When reading, I’m and preparing to write  my comic book review of the amazing Spider-man#16 I found myself asking one key question: “despite what the title of the book says, is this a Spider-man story or a daredevil story?” The two hero’s seemed to share the pages of this story fairly evenly as well as bring to it there key supporting cast. Why was this book written this way? I suspect to draw attention to daredevil and is fairly new title to many fans Spider-man.   Daredevil #1 attempted this same feet by including spider-man on the cover,  and issue #2 even featured a previous Spider-Man Villain as well as including the Fantastic Four.

So while I love the shared universe that marvel brings, the motives of a story also come into consideration, in so much as if they overwhelm the story and in someway make it feel contrived or less good. Thus the root question I end up aways asking myself.

Story

The story did a good job of inter-fusing daredevil, and his supporting cast to the readers. while also introducing him to spider-man (twice).   While the first encounter seems quite forced, as a method of getting daredevil in the story sooner (as Matt Murdock), the main event at the circus seems quite good.  To say that our two hero’s work as a team to take on the Circus of Grime, would be a lie though, while Spider-man definitely needs Daredevil at one point,  in the end it is mostly our web-crawler, with daredevil taking the sidelines after his big heroic moment.

What that does not change, is the fact that I feel this story could have been better written, ( and perhaps published as a Daredevil story;  None of the spider-man cast plays any real role, while Foggy and Karen do.  Even spider-man’s role could have fit well in Daredevil with it advertised as “Daredevil faces Spider-man and the Circus of Crime”. But then,  we get back to the motives; to use the spider-man book to push daredevil.  Thus I feel we made the slight sacrifice of what could have been a great way to tell the same story, and downgraded it just good to keep it in the realm of the spider-man readers.

I would love to hear what you think on this though?  would this story have been exactly the same, better or worse if it was published in Daredevil instead of Spider-Man?

Artwork

I did not find one panel, one clip lacking,  this may even be one of my favorite Steve Ditko spider-man books so far.  he details, the angles, everything just flowed and fit together with perfection.  Take a look at the two action panels I included just below this paragraph with Spider-Man taking on various elements of the Ringmaster’s Circus of Crime. The detail seems to sufficient, while the prospective, and mid action moments seem to greatly spell out just whats happening.