Amazing Spider-Man Daily Bugle #1 is out January 29, 2020. — **Amazing Spider-Man Daily Bugle #1** is out January 29, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — Newsrooms used to organically find their way into superhero comics, so prevalent were former reporters who’d gone on to tell stories within more fantastical worlds. This owed to newspapers and comics being kindred mediums for many decades, paper-based periodicals one picked up at a drug store or newsstand for an inconsequential fee, reading it on the train or passing it to a child as a treat. Everything I just wrote has changed now, and it’s into this changed world (obviously...duh) comes the new book, Amazing Spider-Man: Daily Bugle #1.

As the title implies, it’s a comic about the Daily Bugle news organization that has long appeared in Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Comics flagship Spidey book. There is, however, something kind of off about this comic, and I think it’s owing to the fact that modern newsrooms have become so rapidly-changing and somewhat inscrutable, at least to those outside the daily news industry, anyway. I’m not saying that the original runs of Amazing Spider-Man or Action Comics were 100 percent accurate takes on the newsrooms of their day. This is superhero comics, and I’m sure they were exactly as accurate as befit whatever alien the writers and artists were working toward having the good guy punch.

But I do think that throughout the 20th Century, newsrooms were pretty close to an unchanging monolith. Sure, at some point they got computers, but the essential nature of depicting them and what went on in them was largely unchanged. Over the past 15 years or so, the reality of life in newsrooms has been in flux. And I know, I’m a journalist by trade. I spent my time in college in newsrooms, both through my campus paper and during my internships. I spent a summer at the Poynter Institute (a leading non-profit journalism think tank) as part of a 2007 fellowship class largely focused on newsroom change. And I worked professionally in the newsroom of a daily paper until 2012. Now, I work for a website with a newsroom and daily news team that covers government technology. In addition, my wife is a national politics reporter for the Boston Globe.

That’s all just a means of saying that I wouldn’t know how to depict the realities of the modern media landscape to readers today without several thousand words of prose writing to do it (and even then!). So yeah, I think Amazing Spider-Man Daily Bugle #1 walks head first into what is essentially an impossible job: using superhero comics as a means of daily news media commentary, with 22 pages to do it justice. And as a result of that impossibility, it just feels a little...off, a little overly-simplified and perhaps wondering itself what it’s really like to work at a newspaper in 2020.

That said, the creative team here does its best to encapsulate the financial fear and constant flux that has been well-documented as a source of stress in daily news organizations, doing so by rooting them in character moments, like Robbie Robertson’s tendency to pace through the building when something new (usually bad) is coming, and the reactions of the various departments as he ominously passes through them. The relationship between veteran Marvel journalist Ben Urich and the new character, Chole Robertson, who’s Robbie’s niece. Chloe is the new guard coming into America’s news landscape, and Urich is a metaphor for those who have always been there and done it one way.

One gets the sense in this debut issue that their relationship will be the core of this thing, and I like the seeds that are planted, with the duo learning from each other (maybe). The only qualm I have with it is that at one point, Chloe actually says, “I don’t need to go to journalism school. I have 114K followers…” Oof. Directly correlating social media popularity with attending journalism school or having training of any sort is worrisome and perhaps a bit lazy. My sense is it’s coming from a good place, not one of anti-intellectualism, and the idea that Chloe has a perspective sorely missing from old guard newsrooms is one that needs to be talked about so much more. Still, outright dismissing the value of education because one has figured out social media is a bad look. That said, I’m willing to hear this story out, to see where it’s going, and what else it has to say.

Overall: Tasked with the tricky job of using superhero comics to tell an interesting story about the rapidly-changing daily news landscape, Amazing Spider-Man Daily Bugle #1 does its best. 6.0/10

Amazing Spider-Man: Daily Bugle #1
Writer: Mat Johnson
Artist: Mack Chater & Francesco Mobili
Colorist: Dono Sanchez-Almara & Protobunker
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Price: $3.99

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.