So the four-part Amazing Spider-Man event story, Grim Hunt (issues 634-637), has recently come to a close and the only way I can sum up this whole saga is… Meh. It has its moments, but ultimately Grim Hunt isn’t a satisfying story nor is it a depressing story. It’s just there, adding to a status quo that keeps changing every couple months.
Want more? Read on, but there be spoilers here.
To say I wasn’t impressed with the storyline is not that much of an understatement. Maybe it was the rather predictable nature of the whole storyline (people already knew that it was Kaine behind the mask during the whole resurrection process) or maybe it was the fact that the antagonists were really, really boring, but for some reason, I couldn’t really get into it as much as some other comics I’ve been reading lately. But Grim Hunt did accomplish one thing; it got me reading and sitting through an entire Spider-Man story-arc for the first time since that whole One More Day bullshit years ago. And maybe that was the plan so that I can sit through the “follow-up” storyline which is supposed to explain things… but I digress.
Grim Hunt is basically the concluding chapter to a string of stories known as the Gauntlet, where Spidey has to deal with various members of his rogues gallery. As each moment progress, the situation gets worse until Parker’s at his lowest point. Which brings us to Grim Hunt… and seems like a return to the grim-and-gritty style in grand fashion becomes a giant piece of “meh.”
Three major issues I have with the comic:
First off, I didn’t really like the artwork in Grim Hunt. Sometimes, it’s great; other times it’s not. There are moments where the depiction is rather vague (did Spider-Man just rip Mommy Kraven’s face off? I can’t tell; it looks like she has a tattoo on her face) and there are moments where the art is just plain sloppy. It does convey that dark mood rather adequately, but overall, it’s not pretty… and I don’t mean that in a nice way.
So you resurrected Kraven The Hunter, who’s been dead for roughly twenty years. Not only does it tell me that the House of Ideas is running low on ideas, but they don’t do anything cool with him. He comes back to life, finds out that he’s cursed with immortality thanks to the fact that Mommy Kraven killed the wrong Spider-Man, and when the real Spider-Man doesn’t kill him (because he’s the only one who CAN, for some stupid reason – apparently Kraven has never watched Highlander), he hibernates to the Savage Land? Man, how depressing is that? I’d like to see how they’d handle Kraven in the future, but it seems like they just revived him so that he’d be available as a back-up villain or something, in case Stilt Man or the White Rabbit weren’t available for major Spidey events. (Yes, those are actual Spidey villains… look them up.)
Finally… ugh, add Mattie Franklin (that Spider-Woman from years back that you’ve never heard of) and Madame Web to the Women In Refrigerators list of female comic book characters killed off. Seems rather sad that poor Mattie, who had her own book once upon a time and was actually a good read in my book, was tossed to the curve in favor of classic Spider-Woman Jessica Drew, only to be brought back so that she could be tortured and eventually killed off. And Madame Web… well, some people may miss her, but I barely knew her. Of course, the rather nice touch was where she pulls a Spock on Julia Carpenter’s McCoy by passing her vision powers over to her, thus rendering the former Spider-Woman (yep, another one) and Aranche both psychic and blind… um, okay.
I could comment on Kaine’s death… but the very last page of the comic tells us otherwise.
In the end, the Grim Hunt, in the context of the Gauntlet storyline, is a rather disappointing conclusion and the actual storyline itself is somewhat of a mixed bag. I didn’t really care for the storyline overall, but the writing was somewhat decent for the most part and it didn’t fall into the realm of incomprehensible. So for what it’s worth, it’s probably worth a read if you’ve got nothing better to do.
Next up on Amazing Spider-Man… Joey Quesada’s One Moment In Time.
Oy vey.
dtm666 