Kevin Smith has written some of the worst comic books of all time. From having Batman soil his pants to turning Black Cat into a sexual assault victim, he uses his childish edginess in everything he does. Now, he’s released his Giant Size Spider-Man #1 this month, and it’s some of the worst material Marvel’s ever published.
It’s unclear how Kevin Smith became an authority figure in comics. While he clearly was interested in geek culture from his 1990s Jay and Silent Bob films, most notably Chasing Amy having scenes at a comic book convention where an inker was ridiculed as a “tracer,” it didn’t mean he was able to write superhero books himself.
Marvel and DC Comics cashed in on his Hollywood celebrity in the late 1990s and early 2000s with several books by Smith, most of which just sounded like Jay and Silent Bob dialogue but transplanted onto characters. He garnered a reputation for being late on deadlines and never finishing stories, which is why his comic writing career quickly died.
This year, Marvel Comics is desperate for sales on their main line, as nothing outside of Ultimate Marvel Comics seems to be selling in the industry. Part of the stunt is to do a line of Giant Size books, much like they had in the 1970s. Though most are focused on the X-Men, Spider-Man, as their flagship character, got one well, also written by Kevin Smith.
What follows is the same shallow humor that made Jay and Silent Bob age poorly. The first joke landing flat is using the term “sixty-nine” as something childish for Spider-Man to say. It might have gone better with a laugh track.
He goes even further with lame jokes as we get a Spider-Man song and a dance with dialogue: “Mysterio spanked his… Spider-Can!”
With this, Spider-Man’s suit is ripped over his butt, causing more jokes about “crack” and the like throughout the issue, which only demeans the character of Spider-Man, humiliating Peter Parker
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Treating these characters with disrespect and turning them into potty jokes is a hallmark of Kevin Smith, but it’s something Marvel Comics shouldn’t have approved, especially given how fans have been tuning out in droves. While Peter Parker gets humiliated, even moreso are the fans who buy the Spider-Man books week in and week out with subpar talent telling stories that don’t matter or materialize into anything.
If one didn’t know any better, a reader might think Marvel Comics is intentionally disrespecting its characters and turning them into dirty jokes simply to see how far they can push the readership who they believe will buy anything as long as it says the name Spider-Man on it.
What do you think of Kevin Smith’s Giant Size Spider-Man #1? Leave a comment and let us know.
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