Was this really necessary?
First off, I haven't read 'Learning to Crawl: Part 1', but that doesn't really matter; Learning to Crawl: Part 2 picks up right were Amazing Spider-Man #1 left off.
So right off the bat we have a couple things that irk me. Pet peeve, the first: this is issue 01.2. Yes, you read that right, zero-one-point-two. Dafuq? First we had an endless string of #1 issues to try to cash in on the investor market. Then came #0 issues. Now we're going to have null digits and decimal points?
I get why they did it - this story fits between the original Amazing Spider-Man #s 1 and 2 - making it a "Year One" story, so close to the start of Spidey's career as to be practically an origin story.
Which brings us to pet peeve the second: do we really need another re-telling of Spider-Man's origin?
The story is mostly one of character development, which I'm all for - though it spends as much or more time developing a totally lame new villain called 'Clash' than it does on Peter Parker/Spider-Man.
Great cover art notwithstanding, the artwork here isn't that great either - the first time I read it I didn't even know that Flash Thompson and Clash were two different people (both hero-worship Spider-man, and both are drawn with the same hairstyle). There is a distinct lack of detail in many panels, especially when it comes to characters faces.
In summation, I liked the emphasis on character development, as well as how seamlessly they slipped this issue between the original 1960s stories - but I don't feel we really need to brick up all the gaps in time in a character's history, and was left with an overall feeling of, "Was this comic really necessary?".
