Spider-Girl Volume 1 Issue 1

Choices
October 1998
Written by Tom DeFalco

May "Mayday" Parker is still trying to reason with her new found powers and whether or not she should continue to use them in a superhero capacity. She begins to "research" Spider-Man and ends up talking to her fathers assistant, Phil Urich. Phil informs her the legacy of Spider-Man as some speculate, about how a freak accident lead to his creation and how he was first in entertainment until a burglar he let go killed someone close to him. Before long, Peter shows up and, as he, May, and Captain Ruiz are leaving the precinct, Peter and May feel their spider-sense tingling. A suspicious man begins to follow Peter and Captain Muiz, but May ambushes the man into an alley. Scurrying up a wall, she avoids letting the man see her as she tails him as he goes into a clothing store. She decides to leave the man be since he didn't commit any crime that she saw. Back at school, her friend Davida Kirby tries to get her to loosen up by going to the mall after basketball practice, but May is down because she starts to feel using her powers on the court is too much of an advantage to exploit.

At home over dinner, Peter talks about how he is working on a case with mobsters dealing with the fashion industry. May begins to think there may be a connection with the man since he went into a clothing store. Donning a make-shift black costume and using some web shooters she kept hidden, she takes to the city. Infiltrating the clothing store, she finds her man, Shaky, being grilled by his employer, the masked Mr. Nobody. She takes them on until Captain Ruiz and the police show up. May makes it out the window and Mr. Nobody is able to teleport out as well. Mr. Nobody then shows up in the prison cell of none other than the Kingpin to tell him about what happened. Back at the Parkers, May waits in her room, pretending to be asleep, for Peter to come and talk to her. He doesn't and over the next few days, she begins work on her very own costume as the issue comes to an end.

I like this one a bit more than the What If for some reason. I think maybe because the issue was able to work with the fact that it is a series now and doesn't have to contain itself to one issue. I like to see the inner struggle that May is going through, but sometimes the narration bugs me with using the term "You"; why can't she just say "I". I don't want to be her, I want her to be her. I think the Kingpin is certainly an interesting choice to have as her first baddie in the series, and can see Mr. Nobody being more interesting, especially if he is somebody from the Marvel past. Again, I like the art style a lot and actually enjoyed her first self-created costume; sort of a sexy black-and-white Spidey suit. Again, the conversations with Davida (changed from Roberta, I guess) feel weird with the "girlfriend" slang, since this is apparently fifteen years after the 1990's, when that speech was popular. Now, in 2007, you don't hear that kind of talk. Overall, an enjoyable first issue

Score: 4 / 5