Well, Superior Spider-Man is over and overall, it was pretty lackluster. GASP, you're all likely to be doing right now, how could I not like a top-selling title? Don't worry I have my reasons, for which I'm going to explain.

Doc Ock is not interesting or sympathetic. When it comes to a protagonist to any story, even if the story is about a reformed criminal, the protagonist must always be interesting. Doc Ock negates this feature because never once are we seeing any shred of humanity in him. He's just the protagonist and I'm just suppose to accept that. When he finally fades away in issue 30, why should I care? He killed Spider-Man and stole his body, beat up several other superheroes, constantly puts himself above others to say nothing of all the life threatening schemes he has done over the years and especially since this story takes place after roughly two months since Otto took the world hostage and tried to kill everyone on the planet. When Peter is located inside Otto's psyche, he doesn't cooperate with him or work as a team, he wipes his psyche from existence all because he almost stopped Otto from operating on a little girl, who Otto himself put in hospital.

The only issues of Superior Spider-Man that manage to invest Otto with any kind of pathos or likability are many of the tie-in issues, particularly Superior Spider-Man Team Up #11-12 and even the Age of Ultron tie-in, Superior Spider-Man #6AU. This surprises me, because these issues were not by Dan Slott, but by several different writers, and yet somehow these writers, Kevin Shinick and Christos Gage, manage to make me care and feel more invested in Otto's plight than Dan Slott, the person who thought up this idea in the first place.

The story is boring and predictable. What did I get out of seeing Doc Ock as Spider-Man? Nothing, what is so "unique" and "fresh" to see a Spider-Man who acts like a jerk to everyone, without any redeeming factors? Building ridiculous "Spider-Mechs" and having "Spider-Ling" armies? What's interesting about that? I also saw the entire story from a mile away. You strip away a lot of silly elements to the story and you can tell that this is just a by-the-numbers, body swap story, where a villain tries to take the heroes place, everything goes well at first, but things get more and more harder for the would-be hero until he/she realises "Ya know, maybe being a hero is harder than it seems". It doesn't help that all of the side characters are written as thick as bricks. I literally cringed when the Avengers saw Spider-Man break through their window in issue 26 and scream "I QUIT" while all the Avengers have a big "Well...that was awkward" look on their faces in the next panel.

Gone are the days when Roger Stern would have Peter give his all defeat the unstoppable Juggernaut, or stop by a dying boy in hospital, just to brighten up his last moments in life. All that is gone, replaced with gimmick-based stories that do nothing for the character and have left not an inkling or mark on Spider-Man's world. I'm not saying every story has to be a masterpiece, but at least add a sense of passion in the story.

I'm not saying change is bad. Most status quo changes have been great like Age of Apocalypse, Dark Reign etc. My point is that while other status quo changes are interesting and add a different point of view of the characters, Slott doesn't add anything to the characters and approaches things through gimmicky sales tactics. He tries to create premises that seem appealing enough for sales purposes. Spider-Island's selling point was the idea that everyone in New York has Spider Powers, Superior Spider-Man's selling point was "When will Peter be back?" and Spider-Verse's selling point will be based on the idea of multiple Spider-Men from across the multiverse meeting for one big overbloated story.

Most of these stories have sold well based purely on their gimmicky premises and their plots have been rather mediocre. Spider-Island done nothing for Spider-man as a character and added nothing to the mythos, Superior Spider-Man was just a predictable and generic "Freaky Friday" plot and I doubt that Spider-Verse will bring anything new to the mythology or develop Peter as a character. Slott also intentionally tries to anger people just for the sake of profit, like when he killed off Peter Parker in the most disrespectful way possible in issue 700 and issue 9 of Superior (when Peter's mind was erased) was marketed with taglines like "This issue will make you angry". Slott cares more about selling stories than telling stories. Does that mean I'll be skipping Spider-Verse this year? No, I'm intrigued by the premise and I'm interested in seeing how it plays out, I just won't expect anything on the level of Roger Stern or even Paul Jenkins.

I really don't want to dislike Mr. Slott's work. From what I've read about him online, he's a fan-favourite writer and I want to see why, but from what I've seen in most of his biggest stories like Spider-Island and even Superior Spider-Man for example, all seem like gimmicky concepts that have no real development in terms of characters or any emotional resonance. Sadly though, it seems as though the gimmicks continue later this year with his "Spider-Verse". I'll be checking it out, but whether I'll buy it or not depends until I read the actual issues.

The saddest thing to come from Superior Spider-Man is that it proved that long-term gimmicks of this kind can be enormous cash machines. I simply cannot wait for when DC decide to kill Batman and have Penguin take over his role as a hero, just because the writer is not capable enough to think up a creative story with Bruce Wayne. I'm not saying it couldn't have worked, as I've stated, other writers in charge of tie-ins and other series' have managed to make Otto quite compelling. Ultimately, Superior Spider-man is just a haphazard experiment that just didn't work, due to Slott not wanting to write anything worthwhile and just wanted to cash in on his gimmick-train.

So, what did everyone else think of Superior Spider-Man?