s reaction\u00a0– she finally pops the claws, and gets it horrendously wrong –\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0land, because the mechanics don’t make sense. \u00a0There’s no good reason to have her pointing her arms in\u00a0the required direction, so it looks hopelessly contrived. \u00a0But as a character moment, the idea was decent.<\/p>\n This is more Laura’s story with Gwen as a random foil. \u00a0Arguably the best reason for using\u00a0her is that she doesn’t know anything about\u00a0Wolverine, so she comes to the story with no preconceptions. \u00a0I wonder if\u00a0her\u00a0continuous interactions with the mainstream Marvel Universe are\u00a0such a good idea, though. \u00a0Her first appearance, in\u00a0Edge of Spider-Verse<\/em>, certainly suggested she could\u00a0carry a solo series, but a big part of its\u00a0appeal was the way that Spider-Man’s established supporting cast rearranged themselves around Gwen in his absence. \u00a0The combination of taking Peter off the board, and replacing a male lead with a female, forced everyone into different roles which looked like a\u00a0promising set-up\u00a0in its own right. \u00a0Gwen as a frequent dimension hopper\u00a0may be necessary for cross-promotion, but it\u00a0drags her a long way\u00a0from\u00a0the girl-next-door soap opera milieu that I liked about her first stories. \u00a0But that’s\u00a0more of a\u00a0problem for Gwen’s series, not so much one for this story.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n True, also, that the plot is seriously slight. \u00a0The explanation for the swap\u00a0is utterly random;\u00a0the whole thing ultimately turns out to be the\u00a0work of the Hornet’s cousin, attempting to get revenge on Wolverine (the original one) for killing Hornet back in Mark Millar’s “Enemy of the State” storyline. \u00a0Perhaps this is setting something up for the ongoing series (which is doing an “Enemy of the State II” arc soon), but it doesn’t connect to anything else\u00a0here. \u00a0Nor does it make sense\u00a0for Laura to\u00a0give Red Hornet the “well, you’ve done no harm, so run along now” treatment, given that she\u00a0was<\/em> trying to\u00a0banish someone\u00a0to another universe, and nearly succeeded. \u00a0It feels tacked on so that\u00a0the story can\u00a0go through the motions of having a final act.<\/p>\n But the\u00a0issue gets away with these things\u00a0because\u00a0they’re ultimately incidental to the gimmick, and\u00a0it makes the gimmick work. \u00a0Of the current line of X-books,\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> is by far the most reliable when it comes to simply being fun to read, and issues like this show why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, this is fun. \u00a0Annuals have long been a bit of a sidebar to Marvel’s ongoing titles, even when the regular writer is on board. \u00a0And this is no different. \u00a0Instead,\u00a0Tom Taylor has\u00a0taken it as an opportunity to do an endearingly random team-up story,\u00a0on similar lines to the team-up with Squirrel Girl that appeared in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3529,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions\/3529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}