Miles Morales vol. 6: All Eyes on Me

The two previous volumes in this series have seen the title character deal with his alternate-universe counterpart, and mix it up with a few of his clones.  This time around he gets a new outfit, struggles with schoolwork, stops some street-level crime, and has a romantic meetup with his costumed girlfriend.  You know, familiar “Spider-Man” stuff.  It wouldn’t seem like these things would be all that noteworthy, story-wise, but they all do a good job of showing how much character writer Saladin Ahmed has invested in this current series.  Take the story about Miles getting a new costume.  While he’s stressing about it at first, he realizes that the non-binary kid he helped out a couple volumes back wanted to do a solid for him, and you can see where this is going.  There’s also the bit where he takes on an online conspiracy theorist in a mandroid suit who’s freaking out about a taco truck selling a certain kind of meat.  Without giving the kind of meat away, this felt like an acknowledgement of how crazy our modern society has become that didn’t make me cringe or make me want to roll my eyes so hard that they pop out of my head.

While all this is nice, the one multi-part story in this volume is also fun in its own way.  It has Miles meeting up with Starling for a date in-costume.  If you read that and thought to yourself, “…aaaaaaand what supervillain showed up to ruin it?” then you’re already one step ahead of the characters as Taskmaster shows up with the aim of kidnapping Starling.  Miles tries to follow, even though he’s wounded in the initial attack.  What follows is some well-placed superhero and civilian assistance before he’s able to bring the fight back to the supervillain.

These stories may not seem like anything special, but they manage to be fun, character-driven superhero adventures that prove to be a nice way for the series to decompress after the previous volumes’ high-stakes adventures.  It may seem like something that’s easy to do, but is deceptively hard, as shown by none other than “Spider-Verse” producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, “Soul” co-director Kemp Powers, and “Rick & Morty” writer Jeff Loveness, who team with artist Sara Pichelli for the very scattershot “The Best Part.  It has some cute scenes such as Miles hosting Saturday Night Live (badly), but they only come together to form a story that’s just alright.  The short that follows, “Don’t Run Jux” by Cody Ziglar and Anthony Piper, is just as good.  All this means is that an otherwise solid collection of issues ends on a couple of bum notes, made all the more disappointing by the talent involved.