I have to admit, Frank Cho’s pencils on Spider-Woman in this graphic novel are absolutely eye-popping. No one has ever drawn a sexier looking superheroine. Spider-Woman just glistens with menace. Brian Michael Bendis outdoes himself with subterfuge in this one. Is Spider-Woman a double agent? A triple agent? Or something so complex readers may never know? One thing for sure, she’s being totally victimized.
Bendis obviously has a lot of fun writing this one. And I’ll bet he’s had it planned since the beginning. Spider-Woman is a favorite of his, one of those fractured and broken types he seems especially fond of.
Borrowing a lot from his run on Daredevil, Bendis brings in Matt Murdock and all the problems that hero is currently having in his own comics. Bendis also provides a new hero, Ronin, who also comes from the pages of Daredevil. That’s another mystery that lies within the pages of this graphic novel. There’s little doubt from the onset why this volume is called Secrets & Lies. Not only are the characters lying to each other, but Bendis conceals a lot of information from the reader, although much of it is there on the page if you go back and look through the issues after reading them. I couldn’t figure it out, but when I went back and looked through the pages, the clues are all there. He played that mystery fairly.
The artists provide a lot of action in this story arc. We have ninjas galore, which constitutes a lot of Spider-Man’s one-liners and humorous exchanges with Luke Cage. The attack on the penthouse in Tokyo is awesome. Of course, having all of the comedy going on at the time between the characters would have been impossible. The bit with Luke Cage returning on the elevator after being knocked off the building and falling 20 floors is amazing. Even more humorous, the elevator music from the 1980s reflects Cage’s dark mood and the impending violence he’s about to unleash.
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