Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Spider-Man: Quantum Quest! is number two of three ‘Mighty Marvel Team-Up’ graphic novels created especially for early readers by writer/artist Mike Maihack.

A neatly efficient little intro to this second adventure tells us in one page of flashbacks what Animals Assemble! was about (“Did some flips. Watched some pets. Fought Kraven. Finally got lunch.”) while showing us how Spidey makes friends everywhere he goes: “being a super hero is more than stopping world threatening events every Tuesday – it’s also about being friendly and neighborly. And tacos.” Suddenly there’s an interruption to his morning when The Fantastic Four appear through a portal, accompanied by Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner. The fabled underwater city of Atlantis has disappeared! And an Atlantean artifact with a dolphin on it has gone missing from Reed Richards’ collection in the Baxter Building. “We are hoping your Spider Sense might be able to help us with that,” says Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman.

It just so happens that Spider-Man has seen a dolphin talisman before – in Animals Assemble!. And when Ant-Man helps him find it again, he is transported down into the sub-atomic Quantum Realm, where lots of other heroes have also been stranded. There’s something that links all these disappearing objects and lost heroes together, but can Spider-Man use the talisman to find it – and find his way out again?

Mike Maihack has an appealng loose inking texture that gives his cartooned versions of Marvel heroes a casually funny feel. His simplified shapes are nicely dynamic when he wants them to be and his layouts are clearly staged so kids should always know where to look as Spidey flips through many different settings, meeting lots of heroes as he gets closer to the villain behind all the mayhem. Clever plotting leads to another very big team-up, and the end of this story will leave young readers determined to find out what happens next as Spidey solves one mystery but immediately needs to find answers to another one. The adventures continue in Spider-Man: Cosmic Chaos! the third and last book in this series.