"Whatever happend to the daughter of Spider-Man?"
Talents: Tom DeFalco & Ron Frenz, Sal Buscema(finishes), Gotham(c)
Publisher: Marvel
The tensile strength of May Parker's web strengthens in this new series of the fan-favorite character Spider-Girl. Amazing Spider-Girl feels as fresh as a summer breeze after a particularly cold and drab winter. Tom DeFalco chooses to chuck the second person narrative that became one of the book's signatures and instead relates the narration through May Parker's first-person point of view. This makes Amazing Spider-Girl not just amazing but more friendly.
The addition of Sal Buscema to the artwork gives the book a much sharper and overall more precise look. Buscema's art meshes effortlessly with Ron Frenz's preliminaries and his visual storycrafting ability. Their combined techniques make the action frenetic as well as what can only be described as Marvel. May exhibits the type of kinetic energy we're used to seeing from Spider-Man of the seventies, arguably his Renaissance period.
Frenz has changed a few elements of May's character design. He gives her a new hairstyle that signifies her more mature look and behavior. He makes her a little happier now that she has a new lease on life, courtesy of advancement and the desire to live a normal life free of the webs. We know that she will once more don the uniform of Spider-Girl, but for now May seems extremely happy, and hopefully the happiness will not go away when she returns to costumed duty.
The addition of a colorist who isn't colorblind also helps this book immensely, and gone are the computer special effects such as the annoying blurring to denote speed that we can consider an experiment failed.
While half the book focuses on the newly energized May Parker, and introduces her supporting cast without the clunk of exposition, DeFalco and Frenz soon get her into action in a plausible way, and if you read the narration--which you should--you can see that May loves the thrill of it all as well as the want to do good. I highly recommend Amazing Spider-Girl for new readers and faithful fans.
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