Volume 25: Spider-Man: Blue

Spider-Man: Blue

Author: Jeph Loeb  |  Illustrator: Tim Sale

"[M]aybe by chance, or maybe God has a sense of humour and we're all part of the joke."

Blue is the story of how Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy fell in love, and of how Peter's life seems to him a pendulum that swings repeatedly from good times to bad times. He tries to rationalise the situation by seeing the bad as being a necessary precursor to the good.

It's split into two distinct time periods that work in tandem.

The first is a confessional memoir narrated by Peter in what I'm going to call the present. It mostly takes the form of text boxes (captions) that sit inside the frame and act like a v/o in a film. They're spoken by a Peter that's endured hardship - a Peter that's developed a deeper understanding of his purpose and the dangers inherent in it.

The second time period is a visual retelling of past events. The art and speech bubbles that make up the majority of the frame depict what happened or was said in the past. They show a Peter early in his career as Spider-Man; he's less mature and therefore less acutely aware of how tragedy can shape and scar an individual.

The past and the present exist as one within the same frame and together they tell the full story.

Even though the pictures fill the majority of the page, it's the captions that carry most of the weight and the reason the story works so well. If they were absent it wouldn't need to be retold. Jeph Loeb tinkers with the original very slightly but there's no major retcon happening. I'm willing to bet that, by the end, more people than not will be glad that he did what he did, particularly if you can relate emotionally.

My belief that the art is respectfully subordinate to the text doesn't mean the art is weak. On the contrary, Tim Sale's style is a perfect match for Loeb's words. His colour-blindness doesn't seem to be a handicap at all. His lines are bold and his blacks are striking.

He seems to have a filmmaker's eye. If his frames were taken verbatim to a screen they would make dynamic eye-candy; most likely even better than any of the live-action Spider-Man films that exist at time of writing.

The book collects together Spider-Man: Blue #1–6.
The events that Blue reference can be found in The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #43-48 and 63.

Verdict: