The Spider-Man: Breakout
trade paper back collects the five issue Spider-Man: Breakout miniseries that was originally published between June - October 2005. Breakout expands upon some of the events that occur in the first few issues of New Avengers. Basically, if you haven't read the New Avengers Vol.1 trade paper back, you'll struggle to make much sense of Breakout. To re-cap, New Avengers began with a prison break, instigated by Electro, that results in the escape of a large number of supervillians from the island prison call "The Raft". A number of heroes, including Spider-Man, are in the area, and attempt to stop the breakout. These events are the catalyst for the formation of the New Avengers.
Breakout opens sometime prior to the events featured in the New Avengers, and focuses more on two rival criminal factions, who have a world class beef with one another. Once the breakout occurs, these two factions take their problems out on one another, with New York as the back drop. Spider-Man is caught in the middle.
As the New Avengers haven't officially been 'assembled' yet, Spider-Man is left mostly on his own devices to figure out why the two groups are trying to kill each other, and why they've stayed in New York when they could have skipped town already. Are they looking for something? Or someone?
Breakout is a strange miniseries, and I can't really figure out what the motivation for it was? Perhaps Marvel wanted to capitalise on the popularity of Spider-Man a little more, and decided to rush this one out, but I still don't see how this warranted it's own miniseries. The problem I had with breakout was that it doesn't really add anything to the New Avengers story, and it's more about the villains than it is Spider-Man, although that's not necessarily a bad thing.
As far as tie-ins go, this is probably one of the more unnecessary ones that I've read. While the story following the villains is interested, I'm not sure that it's deserving of it's own series. The artwork is good, and the characters are interesting enough, but it still, I can only give this a generous 6 out of 10. Fortunately I picked this one up for a couple of bucks in the last TFAW scratch and dent sale, otherwise I may not have felt so generous in my assessment.
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