Silk #3

I had really liked the creation of Silk (aka Cindy Moon) in the Spider-Verse event, I like seeing Peter have a super-powered counterpart who isn’t always just time traveling Miguel O’Hara or dimensionally displaced Miles Morales (which I think it is official we are getting another Pete & Miles team-up book) plus seeing how a young woman who has been trapped in a bunker for a decade deals with life in New York relatively unsupervised is an interesting and (almost) unique premise- see Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

But beyond that, I think that this book is really a decent outing, and could be a solid vehicle for driving new, younger, and possibly even dare I say it… FEMALE readers into comic book shops to pick up Spider-Man family books! Because if books like Spider-Gwen and this can run for a long time (this book may need a bit of a boost for that to happen) it could mean big things for the future of comics, especially in the eyes of the younger readers who are probably already on the fence about comic book shops in general.

I liked this issue, because I thought it had quite a few interesting and unique visuals for the story- the two page spread with the panoramic view of the sewers that Silk and Shrike are traveling in, where Shrike is just plodding through sewer water, but Silk is doing her spider-y duties and climbing on the walls and hanging off things, and sitting on top of the giant concrete slab that Shrike lifts up… it was just a really good, funny moment that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Early on in the issue, seeing Silk and Spider-Man staging a fight to build up Silk’s “bad girl cred” was a fun moment, and the flash back/flash forward that illustrated Cindy’s lack of communication skills and her ability to frustrate two separate men in two different decades in EXACTLY the same way (i.e.- the panels were basically identical) was laid out on front street. I like that we see more of her inner monologue in this book, and that we are seeing that she obviously didn’t step out of that bunker a normal, average and well-adjusted adult human female.

The two things that probably made me like this book most are the faces that Cindy and the people around her are always making- I love when an artist takes time to put in different shades of expressions on people’s faces, really giving them depth and a wide range of emotion. I loved seeing Cindy sort of mug to the “camera” with one of her sappy, puppy dog faces as well. The other was the first fight sequence with the glider riding Goblin goons, where, somehow Cindy knows about Angry Birds? But, she probably would, since she has access to outside world, but just was unable to communicate with it. So she probably had an iPod touch (a few generations out of date, without wi-fi) that she could play Angry Birds on.

The reveal of the Goblin Nation base was pretty standard fare stuff- it even reminded me a little of the Foot Clan’s training grounds for all those wayward teens in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first live action movie. The twist at the end was a bit of a weak one, but there wasn’t much more to be done to really drive the story forward to where it needs to go from here with Silk getting into her unavoidable confrontation with the Goblin Nation, so I understand and appreciate that.

I love the look of the character Silk, and I really want to see this book step things up, and hopefully move beyond the pretending-to-be-bad-to-get-answers story, because there is so much more that Silk is capable of- which is on display in the time she spends in her civilian garb, dealing with people and struggling to figure out what the true best course of action is. Heroes should be flawed, and Silk is definitely far from perfect, and so is this book. It was a solid issue, with lots of fun jokes, but I think that when we move Silk beyond Goblin Nation as a whole, and get back to finding her family and figuring out her place in the world when she has been so far removed from it for so long, THAT is where this book will shine.