When I first saw that they were going to put in a ‘Superior Spider-Man Team-Up’ issue during the events, I was a little confused. We just saw him hanging out during the event in ‘Mighty Avengers’ #1 with Luke Cage and crew to form a temporary(?) new Mighty Avengers team to beat down the alien threat against New York.
So how does this possibly fit in? Well, right off the bat and at the end of the comic they actually address it! Spider-Man starts the fight off with Cage and goes off to deal with superior problems that one of his spider-bots notified him of. He swings off to take down some aliens and at the same time a college girl (whose anti-technology) gets powers similar to Electro and can turn herself into lightning.
We spend a few pages on how Spidey teaches her the basics of her power and she renames herself Fulmina. Sweet, an electricity using superhero to help take out the alien menace. Sounds like the perfect plan! He also teaches her how to use power lines to head back into New York with him and we fast forward to Spidey meeting back up with Cage.
So now it’s time for the real team-up to start, right? Well not exactly. This is the time where Fulmina decides she has a mind of her own (a very non-logical one) and thinks that an alien invasion that can wipe out Earth doesn’t matter. Instead, she is going to just get rid of all of the planet’s electricity to make life go back to simpler times.
Yes. That’s right. There are aliens invading the planet and the solution is to remove the power source to the only weapons that are even slightly slowing it down. It’s not the aliens that are the problem, it’s the technology on our world. It’s time to get back to basics and I guess being able to defend ourselves against a fleet of aliens who want to destroy the planet can wait until that is taken care of.
That makes all the sense in the world.
I’m not quite sure why they felt the need to make this an ‘Infinity’ tie-in as, aside from some aliens who are soundly getting their behinds kicked by our heroes, there seems to be nothing else alien themed about this. Unless, of course, we find out in the next issue that it’s alien tech that somehow made Fulmina the way she was.
Honestly, I felt their handling of her was extremely quick in the introduction and that they made her seem almost too simple and weak for a character. That almost could be taken as sexist in the handling of how she thinks. At least this one isn’t in a skimpy outfit.
Ideally there will only be one more ‘Infinity’ tie-in issue for the ‘Superior Spider-Man Team-Up’ line. While I’ll probably pick it up, my interest is pretty low while I impatiently await for the book to get back to what I feel is it’s true course – a Superior Sinister Six.
Writer: Rob Rodi
Artist: Mike Del Mundo
