For the first time in a long time, (at least since the beginning of OMD, or BND, or whatever letters you want to use) a Spidey story has felt like it mattered. Huzzah! I generally try to avoid giving bonus points to a book for "lack of suckiness," but it happened here. Okay, this is going to be long, but I feel I need to defend myself here.

I have generally hated the BND stories up to this point. It's not that I hate change in comic books, but this just felt like the epitome of regression. The writers/editors have intentionally kept the readers in the dark about Peter's past, like who knows what about him, and basically everything that happened to him from the point where he got his powers to the first issue of BND. It's as if they're afraid of establishing something that they won't be able to change later on. Um, isn't that kind of important to figure out BEFORE you completely reboot a character and his history. Was splitting him up with MJ THAT important that it superseded everything else? I really, really hope Quesada didn't burst into a room, yell, "Split them up! Oh, and no deaths or divorces!" then walked out while all the writers sat around looking at each other and shrugging. It feels like they went, "Okay, we'll split them up and figure out the rest as we go." Ugh.

So, okay, back to this being a regression. Is anyone honestly enjoying Pete having a generally crappy life and being an overall loser? I'm not. I have my own housing/job/money problems. No one's going to line up to see "Spider-Man IV: Spider-Man Gets Fired." I realize that it's a 'character development' issue and it makes him more relatable to average readers, but changing it just for the sake of making the character more relatable, and not to make better stories, is just a bad idea. Peter's personal problems in the earliest issues of Spider-Man actually stemmed from his character and his actions, and that's why they worked. Aunt May has no job + Uncle Ben dead + Peter is a teenager and has no skills, references, or career = money problems. Peter is in high school/early college = girl problems. The problems in BND feel like they're only there via editorial mandate. Problem: Peter needs money problems. Solution?: Have someone buy out the Bugle, have Peter get on his bad side, which in turn gets him blacklisted. Or, Problem: Peter needs girl problems. Solution?: Have the devil annul his marriage to save the life of his aunt (who looks like death warmed over, by the way.) The problems are forced, and quite frankly, ridiculous. I don't know about anyone else, but my girl problems generally arise from me blowing money on comics and/or generally being an idiot, not selling my soul to Satan. Not very relatable there, Mr. Parker.

And this slate of brand new villains has just been, well, lame. Did you learn nothing from the X-Men, Marvel. You can't just add twenty new characters in a year and oversaturate the market. Then nobody cares about any of them. There were, what, fifteen, maybe twenty X-Men until the 90's? Then there were, I don't know, a skajillion? (I thought it would be appropriate to borrow a word from the new X-Men book that I hated.) None of them mattered, and there was another editorial mandate to get rid of them. You could have at least sprinkled in a few classic villains here and there, guys. You can have one or two new villains every now and then (and you should) but you can't do eight in a row. It just doesn't work. I don't care in the slightest about any of these new bad guys.

Okay, so there's why BND has sucked thus far. So why was this issue better? Well, I'll go back to my complaints. Filling in at least some gaps in Peter's past? Check. At least we know his origin story and early history is the same (I know, small consolation, but still), and that Norman Osborne apparently still knows his secret identity. Pete's personal problems having realistic causes and/or he's actually trying to solve them and stop whining about them? Check. Hey, at least he's got a "new" job. I say "new" because it's the same job he had, with the exact same people... I'm glad we wasted months getting to that point. Less than three new villains and/or old villains? Check. I think there were only two newbies in here: Menace and Mr. Negative, which were probably the strongest ones anyway, and we get Eddie Brock plus the Green Goblin and the Thunderbolts.

So, yeah, this issue wasn't fantastic or anything, but for the first time since BND started, I'm glad the next issue is coming out next week instead of, well, the last ones could have come out never and I really wouldn't have missed them.