Just wanted to say thanks for the Spidey WEB page. I was a huge reader back in the mid-late seventies and reading your "looking back" sections really brings back some fond memories. I was unfortunate enough to lose my entire collection in a fire back in 1980, so I hadn't really thought much about Spider Man since then.
I picked up a Spider-Man comic not too long ago and was completely confused, as you can imagine, by this whole clone business and the fact that there are so many different Spider Man titles. But reading your old issues of Peter Parker's Pad quickly brought me up to speed.
Shucks!
I know it's all opinion, but just for my $0.02, I disagree with the review of "Carnage: Mind Bomb". It wasn't worth 5 webs. I think the webs rating should be strictly defined. I saw a lot of 5 webs for recent stuff, and I don't think they were that exceptional. I view 5 webs as something like the top 5% of issues, or something like that. In other words, very exceptional. Something like "the boy who collects Spider-Man" or the original Hobgoblin thread (long though it was).
Anyway, I didn't think Carnage: Mindbomb qualifies. Definately not the elite best of Spider-Man work. But in my opinion, it would be stretching it to give it one web. Yes, the artwork did show it as a rather gloom place and the ideal of Carnage smelling like rotten flesh was a good description, but after reading it, I didn't learn one thing about Carnage that I didn't know before (other than he smells like Rotten Flesh). The guy likes killing and makes it an "artform," So what? I knew that from reading the Maximum Carnage story.
I was looking for something such as: where did Cletes Cassiday get his worship of Chaos from, and perhaps an expounding on his saying "law's are just words and you can break them if you've got enough guts". Maximum Carnage showed us that he had a rotten childhood and that he likes to kill and believes in Chaos. I was looking for this issue to connect the 2 points together. Somewhere in his rotten childhood, he would have come to the "realization" that Chaos is "sane". That's what I wanted. I thought the story was extremely lame and I still view Carnage as a shallow 2-dimensional character and that the only purpose of this was to sell death and violence, since that's what Carnage fans want, instead of a meaningful well-told story.
I know your reviewer has the rights to his opinion, but I think if a stricter standard were used, we'd all agree that this issue wasn't one of the greatest stories ever, and we wouldn't see so many 5 webs given out. 3 webs should be average (not bad, just not great and not bad). The recent Ben Reilly spider-Man stuff has been entertaining, IMO, but still doesn't merit anything above "Average" ... because there have been so many fine Spider-Man stories written over the last 33 years, and it's a slap in the face to those fine stories to give these newer stories the same rating.