Like a great many comic book fans of a certain age I have been known to rail against Brian Michael Bendis' dialogue diarrhoea. It's as though once he starts typing his own particular brand of strained superhero banter he just can't stop and very soon a page of artistic panels is drowning in a cavalcade of word balloons.
However, the one notable time this style actually worked for me was his handling of the Ultimate Spider-Man line and so this landmark crossover title worked for me in that respect.
Spider-Men sees Peter Parker of mainstream Marvel Earth-616 transported to the Ultimate universe where the young Peter Parker was shot and killed and a kid named Miles Morales has taken up the Spider-Man mantle.
The interplay between 'our' Peter Parker and the world of the Ultimates - where the name of Peter Parker is held in reverence by the people of New York - is fantastic.
Not only do we get the light-hearted interplay between Peter and the Ultimates (their equivalent of The Avengers), but the emotional exchanges between Peter and that universe's Aunt May and Gwen Stacey - confronted by an adult version of the young man they know to be dead.
Even though this particular scene takes up the better part of a whole issue out of the five issue mini-series, it is handled with the deftness Bendis brought to Ultimate Spider-Man rather than his excruciating banter that kept me away from The Avengers titles for so long.
If this story has a weakness it is its choice of villain - Mysterio. Already a rather lame member of Spider-Man's rogues gallery it is never explained how he obtained the tech to breach the walls between dimensions. Given that this opens up a rather large avenue for future storytelling, it would have been nice to have been told how such a pathetic villain got his hands on such powerful technology... and who built it in the first place.
However, Spider-Men isn't really about the traditional 'hero vs villain' dichotomy, it's about Peter Parker being a 'fish out of water' in a very peculiar world that is both familiar and alien at the same time. This it does brilliantly.
As a side-note, there's nothing here about the Miles Morales' Spider-Man that makes me regret dropping Ultimate Spider-Man when that Peter died.
Not only does Miles' Spider-Man have a very different powerset, but for me Spider-Man can only be Peter Parker and vice versa.
I could only ever see the character as a short-term gimmick - akin to the time after Superman's death when other 'Supermen' came out of the woodwork or when Dick Grayson dons the Batman costume - and I'd always be waiting for Peter to return.
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