Review by Ian Keogh

Trials and Tribulations is another haphazard collection of the Spider-Man stories written by Paul Jenkins. The three final chapters continue from Return of the Goblin cataloguing the emotional aftermath, but they’re preceded by two stories from earlier in the run before tragedy struck.

The opener is a real heartbreaker, one of those single chapters focusing on ordinary people with which Jenkins punctuated his bigger spectacles. Bobby is an enthusiastic young kid whose mother is alcoholic. He dreams of being Spider-Man’s sidekick and enjoying life to the full in a way he’ll never experience in reality while his Aunt and Uncle battle with a box-ticking social services department for some kind of intervention. In as much as the points can hit home where necessary in a Spider-Man story, those points are scathingly made, and Mark Buckingham’s art brings out the tragedy.

A version of the Vulture features in the opening story, and he turns up in reality for the second. It starts as just another Spider-Man vs the Vulture battle, but Jenkins and Buckingham ensure it becomes something more intriguing as it develops into a game of trumps.

This collection might not be ideally curated, but it does showcase how Jenkins is able to generate a variety of moods for Spider-Man, and his social conscience. The new super powered characters he’s created to date, though, haven’t been memorable, but that changes with the personification of an Indian goddess and the way she operates via delivering clues. It’s connected with an incident in Bangladesh affecting thousands and caused by an American chemical company who believed money would make the repercussions evaporate.

The final story is an extended delve into Spider-Man’s history following his Aunt May discovering he’s Spider-Man, with her initial antagonism and gradual acceptance recapped here. Having coming to terms with the idea, she’s reconsidered incidents from the past, and realised Peter’s involvement. Contrasting that, we have a gang war in which Buckingham drops a rare mistake with his funny portrayal of Hammerhead. Jenkins has May Parker deliver some insightful comments, and there’s a clever twist at the end, but too many trivial battles are required to punctuate the conversations, which extend too far.

A more comprehensive cataloguing of subsequent Spider-Man by Jenkins picks up with Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger.

What is a tribulation anyway?