It’s always kind of jarring to see an X-Character in the wild. The X-Men is such an insular franchise. The rest of the Marvel U is constantly bumping into each other, but The X-Men have 10 different team books and only play together. Unless it’s Wolverine, Deadpool or one of the mutants who wound up on other teams, like Beast or Iceman, none of them can escape. And yet, he’s Synch, from Generation X. Like most X-Teams, Generation X has a billion members, and for some reason, only 3 of them appeared in MTU, Vol. 2, #1. I guess Synch was jealous that he missed out. But there’s still plenty more members of that team who haven’t gotten into a Spidey book yet. Maybe one day. Rafael Kayanan pencils this month, and things are as weird on page one as on the cover.
Once again, we must flashback to how we got here. This is a very retro thing to be doing, and it’s somehow gonna take the Spider-Office by storm for awhile here. Peter was studying for a big test all day, and then decided to go out webbin’ for awhile. At the same time, some poor saps decided to mug Synch in the park.
Maybe no one told Bob Sharen it was supposed to be night time.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Really? Are we really gonna scrape the bottom of the supervillain barrel?
With pride, I guess. Uuuuuugh, Plantman! Could you not even pretend to respect the money people spent on this comic? I mean, not me, I went back to just buying Adjectiveless after the Spider-Hunt/Identity Crisis thing, and got this for cheap recently, but making unsuspecting teens drop their $2 on PLANTMAN…! Well, Planty uses a plant to release some “Mutagenic pollen” into Synch’s face after he inexplicably leans in as close as possible to this flower, and suddenly he bulks up like The Hulk. He goes on a rampage, and Spider-Man sees him, leaping in to make a “monster union” joke only a couple pages after his “superhero union” joke.
Yeesh. Spidey starts to realize his foe is maybe not doing this on purpose when crazy plants burst out of the street and drag Synch underground. Then the plants touch Spider-Man and turn him into a man-spider. And I guess we’re caught up now.
Boy oh boy. Spider-Man is made to fight some boring plant-men as Plantman rambles on, and then Synch starts to figure out what to do.
Why… on Earth… would Synch using his power on Spider-Man… turn his eyes into the mask eyes? Ugh, I hate stupid comics so much. This is some sub-1970s MTU crap. The heroes get close to Planty, so he unleashes some sort of asinine plant that’s good flood lights instead of flowers. I am getting angrier with each panel of this comic book.
Kayanan did a great job on that last panel, making Spider-Man as weird and creepy as he can be. More people should do stuff like that. I’m glad I found something nice to say abou this dreadful comic. Despite his humble beginnings on a D-tier X-Team, Synch is kind of a big deal in 2020s comics. Ya never know. Can next issue be worse than this? The cover sure doesn’t look promising…