Title: Amazing Spider-Man 1000 / Queen In Black CGD 2026
Issue: 1
Date: June 2026
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Joe Kelly, Al Ewing, Phillip Kennedy Johnson
Artist: John Romita Jr., Scott Hanna, Nic Klein, Iban Coello
Colorist: Matthew Wilson, Guru-eFX, Marcio Menyz
Letterer: VC's Joe Caramagna, VC's Clayton Cowles, VC's Cory Petit
Editor: Nick Lowe, Tom Groneman, Kaitlyn Lindtvedt
Due to the reshuffling of the assets of Diamond Distributors, we have two overlapping events involving free comics this year. Marvel is participating in Comics Giveaway Day, while other publishers use the familiar Free Comic Book Day logo. The day worked pretty much the same otherwise, and what we have here is a fairly standard Marvel preview book focusing on three upcoming events: The Amazingv Spider-Man #1000, Queen in Black, and The Infernal Hulk.
The Amazing Spider-Man story was the best of the three, a well-told self-contained story where the Answer has attacked the recording session for J. Jonah Jameson's latest podcast. I'm not familiar with the Answer, but the narration does a good job of explaining what he's all about, and more importantly, why this isn't the typical state of affairs for him. What follows is a pretty good dialogue-based confrontation with a satisfying resolution, and then a final page teasing Peter Parker's latest bit of family drama. This reminded me a little bit of the confrontation between the Question and the Riddler back in the Question comic in the 80s, although not quite as intense. It also felt a bit like some of Superman's stories where he's able to handle a situation without resorting to full-on violence, but still keeping Spidey's persona at the forefront. Good stuff.
In the second story, Hel (Thor's sister) has usurped Knull (king of the Symbionts) and now commands his armies. And she is invading Earth, attacking six locations at once with venomized versions of well-known Marvel Universe extraterrestrial species like Kree, Skrull, Chitauri, and so on.
This all looks scary at first, but when Spider-Man and a crew of "Spider-Friends" show up to oppose the New York landing, it ends up looking like Hel's army consists of like six dudes, and the whole invasion looks less threatening. This felt an awful lot like DC's (awful) Invasion crossover and I have a feeling it will have a similar lack of impact. That being said, the visuals in this were pretty nice, and we barely got into the story, so there is room to turn this around.
The last story was a preview of Hulk War: Infernal War, which was mostly just a rambling discussion of monsters with some grimdark visuals leading up to a full-page shot of this version of Hulk with a crew of monsters including a giant spider Shelob knockoff. There's also a dead Captain America and some other characters that I am probably supposed to recognize but didn't. Very little actually happens, so again, there's some room for this to get better, but it's not off to a good start.
Rating: 5.5/10
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