Amazing Spider-Man #556

Well, hello Mr. Zeb Wells my new favorite Spider-Man writer.

I gotta admit, when they announced the creative teams with the likes of writers Dan Slott, Marc Guggenheim and Bob Gale the name that had me the least excited was Zeb Wells, if only because there is very little work of his that I have actually read.  Now that I think about it, I may not have read any at all.

With this last two issues I am ready to proclaim him my favorite of the bunch, by a wide margin.  He seems to really get the tone that I'm looking for with Spider-Man.  It's funny, without being over-the-top, hit-you-over-your-gead-with-the-joke-mallet funny.  The humor is situational, and it's genuine.  The jokes don't feel like non-sequitors, which was beginning to become the case with the last two arcs.  I really, really like his Spider-Man. 

It was also heartfelt, too.  There is a scene in this comic book that might have been the most touching in all of the comic books that I read this week.  Last week, Peter Parker lost his jacket - there is a freak blizzard happening in NYC - and in this issue he finally spots it and demands it back from the man wearing it.  The man who ended up with the jacket is homeless and when he agrees to give the jacket back, he stands there, threadbare and shivering.  Spider-Man gives him the jacket back, saying that he must have made a mistake and it wasn't his jacket afterall.  It was a powerful sequence that hit me right in my gooey spot.  That's Spider-Man right there.

As for the plot itself, there are some sort of Mayan monsters in the city and that's been fun, and it looks like Peter is going to end up with the cop who hates Spider-Man the most as a roommate, and we'll see where that goes (hopefully not too shticky), and I really like the potential love interest they have set up in the crime scene investigator.

Chris Bachalo's art was better this issue in that there were less rubber legs and such.  I still don't like it, but it didn't detract from the story.

Amazing Spider-Man is in a really good place right now.  It's to the point where when I see it's an off week when the book doesn't ship I am disappointed.

On a side note, I wish some editor somewhere would tell their artists that NYPD officers aren't allowed to have soul patches.