Runner Up: Miles Morales: Spider-Man #8 (Legacy #248) – Saladin Ahmed, Javier Garrón, David Curiel and Travis Lanham
Something about black people and being experimented on makes me uncomfortable.
In the last issue, Miles was captured by some sort of weird teleporting being after helping Bombshell fight off some ridiculously strong robots. This issue begins with him in some dark room, strapped to some kind of operating table with a heart beat monitor and only a creepy robot-thing to keep him company.
Miles looks absolutely terrified. Not only because he doesn’t know where he is or who captured him, but the robot interacting with him says that its boss, The Assessor, will target Miles’ family and friends if he doesn’t comply. Miles agrees to the experiments and tests if only just to keep them safe.
The Assessor tests his combat, speed and climbing abilities and pushes Miles to his absolute limits. He’s run ragged in a way that is seldom seen except in cases where the threat is life or death. It goes on and on for an undetermined amount of time until Miles wakes up in an operating room where doctors discuss his DNA and maybe kidnapping his family for more subjects.
This angers and scares Miles into breaking free, beating up the doctors and defeating the teleporting enemy from before to make his grand escape.
Only… it turns out to be another test.
Saladin Ahmed absolutely nailed this issue with his focus on the bleakness and fear in Miles and the situation he’s in. He made me genuinely terrified to turn the pages and see the next torture Miles would have to go through. Ahmed writes Miles like the scared teenage superhero that he is, he’s hopeful, but frantic in the face of an enemy that knows who he is and how to hurt him.
Javier Garrón and David Curiel do their best to nail the unsettling feeling of the sanitized experimental environment that Miles finds himself in and utilize panel layouts to make the book even more terrifying.
Every blank space around each panel is black compared to the normal white. Every panel is also small and feels claustrophobic, leaning heavily into the nature of the facility Miles finds himself in. In it’s own way, it’s clean and very structured to the point where it feels like you could be trapped reading the book.
I also feel like there’s something here in the fact that it’s the black Spider-Man being experimented on. Of course Pete has been poked and prodded every which way for years, but the way that the doctors and the robot were talking about Miles, made him seem less than human. He was never called a kid, just “the Subject.”
Truly there are three absolutely horrifying pages in this issue. The first is where Miles has been ordered to sleep and he’s shrouded in darkness aside from his face and the heartbeat monitor. The other is the double page spread of about 18 – 26 panels of Miles running, fighting, being scared, bleeding and all of the tortures he’s put through while captured.
This issue is a high recommend because it’s a well written and fantastically drawn chapter in this Miles Morales run. Saladin Ahmed draws heavily from his Black Bolt series in terms of storytelling and Garrón makes it all so real and visceral. As far as this run goes, this issue and the one prior are pretty good starting points if you’ve missed the rest!
Ty Talks Comics 