During the review process I sometimes come across a startlingly brilliant book, but at times I might come across an atrocious one as well. If we simply put up reviews of the great stuff then this wouldn’t really be much of a true reflection of what is really out there in your local comic shop. So here is a book which you might have thought of picking up, Spider Girl , and why unfortunately it sits in my pile of comics under “Atrocious – use as firewood next winter”

I think I’ll dissect this comic via positives and negatives, oops maybe not, only really two positives to find in this one and one of them has nothing to do with this actual issue anyway. The point I’m labouring on about is the following, the first positive about Spidergirl 56 is that it starts of with a nice section on the first page telling us what was previously happening in the story, this is really great as I jumped right into the middle of the current story arc. The negative is that this is simply something Marvel has been doing in most of it’s latest books to make the stories more accessible to new readers. So this isn’t really an individual positive for Spidergirl as such.

Ok on to the second positive point, I was astonished to find that the colouring in this book is done by none other than Udon Studios. The reason why I say astonished is because it really isn’t that good. Udon is normally one of my favourites, but here they just seem to be the wrong guys for the job. Most recently they have done stunning work on the Robotech mini-series; maybe they should just stick to Manga style stuff. The two-tone style colouring at play in this book just doesn’t work well with the pencils and inks. Most Udon stuff is very rich and bright in tone and their use of a somewhat dampened palette here leaves the art looking bland and boring.

So now that we have the positives out of the way lets move on to the negatives. Pink thought bubbles? With a Spiderman costumed eye peeking out? Wow how eighties. Not much else to say there. The main villain looks like something out of the Gummy Bears, yep he’s that bad. Makes me want to laugh, which for a criminal is not a good thing. The character design is just so bad its unbelievable, a bunch of fellow heroes come to Spidergirl’s aid during the story, and trust me when I tell you this, this has to be the worst character/costume design I have ever seen since 1981 or so. Are we in the year 2003? Someone please tell Pat Olliffe, or whoever designed these characters originally.

The story is weak, maybe not as weak as the artwork but nonetheless not really any good. One of my favourite lines from this story says it all, the main villain in the book spots Spidergirl and says the following: “Gaze upon my face and know despair eternal…for I am Seth, the Serpent God of Death!” Oooooh start running it’s Seth, yep that’s right not anything more or less than… Seth. Hmmmm ok anyway if I carry on reviewing this it’s going to get really ugly.

Basically I picked this up on a sale, if you see this on sale you’ll now know why and hopefully stay well clear. Bad artwork, pretty much useless story and the most awful characters this side of the Smurfs. Don’t buy it, don’t even take it if someone offers it to you for free [because they probably will :}] just run away…fast!

Score:0/10

Written By: Iain Duncan