This is a crossover event that run from 2014 to 2015 and saw Dan Slott resurrect a Spider-Man villain created by J. Michael Straczynski, stuff him with a family of his own and murder their way through the multiverse by killing loads of Spider-Men and Spider-Women from various alternative Earths. What it really was though was an excuse to showcase and invent many more new Spider-Man variants. I often say that crossovers are a good fertilizer for their respective comic universe even when they are terrible on their own, and this certainly applies here.
I never realized how much of the great 2018 animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse owed to this crossover (which should be obvious by how it is referenced) but I was only vaguely aware that this crossover even existed. Not that that’s all that important, the movie took some of the characters created in the event and the vague idea of different versions of Spider-Man meeting and created something far more superior around it. Same with the creation of Spider-Gwen, another female Spider-Man variant aimed at a more younger crowd and like with May Parker another way to restart with a younger, fresher Spider-Man.
It’s kinda a shame, you have all the ingredients here for a good story, a clever high concept, a threatening group of villains, and yet it was tedious and boring to get through it. Slott really used this to kill off random Spider-Man variants for pure shock value (which I always find distasteful in superhero comics) but could hardly explain why the villains did what they did. Their harebrained logic hinges on a prophecy that they may be killed by Spider-Men in the future, so they decided to genocide them all. Wow. Their characterization can be summarized with ax-crazy murder vampires. All very boring and stupid.
Really the best parts here were some of the tie-ins (usually the worst part of any crossover) that showed the various Spider-Men from across the universe and their origins. This was fun in a way. But the main crossover story was hardly compelling. Doc Ock is back as the Superior Spider-Man, one of the most annoying incarnations of Spider-Man ever, Peter Parker written by Dan Slott was also there, and not exactly well written as usual. The ending of the whole crossover was kind of a whimper with them finally stuffing Morlun and his family on a post-apocalyptic world without any life and so much radiation even Morlun and his kin couldn’t survive outside of a bunker.
Another thing I found incredibly annoying was how much Morlun and his family felt like narrative gimmicks, they could easily overpower every enemy, their leader even a Spider-Man infused with cosmic power, only to then be easily killed later when the plot required it. Their set of powers was so vague and undefined none of the fights had any weight to them, it was all more or less handwaving stuff away, which is one of the reasons this didn’t feel like it had any stakes. To get readers to invest in something you need to make the rules clear, but this was just a 100% pure plot-driven stupidity without rhyme or reason.
The Entropy Pump 