This is the comic I was hoping for when I picked up Models Inc.  The first story focusing with Mary Jane and why she left Hollywood to come back and be a supermodel in New York.  While it does suffer from massive overcoloring (what else is new with Marvel?), it’s a fun story.  And Mary Jane is written as a three-dimensional human being who also happens to be a model.  Her struggle with always playing “the girl” in movies does a great job resonating with her struggle with being “the girl” in her relationships, including her epic breakup with Peter Parker (which we weren’t around to see happen until now).

In the second chapter of the story, Van Lente returns us to the present, where we see Spider-Man through the eyes of one of his more recent enemies.  Well, two, if you count his roommate.  The coloring gets less obtrusive in this story, as it sort of mutes the panels of this mostly actionless chapter.

Chapter three is the new Peter Parker Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places storyline, where this wrong place appears to be Match.com.  There’s a lot of great humor in this story (written by Brian Reed) that I didn’t get in the Van Lente chapters (which were very good, just without a lot of humor).  And while the Spider suit is more vibrant than you’d expect, given the rest of the issue, the coloring just goes to show that isn’t specific colorists oversaturating these stories, it’s someone in the upper-echelon spilling the ink on the page.