1:100 Ghost-Spider: Dog Days Are Over by Seanan McGuire

 Gwyn Stacy, the Spider-Woman of Universe 65, has been outed in her own universe which makes leading anything resembling a normal life impossible. She just wants to go to school and get an education without the hassle so decides to jump over to the regular Marvel universe, 616, and go to school at Empire State University with the help of Peter Parker. So during the day, Gwyn can be found in U-616's ESU doing the school thing but then she returns home to U-65 for homework, band practice, and crime fighting. Unfortunately, jumping between dimensions has the additional problem of having two versions of Miles Warren after her. The one from her home dimension wants to take her out and the one from U-616 seems to have the hots for the Gwyn Stacy of his universe who is no longer and is willing to transfer his affections to this new one.  Neither seems to be ideal for Gwyn's plans.

As stated before, I have only recently started reading Marvel comics and even then tend to limit to characters I'm interested in by authors I like. I just don't have the time or brain power to deal with the constant reboots and artwork/story lines that don't work for me so I tend to not know a lot of the backstories or previous information. This means that I'm kind of lost on what is up with either version of Miles Warren in this collection. There is enough filled in that I have an idea but not much more than that. Also not really sure what is up with Jameson and the Man-Wolf. Again, there was enough that I could figure out basic motivations but there is obviously a lot that I am missing. It made certain things less clear so this was less enjoyable than the last couple of volumes I read. I think a little less time spent on setting up the cross-dimensional stuff and a little more on understanding these villains motivations would have helped tremendously.

Page count: 112p/112p ytd/347,493p lifetime

94:100 Spider-Gwyn: Ghost-Spider Vol.1: Spidergeddon by Seanan McGuire & Rosi Kampe

Gwyn is generally just trying to kick it on her Earth, do band stuff, catch bad guys, the usual, when she gets pulled into another dimension and her usual transport back to her own seems to be broken. She hooks up with that universe's Peter Parker and Mary Jane only to find out that in this universe, Gwyn has turned into the Gwyn-Goblin and Peter and MJ want Spider-Gwyn to help them get their friend back.

That covers the first couple of issues in this graphic novel. The rest is dealing with the deaths of different Spiders across the multi-verse and Gwyn volunteers to help let those universes that have lost their Spiders know what happened to them so they aren't left wondering. By the end of that, she is feeling lost and deciding to stay home for a while but that's when Spider-Ham shows up and convinces her that she has to come with him.

So full disclosure, I'm not a huge comic fan (that's my husband). I enjoy the movies but really, my only true comic love has been Elfquest (seriously, go check it out. It's AMAZING!) but my husband keeps bringing stuff into the house and I've started picking out certain ones that I'm interested in. My interest is really simple; I have to have a reason to like the character before I even consider reading the comic, the artwork has to be at least reasonable (if it's too messy or ugly in my opinion, I can't get over it and will walk away without reading it no matter how good the story might be), and I tend to go for comics written by authors I like.  This means that I generally have zero idea of the other storylines that are going on with that particular character and how things all work together and I'm ok with that.

That being said, my first exposure to Spider-Gwyn was from the "Into the Spidervsere" movie.  I thought she was fun so when I saw that Seanan McGuire, a favorite author, was writing a comic series for her, I was in. I have zero knowledge of how this ties in with any other comics about Spider-Gwyn. The story was entertaining and didn't make me feel lost (which I appreciated) and the art was generally fine.  I'll keep going with this series.




Page count: 112p/22,711p ytd/331,408p lifetime