Sinister War

One for the big-time Marvel fanboys.

Basically we have Spider-Man here taking on nearly every enemy he’s ever had. Or, as he puts it, it’s “a battle royal with every single baddie who’s ever looked at me sideways.” Some of these I had never heard of. Who was this Morlun guy? He seemed important. What’s with the yellow lizard? I had to do a search to find out he’s called the Dragon King. I never did figure out what his super powers were. There are so many villains on parade that sometimes they just have to be introduced as the teams they’re a part of: the Sinister Six, the Savage Six, the Sinister Syndicate, the Superior Foes, etc. They come flying off of splash pages so filled with figures they don’t even register as individuals. But at the end of the day, as with most battle royals, they end of spending most of their time just milling around in the background.

The guy behind all of this is Kindred, and if you don’t know who he is then I don’t have time to fill you in because it’s complicated. Really complicated. Basically he’s a supernatural figure with demonic powers, including the ability to send centipedes into people’s ears and control their minds, sort of like the slugs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kindred has assembled this all-star team of supervillains (even raising some of them from the dead) to make Spider-Man pay for his sins. Or something. They all go along with it because they think Kindred has the power to send them to hell. I don’t know if Kindred can actually do this. I also don’t know what sort of hell it is we’re talking about. There’s talk of souls and punishment and the like, but there’s no theological content to any of it. It’s just another part of the multiverse I think.

The four-part series collected here was the culmination of a longer story arc by Nick Spencer. At the end they collect some of the teasers from previous issues that helped set things up (but shouldn’t these have been part of a prologue?), and the story went on from here as well, so it’s really all quite confusing unless you’ve been following along pretty closely. Which I hadn’t.

There was too much going on. Which is too bad because I liked the main story arc, which has Doctor Octopus again cast in the anti-hero mold. He’s the one who takes down Kindred at the end, using science. Spider-Man is mainly just a punching bag throughout, only being spared when the bad guys start fighting each other. (Why Kindred didn’t see that was going to happen when he set things up as a competition to kill Spider-Man, I’m not sure.) I didn’t like Mephisto being involved because that only increased the confusion as to what was actually happening. That confusion also had the effect of watering down all the psychodrama involving the Osborn family, which I didn’t understand anyway.

I think this is a problem with the current era of Marvel comics (and the MCU) generally: an inflation in the roster rolls and an increase in complexity that caters to a readership expected to be up on more and more information regarding backstories and different timelines. So if you’re just coming in here, good luck!

Graphicalex