Do you like how conglomerates ruled over everything, awesome architecture, and crazy colors of Blade Runner? Like Spider-Man? If you’ve answered yes to one or both of those questions this book may be for you.

Spider-Man 2099 was written back in the beginning of the 90s or as I sometimes call them the “Dark Times.”  Now I’ve been known to joke about this on the forums, twitter, and with friends about how the 90s produced tons of crap and almost destroyed the industry.  On the other hand we did get gems such as this.  Spider-Man 2099 was a great combination of talent for the time and evidence that the entire decade wasn’t bad.

Peter David, who more recently adapted some of Steven King’s The Gunslinger into comic form, is the writer for this book.  He does a great job of making our protagonist, Miguel O’Hara, different from Peter Parker, but keeps him to the core of the character’s mantra.  We all know it and it’s of course in this book early on.  The major difference between the two is what drives them.  Peter was driven by the loss of his uncle.  Miguel is driven by self preservation.

Early on in this book Miguel decides to leave one of the giant conglomerates, Alchemax, that now rule the world.  This happens after Alchemax start moving Miguel’s work further ahead than he wishes.  The results are disastrous, to say the least, and anyone will agree that it’s a good reason to leave.  When he lets his boss, Tyler Stone who has the feel of Norman Osborne/Lex Luthor, know that it’s time for him to leave his boss slips him a drug.  This drug happens to bond to a person’s DNA making them an addict for life.  Miguel uses his research to overcome the drug, but of course an “accident” happens.

The book is really a fight against what our world seems to be eventually evolving into, when reading it I thought of the opening of Fight Club how everything will be named after big companies.  Miguel becomes Spider-Man as I said, out of self preservation.  He needs to keep Alchemax off of his trail otherwise he’ll become a victim of experimentation and their property.  Along the way he helps people because it’s the right thing to do and he has the power to do it or “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.”

The art is done by Rick Leonardi, who is currently the artist for Vigilante.  His art in this book is really something you need to see.  Somehow Leonardi manages to really hit the Spider-Man look.  All of the characters in this book look distinct.  For instance the Vulture in this book is not only a new original take, but he has a new look to go along.  Miguel’s brother, Gabe, doesn’t get lost in the background with other characters.  As I mentioned just describing how great I thought his art was in Spider-Man 2099 doesn’t do it justice.

For those of you who think the costume may be stupid… please stop and take a look at most Superhero costumes.  It’s from a Day of the Dead festival that the main character went to in Mexico.  I really like this costume because it’s simplistic, but not too much, and different from the original Spider-Man‘s while keeping some of the original feel.

As I mentioned earlier this book is full of crazy colors.  I don’t know what it is with the future, but the colors are bright and vibrant.  Some of the pages in this book remind me of Star Wars books in the early 90s from Dark Horse, out of control.  If there was one thing I would have liked to see Marvel do with this book it would have been to recolor it.  Nothing to drastic, just tone it down just a little bit.  The cover is a great example of what they could have done.

Lastly would be the overall quality of this book.  I think for a 29.99 book with only 10 issues this should be a hardcover with nice glossy pages.  This book instead is a floppy trade and there is nothing special about the print quality.  It may be that Marvel didn’t think this book was going to sell well and wanted to try and make something off of it.  The reason I say this is that I recently bought Nova Annihilation which had a cover price of 34.99, it had three more issues, was hardcover, and nice glossy pages.  On the other hand at instocktrades.com it’s less than 20 dollars for this book, which is more than worth it.

As I said if you like Spider-Man and Blade Runner I think you’ll like Spider-Man 2099.