Hot damn, yes! Miguel O’Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099, is back and in his proper form in the pages of Superior Spider-Man #17, and one can only hope he’ll find a way to come around more regularly, what with the whole Age of Ultron effect tearing holes in the space-time continuum and all.
We open in Nueva York, 2099, where the city we know is now a slum known as Downtown, and the upwardly mobile actually moved upwards, building Uptown literally above the city. O’Hara is riding a maglev train when he spots some kind of anomaly billowing forth from Alchemax, the massive megacorporation that he once worked for and which rules everything as a symbol of private enterprise run amok. That means it’s Spider-Man time. Along the way, he runs into a dinosaur fighting World War I biplanes, and has to pull some spider-heroics to save the lives of the Public Eye Flyboys (private police on hoverbikes to whom civil liberties are folk tales). Once he finally gets to Alchemax, he realizes that the nefarious Tyler Stone, architect of most of the hell of his life (as well as his actual life, being his secret biological father) is actually the victim of the unstable temporal anomalies rather than the cause, and he’s slowly being Swiss-cheesed out of existence… which, in Back to the Future terms, means that Miggy himself may cease to exist. Since our present day is the source of the problem, it’s up to him to swing back to Old New York (once New Amsterdam) and put a stop to things.
This will involve saving the life of his own grandfather, who happens to be Tiberius Stone, the guy who sabotaged the Hobgoblin, and who has a massive beef with Horizon Labs and Spider-Man for ruining his life of working for the Kingpin and being a general techno-criminal ne’er-do-well. Tiberius is out for revenge, and with the Hobgoblin dropped and Kingpin presumed dead, his next target is Horizon’s honcho Max Modell, the guy who fired him for being a criminal jerk. This comes to a head when Modell is arrested via helicopter right in the middle of the company softball game, during which Peter Parker (aka Otto Octavius) has been showing off for his girlfriend/tutor, Anna Marconi. This blindsides Otto, who has apparently missed all the meetings on the fact that Tiberius has been airing dirty laundry about all of the secret projects at Horizon, and he’s got himself put in place as the new supervisor – thanks to the new majority shareholder, Liz Allan. Longtime Spider-fans know her as the head of Allan Chemical, the ex-wife of Harry Osborn, and mother of his creepy little Damien-child Normie and, we can only hope, NOT the new Green Goblin Kingpin of Crime that’s been building his operations under Otto’s nose. It’s possible, though, since Allan is coming across as fairly menacing and ruthless here.
One reason Superior Spider-Man is a great ride to be on: Once Stone slimily informs “Mr. Parker” that all of his technology and web-fluid that he creates for Spider-Man are now the intellectual property of Allan Chemical, Peter Parker actually gets to say “You shall rue this day.” Supervillain dialogue is always awesome, especially when it’s snuck into normal conversation.
Anyway, Grady – inventor of the ‘time door’ that nearly destroyed New York last year – gets the bright idea to use it to go back in time and stop Stone before he starts, but before he can start, Spider-Man 2099 comes bounding through it, and we get the connection that Allan Chemical gets shortened to Al Chem which will eventually become Alchemax and holy shit how long has Dan Slott been plotting that?!
This issue is a blast for me, since I was a huge fan of Peter David’s original Spider-Man 2099 series back in the day – and I feel old referring to the 1990s as ‘back in the day.’ This isn’t the lame teenage Miguel O’Hara we got in the Timestorm series, but the real deal, who is a bit more cynical and bitter. Not only is Slott wowing us with subtle long-term plotting, which gives me every confidence that whenever Superior Spider-Man ends its run, it’s going to be great, but he’s also having fun with future cusswords. David’s big joke back then was using the word ‘shock’ to replace the word ‘fuck,’ so he could imply profanity by saying “Holy shock!” or “That shockin’ sucks.” Slott’s running with that ball, replacing “damn” with “jam” and he might have even replaced “shitheads” with “bitheads,” although that might have just been a jab at Alchemax scientists being tech nerds. Slott also has a great bit where Otto gets pissed off at his spider-sense for not being specific.
Ryan Stegman is also top-notch with this issue – the final splash page of the two Spider-Men meeting looks super cool, even if it does have a little odd sense of “personal space.” His Spidey 2099 is completely awesome – in fact, his entire 2099 is cool, complete with silly jokes like a billboard advertising Blade 96. The only complaint I have is not against Stegman alone, but kind of anybody drawing Ms. Marconi – no one seems to know how to properly render the proportions of a little person like herself.
Aside from that nitpick, Spidey Now! vs. Spidey Later! is hitting all my fanboy buttons right now. I can’t wait to see how this all plays out.
