The Amazing Spider-Man #700
Written by Dan Slott, JM DeMatteis, Jen Van Meter
Pencils by Humberto Ramos, Giuseppe Camuncol, and Stephanie Buscema
Inks by Victor Olazaba, Sal Buscema
Colors by Edgar DelGado, Antonio Fabela
Letters by VC’s Chris Eliopoulos
Covers by MR Garcin, Steve Ditko & Marcos Martin, Humberto Ramos & Edgar DelGado, Oliver Coipel & Justin Ponsor, J. Scott Campbell & Edgar Delgado & Joe Quesada, Danny Miki & Morry Hollowell
Marvel Comics
Release Date: December 26, 2012
Cover Price: $7.99

This is IT, True Believer! The Amazing Spider-Man #700 is the LAST issue of Marvel Comics’ flagship title starring their most popular character. Now, I don’t want to incur the Twitter wrath of writer Dan Slott, so you won’t find any spoilers here, BUT you’ll get the nuts and bolts of if this issue is worth it or not.

Slott has been writing Spider-Man a loooooong time. And, like he himself stated, this story began way back with his earliest work on the title, about 100 issues ago. First, let me say, the lead up to this story has been pretty entertaining. Not mind-blowing, but very entertaining. This issue, however, does have some VERY mind-blowing moments. It’s a classic Spider-Man story that will have fans of the series recalling all of their favorite issues, as so many of them have been told at this king of break-neck, beat the clock manner.

This is VINTAGE Spider-Man…kind of. Any more details would be telling. It’s nice that for the last issue of this series, we get a classically told Spider-Man tale. It doesn’t up-end everything you knew about the character (Sorry, JMS) and it doesn’t take the previous 700 issues and make them meaningless. It’s a natural ending to the saga that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko started over 50 years ago. You could NOT change the characters in this story. The roll of Spider-Man couldn’t be played by Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, or Matt Murdock. This HAD to be Peter Parker’s story. And I’m glad it was.

Humberto Ramos is probably one of my all-time favorite Spider-Man artists. His art has such a kinetic energy to it, that he was pretty much born to draw Spidey & company. This issue is no exception, and with the length of this tale, it’s amazing that his quality did not suffer one bit. You can tell he really loves drawing the wall-crawler, and the love comes through on each and every page. One of, if not THE, best issue he’s drawn yet.

Of note, there are also 2 back-up stories in this issue, but both aren’t nearly as impressive as I wanted them to be. They seemed like something that you would’ve found in the Tangled Web anthology series about 5 years ago, not something that they’ve been working towards for 700 issues.

A fitting end to a 50 year story. All involved should be darn proud that they contributed to this issue, and a huge THANK YOU to everyone who made the last 700 issues worth of stories worth reading.