Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week - beginning with two Award postings, followed closely on Tuesday with this past week’s Best.

Superhero comics about the villains are hard to make work in the long run, because the need to make a protagonist not infinitely hateable tends to drive villains with their own series towards the antihero middle. Superhero comics that are also comedies tend to be equally hard to pull off, because the genre often has a tendency to swallow up tones that don’t fit what’s “expected.” Five issues in, Superior Foes of Spider-Man isn’t just succeeding at either one of these concepts, but genuinely triumphing at both of them. It’s really remarkable to watch unfold.

When the series started, it was this small little crime story about a group of perpetually-down-on-their-luck criminals trying to get rich quick and not kill each other out of frustration. The book was immediately rooted in these lived-in relationships and non-superhero story tropes, so when you added in the fact that these were five criminals wearing brightly-coloured spandex lamenting getting beaten up by a guy with the proportional strength of a spider, everything was grounded and, I dare I say it, realistic. Well, for certain values of realistic.

If you think about it, this is what the Marvel universe has classically been based off: Tights and capes, but with “real-life” problems. In this regard, Superior Foes of Spider-Man #5 is a quintessentially classic Marvel story; it avoids veering into cliche or the dreaded grim-and-gritty through the unified vision and execution of its creative team, Nick Spencer, Steve Lieber and Rachelle Rosenberg, who infuse it with that unmistakable Marvel tone but giving it its own voice that isn’t really anywhere else in superhero comics these days. And keep in mind, this is a book that manages to stay zeroed in on the daily interpersonal challenges of its main cast even as one issue spins a yarn about a notorious crime boss’ head being discovered by a small child, who teaches him friendship and puts it on a remote control car, admits that’s fake, and then reveals in this issue that this genuinely insane story might be the true one all along. The book keeps adding more moving parts, like crime boss heads on toys, intra-team attempted murder, shapeshifter threats and the multiple deathtraps of a different crime boss’ lair, but never loses its rambling, affable focus.

The humour is what really makes the book so utterly unique and amazing. A lot of comedy in superhero comics can veer towards the wordplay-and-talking-heads variety (and only a few creators can really nail it), but what makes Superior Foes stand out is how the book’s team uses as much visual humour as verbal. It makes sense, when you remember that comics are a visual medium as well as a literary one, and Spencer, Lieber and Rosenberg obviously have. So what happens is that in addition to Boomerang’s wry, unreliably narrated jokes in his narration, or the banter between Beetle and Speed Demon, you also get sight gags, thought bubble visual jokes, Vaudevillian pratfalls and sound effects-based humour. It’s almost as if the book’s creators set out to combine superhero comics with Hergé, a comparison made even easier by Lieber and Rosenberg‘s elegant use of sparse linework, flat colours and a stunning two-page spread with a cutaway design of the Owl’s deathtrapped lair. And brother, I love me some Hergé, so getting a dose of that in Superior Foes is always a welcome treat.

Also, in with all this light humour, a dude eats a rat that just ate a snitch. All-around fun!

Superior Foes of Spider-Man is a series that makes it look almost frustratingly easy, that is just all-around brilliant and celebrates a lot of what makes comics excellent, without ever having to be married to just one genre or tone. In fact, it’s how well it synthesizes all these different ideas that makes it so amazing. Its team has easily earned this week’s Sixth Man Award, assuming the NBA doesn’t sue.