Review by Frank Plowright

The Parker Luck picks up after the period of Otto Octavius transferring his mind into Spider-Man’s body and for a while becoming Spider-Man. After Goblin Nation that’s at an end and Peter Parker is back in control, except with no idea of what’s happened for some while. The first big surprise for him is that he now runs a tech company, Parker Industries.

While acting with good intentions, if with a immense side dish of arrogance, Octavius made a hell of a lot of changes to both Parker and Spider-Man’s lives. Enough of them to see Dan Slott through several chapters of misunderstandings. Yet the beauty of Slott’s writing is while there are plenty of funny slapstick moments, he doesn’t take the obvious route of turning everything into a joke. Anna Maria Marconi, for instance, has one hell of a lot to process on discovering the man she’s been sleeping with is someone very different, and the situation is handled both surprisingly and tenderly. Another problem with being associated with geniuses is that you’re not always going to see eye to eye with them.

After the more restrained art toward the end of the Superior Spider-Man series, Humberto Ramos is back here in almost full exaggerated effect, although he’s toned it down a little from his work on the previous series. The style features fewer inconsistent distortions, although everyone still has oversized eyes, and the only really excessively produced personality is a raging J. Jonah Jameson. His storytelling, though, is first rate and the action scenes sparkle.

Jameson’s not the only well known face experiencing new circumstances. A few non-entities are polished off, but the primary villain problem is Electro, whose powers were boosted by Octavius, and who’s now scared as they’re running beyond his control. Neither is the Black Cat happy at what’s happened in the recent past. Slott doesn’t just deal with the old, though, as The Parker Luck marks the first appearance of Cindy Moon, Silk, and the beginning of Slott’s next big idea, but that’s for next time in Spider-Verse Prelude.

Despite toning the art down, the way Ramos exaggerates Spider-Man and his world still won’t be to all tastes, but Slott hits all the right buttons in clearing up his old plots and starting new ones.