Dan Slott is probably the writer who got me closest to liking 616 Peter Parker, but when his return to the character turned into an excuse to foist Spider-Boy on us, I began to think maybe he should have stayed away. Running through all the old kid sidekick tropes wasn't inspiring; the idea of introducing a new character and then saying they're actually an old character that everyone forgot because of timeline shenanigans used to be fun, but got tired surprisingly quickly. And the Spider-Man series about the two of them tentatively rebuilding a relationship only one of them remembered rapidly reached the point of having to point up its own incoherence in dialogue in the hope that might serve as an excuse. So I didn't have high hopes for its transition into Spider-Boy's own book, but this is surprisingly fun. It downplays most of the timey-wimey stuff in favour of being a classic kid-focused superhero series, giving us Bailey Briggs as a boy who's lost everything but is still trying to do what's right, assembling his own small supporting cast and a rogue's gallery full of suitably daft new villains like Emilio Helio, the Balloon Man. I could have done without Killionaire, the latest attempt at the influencer supervillain concept which so rarely sticks, and the big bad didn't need to double as a unified field theory of Spidey villains, but these are minor pitfalls. Art from Paco Medina and especially Ty Templeton contributes to a sense of clean, classic comics, often leaning comedic but just as ready to unabashedly dive into teen angst. In other words, beyond maybe being pitched a little younger, there are a lot of points in common with the original Ultimate Spider-Man, but where that was very deliberately positioned as an outreach title, this comes from a starting point nestled deep enough in the lore that even kids raised on Spider-Verse films seem unlikely to happen across it.