Spider-Man: Blue (2024)

Spider-Man: Blue

What in the web-slinging hell did I just read? For years, Spider-Man Blue sat on my shelf, a thin paperback languishing among the colorful hardback spines of serious comics. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are the minds behind The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, two of my favorite Batman stories. So when I saw their name attached to Spider-Man, it was a no-brainer. Slam dunk. Easy win.

Not quite.

The premise of Spider-man Blue is simple: It’s a love story about how Peter Parker fell for Gwen Stacy. All through this story like any other Spider-man comic Peter juggles his fraught personal life with his responsibilities as a superhero slash moral force for good (this time with extra neurosis!). There’s all that, plus a shadowy supervillain pulling strings somewhere in the background, because of course there is.

As Peter slowly befriends Harry Osborne and Gwen Stacy, Aunt May introduces him to Mary Jane Watson. MJ shows an immediate interest in Peter; she becomes part of the gang (“the gang” being her, him and Aunt May). Now Peter has two suitors to balance along with his web-slinging alter-ego.

The strange thing about this book is its focus or rather what it focuses on too much. Specifically: MJ instead of Gwen Stacy.

Some context: This story is being told from the present by Peter himself. We know Gwen’s fate; we know he married MJ; we know they were together for years before she died (it’s not worth asking why he couldn’t save Gwen but apparently had no problem keeping another redhead alive). He remembers Gwen as an idea but has trouble parsing her as a person which makes sense when you realize present-day Peter knows what happened next.

Given those circumstances, I’m willing to forgive Blue its odd choice of focal character though it does make more sense if you read it as a brain thing.

Still, the sidelining of Gwen is made worse by what happens narratively in Spider-Man Blue. Is it a different way to tell the love story between Gwena and Peter that we all know doesn’t end well for anyone involved? Yes, fine, okay. It’s different. But being different doesn’t mean better. This whole graphic novel is so imbalanced in terms of narrative that it became almost incomprehensible from a storytelling standpoint.

The Green Goblin is sidelined early on like Stacy in favor of some shadowed and mysterious villain who drops hints about his identity along the lines of “I crave the hunt.” By the time he reveals himself, something needs to wrap up because the story has progressed too far. His motives are foggy at best and wholly unsatisfying at worst.

By focusing on (sorry) Kraven’s storyline instead, Blue leaves no space whatsoever to tell us what happened to Gwen. It leaves off the climactic event and has Peter lament her loss in the present using Uncle Ben’s tape recorder in the attic while Mary Jane listens outside.

I put down this book dumbfounded. Spider-man Blue siphoned every last ounce of hope and excitement I had for this book out of my brain with some sick, twisted web. I would advise any Spidey fans reading this to skip it entirely.

Watch Spider-Man: Blue For Free On Gomovies.