Over the course of ‘Superior Spider-Man Team-Up’ and from prior comics Doc Ock has been collecting his old partners in crime and trapping them. Why has he been imprisoning his old crew? Well, he wants to get the gang back together! Though instead of having the Sinister Six, Spidey wants to bring forth his own super-hero team in the Superior Six! Who needs to be a part of The Avengers if he has his own team at his beck and call, right? Quite literally too, as he’s implanted them all with mind control devices.
Only near the end of ‘Superior Spider-Man Team-Up’ #6 did the moment we were all waiting for happened. He lost control of his new team when Sun Girl appeared to go a bit super nova. With all of the team members not free and with a pure hatred for Spider-Man, he is quickly taken out and tied up. While the man pretending to be Mysterio just wants to go home, everyone else is ready to kill Spidey with Chameleon going so far as to say he was going to take his face and kill everyone that he ever knew. Electro, Vulture, and Sandman, though, are all willing to take down the man who has been keeping them imprisoned or under mind control for quite some time.
When you get a bunch of super villains who mostly didn’t like you in the first place to really hate you, you should know there is going to be superior problems.
So that bit about being killed doesn’t happen. The villains fall into the usual pattern of far too much taunting and not enough doing. What does happen is Sun Girl comes back to save the day. First by helping Spidey get loose and then by taking out the device that Electro had just powered which could have killed everyone in New York. In the end? Sandman, the only almost OK villain of the bunch, says part of him that believed in Spider-Man was dead and Sun Girl who has realized this is all Spidey’s fault is disgusted that he was her inspiration to be a hero.
Doc Ock finally cops to the fact that he made a mistake and vows that from now on he will be a superior super-hero and not make this type of mistake again. You almost get the feeling that he hasn’t actually learned a thing from his mistake here. In the end, his ex-teammates have been defeated. I suspect nothing will come of them trying to say that Spidey had been controlling them all along and it’s doubtful he’ll have a chance to recapture them for himself with the authorities already onsite.
It’s been an interesting run, but the build-up felt far too big for just three issues. I honestly felt a bit let down with how quickly this was resolved. Hopefully it’ll all be coming back to bite Doc Ock down the line even worse. Though, with everything about to go a little green with Goblin problems, I don’t suppose it’ll be in the near future. It wasn’t a bad book but it was by no means superior to the last few issues and, if I might say, it ended on an inferior note. It’s a shame as I’ve been loving Yost’s work on run and have been mostly preferring this to the mainstream title.
SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN TEAM-UP #7
Writer: Christopher Yost
Artist: Marco Checchetto
