After months of bizarre mishaps and horrible nightmares, Spider-Man gets checked out by a doctor and is told that he is dying. Upon further analysis by Tony Stark, it is determined that Spider-Man, possibly caused by the same radioactivity that granted him his powers in the first place, is going to die soon.

As if that wasn’t enough, Morlun, a vampire hell-bent on killing Spider-Man and absorbing his life-force, starts making random appearances in Spider-Man’s life and warns him that his time has come.

The interesting thing about this massive 12-issue story arch is that it involves all three of the main Spider-Man titles which includes Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Knights: Spider-Man and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. For example, if you only read the Amazing Spider-Man comics, you’ll be missing 1/3 of the story. As you can no doubt imagine, this caused several problems for a person like me who only reads Amazing Spider-Man and not Marvel Knights or Friendly Neighborhood. Luckily, Marvel has released a graphic novel, which is currently sitting in my hands, that has all 12 issues in order.

As expected, the Amazing Spider-Man pieces of the story are the best ones. However, the Marvel Knights issues were much better than expected. The Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, on the other hand, were awful. They did what they had to in order to keep the story moving nicely, which was good. However, some things just didn’t work. For example, once Spider-Man finds out that HE’S DYING, all he seems to be able to do is crack stupid jokes and laugh it off. For some reason, this only happened in the Friendly Neighborhood comics and I can’t honestly see him chuckling to himself when he finds out that he has less than a couple months to live. Also, The Hulk makes a minor appearance in one of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man comics. The bad part is that they make him look like a complete moron. The dialog is awful, even for Hulk. Peter David is easily the worst writer of the arc.

On the other hand, like I said earlier, the Amazing Spider-Man issues of The Other are fantastic. I’m assuming the main reason is because J. Michael Straczynski is an pretty solid writer. So much so that he’s the brains behind the entire story and has been guiding the other writers down the same path towards the finale in AMS.

So, after reading all the pieces of The Other, I can wholeheartedly say this arc is much better than many people say it is. I’ve heard a number of complaints regarding the new path that Spider-Man’s characters has been placed on and, to be honest, I like it. It’s an interesting change. As for The Other, it’s got a death, a rebirth, crazy fights, superhero cameos…what else could you ask for? Sure it’s got it’s flaws but overall, it’s a descent read. It’s a better idea in this case to pick up the trade paperback if you’re looking at reading this story. It will probably wind up saving you a lot of trouble and money in the long run.