By Taylor Anderson

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Anyone who knows anything about magic and time travel knows there’s always cost for either of them. Use magic to help yourself out, and you better bet your ass that some ironic malady will strike you later. Use time travel and you better be prepared for the consequences caused by your mucking up the time-space continuum. But if you’re Loki, these rules may not apply to you, and in that case, why not mess with both? He does just this with Peter Parker, but with there being no consequences to these actions, it seems like a pointless gesture in more ways than one.

Loki feels like he owes Peter a favor, so he says he’ll turn back time for the friendly, neighborhood hero to any point in the past that he wants. One would think that Peter would reset time to when he wasn’t broke, like when he owned Parker Industries. Instead, he settles for saving the life of a random New Yorker killed by a magical wasp he accidentally unleashed. This is certainly a nice gesture by Peter, but it makes this entire issue seem a little pointless. In a very literal way, the issue ends up where it began, and that makes me wonder what the point in reading it is in the first place.

The irony, or so we’re led to believe, is that Peter may end up regretting his choice in resetting time since Carnage is about to be unleashed on New York. While that may be an important plot point later, this makes the present issue suffer. If everything that happened in this issue is just set back to where it was from the start, there are no consequences for the events that happened in its pages. If that’s the case, then why should I care about what happened to Peter, Loki, and everyone else here, since as soon as something happens to them it is erased?

For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page. Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore. If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to Comixology and download issues there. There’s no need to pirate, right?