[Spione] Spy vs. Guy, Spider-Man vs. Wolverine #1

[James_Nostack]

Spider-Man vs. Wolverine #1 works surprisingly well as a Spione-type Spy vs. Guy story.  For anyone who doesn't want to shell out for a hard copy, it is now available on the Marvel Digital Unlimited service.  (It may also be available on Comixology or other such legitimate sites, as well as elsewhere.)

The art, by Mark Bright, is serviceable but nothing too exciting.  Mainly I'm impressed by the plotting from Jim Owsley (a/k/a Christopher Priest): the story does a decent job juggling the protagonists' inner conflicts, and works very well as both a Wolverine comic and a Spider-Man comic.

The neat thing here is that it's Spy vs. Guy in the sense that it's Wolverine vs. Spider-Man, but each character has his own Spy vs. Guy internal conflict.  Given that any story involving people in spandex is going to be somewhat silly to begin with, Owsley does a pretty good job with the moral ambiguity of the Cold War, using "super heroism" as stand-in for Americans' moral exceptionalism.

One story-telling critique: there is a plot-line here involving long-time Spider-Man supporting character Ned Leeds that gets more-or-less forgotten by the end of the comic. 

One history critique: the character "Charlemagne" lives in a stately mansion "just outside East Berlin," and Wolverine comments that Charlemagne could/should eat at a McDonalds to be less flashy.  I am not sure Jim Owsley understood that "just outside East Berlin" is East Germany.  (I was deeply embarrassed for the American education system that Ron had to spend several pages of Spione explaining this to his audience.  Jesus wept.)

[Ron Edwards]

You should have seen me figuring that out as I ventured into my own research-reading. Those diagrams in the book are doubly embarrassing considering they began life as my own notes to myself.