Review by Frank Plowright

With this collection the series title switches for a couple of volumes from plain Miles Morales to Miles Morales: Spider-Man.

A big shock to both Miles and readers in his first series was his Uncle Aaron being revealed as a super-villain. He’s been keeping clean, but during Bring on the Bad Guys he racked up some serious debt acquiring the Prowler’s armoured suit in order to rescue Miles. That’s now coming home to roost, as the debt is with people for whom welching is a capital offence.

Saladin Ahmed has been writing this series to incorporate shorter encounters, which makes it very episodic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing here as Ahmed breaks down the plots to smooth the way for different artists like Alitha E. Martinez on Miles meeting the White Rabbit and her associates. It means that when it counts Javier Garrón is there to supply the grace and detail befitting the major moments, which he does on the final chapter. However, while Garrón is the primary artist for a reason, some contributors fall too far short of his standards. Martinez, for instance seems to have drawn her section in a great hurry as it’s all clashing bodies in close-up.

That’s contrasted by some great dramatic moments. While Ahmed is echoing Peter Parker’s high school days from decades previously, he’s doing it via bringing his own elements to the table. We’ve not seen much of Brooklyn Visions’ Principal, but when he steps on stage he’s a real class act, and Vice-Principal Dutcher has a good scene also. Before then Ahmed has pitched an inevitable conflict with Uncle Aaron extremely well considering it requires delicacy. The major problem of acquiring new web fluid is written off a little too easily, but at the end of the day we’d rather have Miles with it than the endless problems caused by a Spider-Man without it.

Introduced last time, a villain called Ultimatum is responsible for much of Spider-Man’s problems in Family Business, and the next volume’s titled Ultimatum. How about that?

Ahmed’s entire run is collected in hardback as Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Saladin Ahmed Omnibus