Spider-Man: Fever #3

by Brendan McCarthy

This has been a terrific little series.  McCarthy's homage to Steve Ditko has been crafted with a great deal of respect and love, and while the story doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense, it is so full of great moments and amusing lines that it's nonsensical nature becomes its greatest strength.

It's really not easy to describe or summarize the plot of this issue.  Basically, Dr. Strange works to rescue Spider-Man's soul from the Arachnix demons that are forcing him to hunt the Soror Fly, which used to be a human being, while he wears the soul of the spider that gave him his powers as a hat.  There are talking dogs and an Aboriginal sorceress.

The comic is worth purchasing simply for the last couple of pages, where Strange and Spidey have some truly inspired dialogue on the nature of The Abyss ("Imagine that you are a wooden chair and the abyss is a termite.  There will come a moment when there is more air than chair."), the tendency of spiders to end up in the bathtub, and the similarity of the way they both hold their hands when they cast a spell or shoot a web.  It's funny how I never noticed that before.

This was a great series.  I'm glad to see Marvel publishing some more experimental and unorthodox stuff like this again.

Spider-Man: Fever #2

by Brendan McCarthy

This really is a cool comic.  Spider-Man's spirit or soul is trapped in some weird spider dimension, and he has to either capture the Sorror Fly, to prove that he's a spider, or the other spider demons are going to eat him.  Meanwhile, Doctor Strange is scouring the Webwaze dimension in order to rescue him.  That's about it, except that Strange chats with some dog creatures and rescues a beautiful woman from a trap, and Spidey has a chat with the spider that bit him, giving him his powers.  Oh, and because it's a Spider-Man comic, he suffers acute feelings of guilt and helplessness.

The story is a throw away, but that's because a comic like this is all about the art.  McCarthy's stuff is always cool, but he does some very neat things with this issue.  I love Spider-Man's desert nomad look, and many of the other design touches he incorporates.  When Doctor Strange is in the dog creature house, their wallpaper is a pattern of cat heads.  Many of the pages are splash pages, and the whole thing looks fantastic.  I would love to see McCarthy do some more superhero work.

Spider-Man: Fever #1

by Brendan McCarthy

Growing up, I was never really a fan of either Steve Ditko or Doctor Strange. I felt that the former's art was often stiff and awkward, and that the latter was always ridiculously over-written and overwrought. (Granted, my first exposures to Ditko were in the later issues of Rom, Spaceknight, around the same time that the covers were by people like Mazzucchelli, Smith, Zeck, and other artists that I really loved at the time, and his stuff looked so childish in comparison. Then there was Speedball.....).

Anyway, I have liked McCarthy since I first came across his work on covers for Shade the Changing Man (the Milligan version, not the Ditko, a connection which I only just made as I typed this). I've tried to follow his work, but so little of it has been in comics. For this reason, I got excited to learn that he was doing a three-issue Spider-Man/Doctor Strange story for Marvel.

Now that I've read it, I can easily say that it's the best Steve Ditko comic I've ever read, in much the same way that Gødland is my favorite Jack Kirby comic.

The book starts with Spider-Man engaging in yet another pointless fight with The Vulture, while back at his house, Doctor Strange gets a book he ordered delivered in the mail. As it turns out, the book is booby-trapped, and he lets loose an ancient spider evil kind of thing to crawl around in the city's drain pipes. Spider-Man ends up in Strange's bathtub, where he is preyed on by an Arachnix Spider-Demon, and gets his soul taken on a Webwaze energy stream into some other dimension.

Things get pretty psychedelic at this point, in the way that McCarthy does best. The book is beautiful and kooky, and pretty enjoyable all around, and the best part is that there are still two issues to go.