Amazing Spider-Man #591

I’ve been a huge fan of Brand New Day since it started, and Dan Slott has been one of my favorite writers in the Brain Trust.  Sadly, this wasn’t his finest hour.

Let’s start with the fundamental flaw with the entire plot device of accelerated time in the microverse.  If a whole generation could pass in the microverse during a two-year span in the 616-world, that would mean that time passes very fast in the microverse relative to time in the 616.  Another way of stating that would be to say that for every minute that passes in the 616, many many more minutes would have to pass in the microverse.  So just to be clear, Peter and the FF could spend a whole year fighting in the microverse and only minutes would pass back in the 616.  Right?  Only that’s not what happened.  No.  In order for time to pass faster in the outer world, as happened in the story, then during the two years since Peter and the FF left only minutes or days would have passed in the microverse, not a generation.  How could editorial miss this?  And how could Slott devote so many pages to painstakingly explaining it wrong to the reader?  I know that if I tried to write a detailed explanation of the plot device I probably would have figured out that it didn’t work long before the artwork was ever finished.

Next is the whole explanation around Peter’s new status quo resulting from the terrible One More Day storyline.  Are we to believe that Peter remembers everything?  Or only some things from before the Mephisto-mindwipe?  I assume that this will be explored in-depth later on, so I’ll give that a pass for now.  But still it was rather tiresome to have Peter reveal his ID in two different comics using two different sets of logic in the same month.  Can we assume that numerous memories came rushing back (whatever that means) to the Avengers as well?

The art was uneven and the change in styles was distracting, but relative to the poor dialogue, incoherent plot device, and annoying plot developments, that was the least terrible part of this issue.  I can only assume that next issue will be better.  In the meantime, my word for this issue is: disappointing.