Anghus Houvouras reviews The Superior Foes of Spider-Man #1…
“Boomerang and some of Spidey’s deadliest baddies prove that with terrible powers come terrible responsibilities! Rising Star Nick Spencer teams with Eisner Award winning sensation Steve Lieber for a walk on the Spider-Verse’s evil side!“
Some of my favorite comic titles are the ones that pluck a few characters from obscurity and put them into their own book. Like Keith Giffen’s exceptional run on Justice League International, or the various incarnations of DC’s Suicide Squad. Marvel has had equal success with Thunderbolts.
Let’s be honest: Second rate characters are just more fun. They don’t have the same expectations or constraints as the A-List characters. Give me a book like Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye over any of the nineteen series Wolverine is starring in.
The same ‘second rate’ logic applies to the new title Superior Foes of Spider-Man from the team of writer Nick Spencer and Art by Steve Lieber and Rachelle Rosenberg. The ‘Superior’ foes are anything but. A group of villains who can barely make ends meet and whose attempts at crime are laughable at best.
Boomerang is behind bars after his most recent encounter with Spider-Man. A villain who has suffered many indignities over his colorful career. All he has left is a few tenuous friendships with other villains including Speed Demon, The Shocker, The Beetle, and Overdrive. A group of sloppy would be criminal kingpins can barely pull off a routine robbery. Boomerang attempts to organize these misfits from behind bars and use them as pawns in a plan to curry favor with a much more menacing criminal. Not being the sharpest knives in the drawer, things don’t go according to plan. When they get mixed up with Hammerhead, things go from bad to worse.
Superior Foes of Spider-Man is equal parts crime noir and comedy. It reads like an old pulp mystery novel and the characters feel like they could inhabit the same creative space as the cast of Seinfeld. This is a fantastic first issue and with one issue joins the ranks of Marvel books like Hawkeye, FF, and Daredevil as wonderfully character driven books brimming with personality.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published July 4, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
