Oh, Amazing Spider-Man, do you remember how great you were just twelve short months ago?  You had a stellar array of diverse writers, constantly trying to improve on the previous guy's always great work, along with artists to die for.  You were back to your heydays, as if Lee and Romita never left, or as if Stern was still steering the ship (and sometimes he actually was!).  You were everything I remembered loving as a boy, yet you were fresh and relevant.  Look at you now...

We had a great run, and I thought that if nothing else Slott had a love of the character that's on a par with anyone else and Marcos Martin was still going to be hanging around.  Unfortunately, we all know that Slott wrote some of the weakest Brand New Day storylines and while he's had some brief moments of glory since Big Time, for the most part it's been kind of a directionless, underwhelming mess.  This issue brings to an apparent close the storylines of Mr Negative and Anti-Venom.  They're not great characters anyway and this climax is underwhelming to say the least.  Once more there's a lot of focus on the somewhat dislikeable Carlie Cooper and I'm even feeling that Peter's less than sympathetic under Slott's direction.  Peter Parker, the great everyman that we all used to relate to, now reduced to a shadow of his former self.  The art is lacklustre too, to say the least and I'm left wondering where the permanent rotation of Ramos, Caselli and Martin went to.

So I'm out as of now.  Ultimate Spider-Man continues in a couple of months (and I have this bizarre suspicion that the Ultimate, sympathetic version of Peter is not as gone as we might be led to believe) and I have a feeling that Waid's Daredevil and Rucka's Punisher will likely fulfill the street level Marvel Universe need that I seem to have.  Here's to the next reboot!