Review: Spider-Noir recaptures the magic of a bygone era

Nicolas Cage was born to play 1930s PI Ben Reilly/The Spider: part Bogey, part Bugs Bunny, 100% Cage-y.

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[Thad Boyd]

This problem is what made me stop reading Marvel and DC comics to almost entirely focus on creator owned stories. It might be fun to check in on what Spiderman is up to, then every like 11 months their stories get crossovers with a bunch of other BS I don't care about and I end up spending too much time wiki diving to figure out what the heck is going on.

One of the reasons I've been recommending Invincible since it was still in publication was that, aside from short unimportant cameos by other Image characters, it was a superhero comic where you didn't need to know anyone who was not already introduced in the book you were reading.

There's a Kurt Busiek quote I think of often: "The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it’s about the cake after all."

 

[Thad Boyd]

You can't wow me with black-and-white visuals

No? Not Orson Welles or Howard Hawks or John Huston or James Whale? Not German expressionism or the photography of Ansel Adams or the house falling down around Buster Keaton? Not Fleischer Brothers Popeye or Mouse: PI for Hire? Yes to the animated version of Akira but no to the manga?

Well shit, man, completely leaving aside the merits of Spider-Noir it sounds like you're unmoved by a lot of genuine visual grandeur.

 

[Thad Boyd]

Lots of smoking. Period accurate, but perhaps something for parents to consider.

I'd say as far as what I'm concerned about my kid seeing I'm probably less worried about smoking than a guy getting tortured to death in the first episode, but yeah I suppose the smoking is more imitable.