I've not had a whole lot of experience with Miguel O'Hara, outside of comics I've played a couple of video games with him in, and I've not yet seen Across the Spider-Verse so don't have that to draw from, and it's been about fifteen years since I read the original Spider-Man 2099 book. So I went into this series not really knowing much about him, but prepared to see what it was like; especially as this new series is set to be a horror themed one.
The book opens a year before the main events (2098?) in which a couple are walking through a graveyard at night when zombies burst out of the ground and attack them, killing the woman, Barbara (nice
Night of the Living Dead reference). The man, Doctor Southey, manages to escape, and spends the next year working on a treatment to 'stop death'. Using the zombie virus, he creates a new disease, one that makes the host unkillable, but sends them into a vicious fury that brings out the worst in them, and drives them to infect others. So it's kind of like
Marvel Zombies but without them actually being rotting corpses.
Unfortunately, the infection has reached the Barrio, where Miguel's mother, Conchatta, works to help the poorer people who call it home. She returns to Miguel's home with a bite wound, clearly ill. However, whilst trying to help her she turns into one of the infected, a Zero, and begins attacking Miguel, cursing him, trying to hurt him with words, whilst attempting to bite him. Luckily Miguel is able to subdue her, and takes her to Blade for help.
Studying what's happened to her, the two heroes are able to figure out what's happened, and Blade heads to a remote lab where Southey conducted his experiments in order to try and find out more, whilst Spider-Man descends into the Barrio, which has been locked off in order to contain the infected population. Thus begins a mission that sees both heroes going up against hordes of infected Zeroes.
Miguel O'Hara: Spider-Man 2099 is a lot more fun that I was expecting. I was kind of expecting a book that would be decent, but would leave me feeling a little lost because I knew nothing about this world beyond the very basic premise that I remembered from reading it almost two decades ago. But Steve Orlando manages to make this feel both like a continuing adventure set in this world, but also an easy jumping on point for new readers such as myself. You get the information you need to understand as you go, such as a brief lowdown on Miguel and Conchatta's strained relationship, or who Blade 2099 is, as we meet them, so that when you have Miguel fighting his mother and her screaming cruel things at him you understand what it means to their relationship even if this is the first time seeing these characters.
The zombie plot is something that you're likely to have seen before, it goes through the standard motions of a scientist thinking they're doing good, becoming a monster, creating monsters, and then dying at their hand. It's standard stuff, but Orlando does manage to keep it entertaining. It doesn't feel like a rehash, and thanks in large parts to Miguel being the protagonist, there was never a moment where I felt bored or even tried to anticipate what might be coming next; I simply enjoyed the ride.
The art is done by Dev Pramanik, with Raul Angulo on colours, and the book looks really, really nice. There's a roughness to things, there's a lot of linework, and parts of the book that you'd normally see as blocks of black shading in other books are instead filled with inking lines. It looks almost sketch-like at times, where the roughness and the fluidity of the drawing is as much a part of the presentation as anything else. And it's used to great effect throughout the book, as it adds a lot of motion to the panels, and when Miguel is jumping around the environment or fighting the Zeroes the art style helps to sell thr frantic motion and the danger of the moment. The colours compliment the art well, and Angulo uses a very muted set of colours, Things are very yellow, with some green seeping in a lot of the time too. It gives the book an almost sickly look, which is great for the story as it's dealing with infection and illness. I think this art team works really well together, and it's a shame that they're not working on the rest of the series, as I'd love to see more from them.
I wasn't sure that this was going to be a book that I'd even finish, let alone enjoy, so the fact that I'm actively looking forward to seeing the next issue is a very pleasant surprise for me. Using Miguel as a horror protagonist seems to be a great idea, and if the rest of the series continues with this kind of quality then maybe he might just join Marvel's ranks of monster hunters.
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