Review: Spider-Man: Life Story HC

It has been, without any doubt, a great few years to be a Spider-Man fan. It feels like not a year has gone past without the release of a “love letter to Spider-Man” in some form of media. In animation, there was Into the Spider-Verse. In gaming, there was Insomniac’s Spider-Man. As for live action film, fans are still picking their jaws up off the floor after No Way Home. So what about the original home of Spidey; comics?

For that, we have Spider-Man: Life Story; Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley’s 2019 miniseries. Basically an extended ‘What If?’ tale, Life Story’s central conceit is a Marvel Universe in which the characters have aged in real-world time since Peter Parker received that spider bite in 1962. We get an issue for each decade of Pete’s life since then; ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s, ’10s. This new hardcover also adds the 2021 Life Story annual, which shows the years from the viewpoint of a certain brush-headed newspaper editor.

It’s a great hook to pull readers in; it certainly did for me. Sure, we’ve seen Old Man Spidey before in Reign, but this is something different. And with a great storytelling device in place, this is where the “love letter to Spider-Man” part comes in. Zdarsky has picked key Spidey and Marvel storylines from each decade, and tweaked them to fit his aging hero and the relevant villains and supporting characters. Do Secret Wars show up in the ’80s? Of course. Is there something like Civil War in the ’00s? You bet. And the ’90s? Hmm, Spider-Man in the ’90s…can you think of anything big that happened?

For any fans of the original Ultimate Spider-Man run, seeing Mark Bagley drawing a Spider-book again will be like curling up under a warm, familiar blanket. Of course, this is neither the Ultimate Universe nor 616, so the characters have a slightly different look to what we’ve seen him draw before; but haircuts and fashion aside, you’ll still recognise a Bagley Peter and MJ from a mile away. Frank D’Armata’s colors do a fine job on the original minseries, with some variation between time periods but perhaps not as much as there could have been. Matt Milla picks up the colors on the annual, perhaps with a little more subtlety to the shading.

All in all, this was a great read, and an emotional one at that. Endings are always difficult in such ambitious, wide-ranging epics, and this is no exception. Zdarsky doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s not enough to deny Life Story its status as a potential future classic. Although this new hardcover only adds the annual on top of the existing paperback, it could still be a great gift for the Spider-fan in your life.

Writing – 4.5 Stars
Art – 5 Stars
Colors – 4 Stars

Overall: 4.5 Stars

Writer: Chip Zdarsky
Artist: Mark Bagley
Colorists: Frank D’Armata (#1-6) and Matt Milla (Annual #1)
Publisher: Marvel Comics

Author Profile

Yavi Mohan

Yavi Mohan is a comic writer (and more frequently, comic reader) based in London. He is frequently overwhelmed by the number of comics in his reading list, to the extent that it sometimes delays his reading. This list includes every issue ever published with Spider-Man as the main character.