Since I've been reading a lot of comics over the past couple of months, I thought I'd make a few posts about most of them and give my basic opinion on each of them.
Post #1: Spider-Girl #½-24 & Annual 1999
Before I begin, I'd just like to recount my own personal history involving this series.
To make a long story short, Ben Reilly was my Spider-Man growing up as a kid in the '90s and I was completely pissed off when he was re-retconned back into a clone, ignominously killed off, and re-replaced by Peter. In hindsight, I realize the Clone Saga was 70% crap and that Ben should never have been retconned into being the original Peter in the first place, but still, I was angry and disappointed that a character I sympathized with and enjoyed reading about was all but erased from existence as if he had never been (I'm still angry about it, to be perfectly honest, but that's another story for another time.).
Anyway, even though my Spider-Man was dead and dust filling someone's ashtray, I continued to read the books. While I'll admit they weren't all that bad -- at least not in the beginning -- they just didn't hold the same spark for me. The sudden, abrupt departure of too many regular artists at one time -- Mark Bagley, Sal Buscema, and Dan Jurgens -- also left me feeling as if I'd been picked up and dropped into a whole 'nother universe that was weird and strange to me.
Moving on, my dissatisfaction for the Spidey titles kicked into overdrive when two things happened: Norman Osborn became a poor man's Lex Luthor who was everywhere all the time and Aunt May was "resurrected". The latter development, in particular, left me feeling sick inside; that was when it fully sunk in that nothing that ever happened in comics mattered a damn because anything progressive -- anything that caused characters to actually grow and change -- that a creator could ever bring to the table was just going to be swept under the rug once another creator who hated it came along (I'm looking at you, Mr. John "The-Status-Quo-Is-God-Unless-I-Don't-Want-It-To-Be" Byrne.).
Suffice it to say, my status as a Spidey fan was pretty much dead at the time and I had all but given up reading the comics. Then I happened to see the comic above on the spinner rack of one of the local grocery stores.
As a typically sexist boy who thought girls were icky, I didn't read many comics focusing of superheroines. Truth be told, I probably wouldn't have bothered picking up the comic above save for one thing: the Ben Reilly suit. Yep, I bought the comic because of the suit Spider-Girl was wearing, a suit belonging to my Spider-Man, the Spider-Man the writers had decided to treat -- and dispose of -- like shit. My interest piqued, I just had to take a look through it.
Suffice it to say (again), Spider-Girl turned out to be the exact comic I needed to read at the time. There was no angsty bullshit about Osborns and Goblins and genetically engineered actresses, there was just a lot of action and humour and a respect for what had came before. Having re-read those comics now, at the point in my life where I am now surrounded by a bunch of deconstructed, decompressed garbage written for stupid man-children who like seeing their favourite characters derailed, assassinated, and raped, that opinion has only been reinforced a hundredfold.
tl;dr version: I love these comics -- I love the characters, I love the humour, and I love the lack of brutal violence, gore, and stupid decompression -- and I'm going to continue reading the series until the final issue. Then, if things are still running smoothly, I'm going to move on to the spinoff titles Amazing Spider-Girl and Spectacular Spider-Girl.
