'Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane' Review

Take a look at this! Marvel attempting to make Shoujo. Wow. I've been seeing this thing at the library for months and finally decided to pick it up. It wasn't until I had it checked out that I realized it's actually volume 4 in the series, but it's not hard to follow. Degrassi meets Spider-Man. I can see where the idea of this could sound good. There are so many different characters Peter has had relations with throughout the history of Spider-Man and putting them all in a high school setting sounds interesting. I think this series is very much directed at a target audience and I am not in that audience. They even collect it into a volume like this to make it look like a shoujo series. I mean the color scheme even looks like Fruits Basket!!


Plot Summary

So Peter and MJ aren't together anymore. Now MJ is with Harry and I guess they've also been together in the past but they broke up previously. It seems like every character has dated every other character at some point. Everyone is a whore. Not really. Spider-Man starts hanging out with Firestar and that eventually turns into make out sessions. Liz is having problems with her boyfriend Flash. They actually made Flash out to be a pretty cool guy in this series rather that just the normal Flash Thompson who yells "PARKER!!". MJ and Harry don't want to get serious but they do anyway. This comic is just constantly jumping around between relationships very fast. Warning to all guys thinking about reading this - There is no action. At all. No violence. Nothing. There's one bad guy on one page. Iceman has a random appearance at the end. That's about as Marvel Comics as this thing gets. Felicia Hardy is in it. I don't think she's Black Cat yet? They don't mention it at all. She's just a random whore who wants to screw up everyone else's relationships. She has no heart and wants everyone else's love life to fail. That's what I got out of it. She also speaks in cat metaphors. "Are you feelin' lucky?!" Recurring words like 'catch' 'bad luck' 'thief' 'jinx' and so on. They really lay it on thick. Harry opens up his 'soul' to MJ and admits that he loves her but she still loves Peter deep down. They break up and the comic ends with MJ and Peter on a bench together.

I definitely wouldn't say this series is bad, it's just not that great either...Like a mentioned before, it's all about the target audience. I don't think I'll be reading any more of this series but I'm not horribly disappointed at all. Strangely enough, this was created by two guys. The art style reminds me very much of a female artist, but I suppose the artist might have just been trying to imitate shoujo as best he could. I really didn't like the fact that it's called SPIDERMAN LOVES MARY JANE. I mean, come on, they couldn't think of something better? How about WEB OF ROMANCE? Corny but better, I think. On the back cover it says it's a 'breath of fresh air' and I really can't argue with that. Marvel was definitely branching out and I have to respect that.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane volume 4 - 5.5/10