Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage

So a lot of this is what I don't really like about comic books. Constant, aimless fighting, lots of pages but little actual story, clumsy writing, dreadful pre-00s art... it's not bad, it just seems like something of a relic. This is one of those big crossovers that covered all of Spider-Man's monthly books and was darn near impossible to read and understand if you were a little kid and your mom bought you one comic per month (this is why a few years later I completely missed most of the clone saga and Norman Osbourne's return, although that's not really a bad thing). In the story, Carnage escapes from the asylum thanks to a new way to manifest his power and goes on a killing spree with several other villainous figures, while Spider-Man teams up with a bunch of dudes I mostly didn't know about, including a couple he normally wouldn't were the situation not so bad like Venom. The two groups clash multiple times without a whole lot getting done, and things look as bleak as they can in a universe that never gets more adult than a light PG-13 and in which no one of significance is really allowed to die before good predictably overcomes evil.

While I don't really like the early 90s aesthetic, my biggest issue with the comic was probably actually the dialogue. The need to explain every single thing that's happening while it's happening and have the foes constantly hurl half-witted barbs at each other really takes its toll on your brain, as you'd just like the characters to shut up for a while if all they're really going to do is fight each other ineffectually. Carnage seems like an attempt to capture something similar to the Joker, a mad man with a gruesome sense of humor who cares nothing of spilling a bunch of blood, but he's really not half as clever as he thinks he is, sometimes saying things that are literally not jokes at all, and sadly no one else really bests him in that category. His main partner Shriek is pretty bad too, seemingly more like a gothy teenage girl than a true psychotic super villain. And Spider-Man's moral quandary of whether it's ever okay to kill someone if they're as bad as Carnage feels like it's going through the motions instead of really paying off well. The truth is it actually doesn't matter at all, because pretty much nobody in these stories ever stays gone, whether they're sent to jail or apparently dead. It's an endless cycle of immortal characters facing off, selling more issues every month the company stays afloat. Again, not really bad, but there's a reason I usually stay away from the mainstream comics.