Image Courtesy of Marvel.com

Spoilers: Keep in mind that my method of reviewing involves spoilers for purposes of analysis. If you care about being spoiled and have not read Silk #2 yet, please avoid this review until you do!!

I’ll say right up front that this issue is no where near as strong as Silk #1. It spends too much time covering Cindy’s investigation of what happened to her family and getting readers up to speed on her origin story, a lot of which is recap. There’s some new information, though, and it’s intriguing to find out just how thoroughly her family managed to disappear, but all of that info could have been covered in half the pages dedicated to it here. The fact that this flashback-style information dump is sandwiched between two halves of Silk’s fight with the Hydra tentacle robot makes it feel even more awkward, especially since the fight itself doesn’t seem to hold any real importance (apart from providing a meta joke about a tentacle monster is a comic that has a really clear manga-influence art style). It’s just a nameless hydra robot. By the time we get back to Silk fighting it, I barely care. Overall, the structure of this issue just falls apart for me. So this is definitely not the best comic I read in March.

That said, here’s what I did like about it. The art remains extremely strong. In fact, the more I read Silk, the more I like this art direction. It goes beyond just the clear manga-inspiration. The line work is amazing. Most of the time, when you have a comic with such thick, defined lines, it looks sloppy and cartoony, but here it just works. It makes everything seem smooth, beautiful, and unique. And it does look a little cartoony, but it works for this comic. As far as the content of the issue goes, Cindy remains charming, funny, and just a blast to read. In fact, I think I enjoy Cindy’s inner monologues more than Peter’s OR Gwen’s. More than anything, this issue shows the great potential that Silk has, but almost entirely because of Cindy’s personality and Stacey Lee’s gorgeous art (seriously, she needs to be drawing for more comics), which makes me very excited to see how great this book can be when we have an issue with better structure and pacing than this one.