Book Review: The Amazing Spider-Man #700.4

Book: The Amazing Spider-Man #700.4 by Joe Casey with illustrations by Timothy Green with colors by Brad Simpson

Rating: 5 stars

Review:

This picks up right where the third issue ended with Peter at the villains hospital trying to find a way to get out of there. But now that the entire hospital staff and the villains are clued in to who the new patient really is, Peter is going to have a hard time making it out of there alive.

But Peter's threat doesn't come from the hospital staff, because the Doctor stands by his code to heal, so he talks the villains into attacking Spider-Man during lights out.

Spider-Man was ambushed as soon as he tried to leave his room. And even though he is healing faster than normal he is still not completely ready to go up against three villains.

The fight doesn't go as planned especially with a staff member attempting to wake up Firebrand which sets off a huge fire. Spider-Man being the hero that he is, doesn't hesitate to save the villains. Unfortantely, the Doctor and the rest of the staff got away but at least he made it out alive.


This issue also included a second story:

Three O'clock High! by Clay McLeod Champman with illustration by Javier Rodriguez

In this short story, Casey a young boy who is continuously bullied tells the bullies that Spider-Man is his friend to stop them from bothering him.

However, that only makes things worse. Thinking that Casey is making up a lie the bullies tell him he has until 3 pm tomorrow for Spider-Man to show or they're going to beat him up.

Casey tried to flag down Spider-Man at the scene of a robbery but wasn't able to get his attention. Then he tried to see if he could get someone to pretend to be Spider-Man but that didn't quite work out. So as a last resort, Casey took drastic measures to finally get Spider-Man attention but that only resulted in Spider-Man being angry with him.

So, the next day, Casey with no Spider-Man for reinforcement endures the school day as a "dead man walking" before heading to the playground. After admitting that he lied and prepared to get beat up, Casey got surprised by Spider-Man but he wasn't there to stop the fight. Instead he was there to give Casey a nudge in the right direction for standing up for himself.

This was a good story.

In fact this was a really good issue. Both stories were well-written and the artwork is good. I'm really looking forward to reading the last issue.