The Brand New Day keeps on rolling in Spider-Man #554 but just how long will it last? Seriously, this day is starting to drag on and, if the writers don’t start to distance themselves from not only the tag line but the whole idea in general, it could cost them. As for Amazing Spider-Man #554, it basically wraps up whatever mess was started at the beginning of March but, like you’re about to find out, it’s not really done the way most people would like.

Bob Gale’s been keeping the BND alive this month with the new Freak villain playing the antagonist to Spider-Man. Freak is, apparently, one of Guggenheim’s creations but to be honest, I would have thought he was smarter than…this. Freak is a pretty awful villain and much too boring to have to read about for an entire month. With Menace last month, at least we were offered something remotely evil. Freak, on the other hand, is just a junkie on a bender. I have to blame this on Gale at least a little bit as his writing this entire month has been significantly weaker than Slott and Guggenheim. This issue is no exception to that.

Like I said in my previous reviews of the ASM comics this month, Jimenez just doesn’t do it for me. He seemed to be picking up steam in issue #553 but, probably because of the bad mood the writing put me in, after reading this issue I realize that he’s not a very good artist for this title. His drawings of Spider-Man just don’t seem to work since he, for whatever reason, feels the need to draw Spider-Man with an extremely disproportionately long face which just looks bizarre. Having been spoiled the first couple of months with the art of McNiven and then Larocca, Jimenez’s work seems to fall a little short of the line drawn by the previous artists.

Overall, this month has been the most disappointing that ASM has seen since the relaunch back in January. With Wolverine guest-starring in next month’s issues, hopefully things will pick up. Otherwise, it looks like this Brand New Day has pretty much run out of steam.

Amazing Spider-Man #554

6.4/10 (How’d you get that?)

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