YMMV / Spider-Man: Reign

• Complete Monster: Edward Saks is Mayor Waters's chief assistant and the real power behind the Reign regime, with Waters just being a puppet. Under Saks's guidance, Mayor Waters turns New York into a Police State, where elections are suspended and armed troops arrest, beat or just kill those who protest against the government. When Spider-Man returns, Saks releases the Sinister Six and sends them after Spidey, threatening to blow them up with micro bombs implanted under their skin if they fail. Jameson confronts Saks and Mayor Waters over their actions and manages to reveal that Saks is in fact Venom. Venom then proceeds to devour almost everyone in a room occupied by his prisoners and his underlings. Mayor Waters announces the creation of the WEBB shield generator, designed to keep super criminals out of New York, but Venom altered it to deliver an army of symbiotes to the people of New York, killing some civilians and turning others into Venom's slaves.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sandman's daughter is popular even among detractors of the storyline.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A deathly Doctor Octopus saving Peter's life is almost a reverse of several elements in Superior Spider Man.
  • After copying The Dark Knight Returns, Batman seems to have returned Spider-Man the favor by also explicitly showing his penis and requiring his publisher to edit it out for future printings in Batman: Damned.
• It Was His Sled: The 'twist' that Mary Jane died as a result of exposure to Peter's irradiated... fluids is by far the most infamous aspect of the story. In all fairness, the author wasn't just referring to Peter's... intimate juices, but to the fact that a large percentage of human waste is excreted though the skin. So the author was stating that it was Peter's constant proximity and touch that made Mary Jane ill. Unfortunately, because of the way the explanation was written... still squick for many.
• Narm: The revelation that Mary Jane died of cancer caused by exposure to Spider-Man's radioactive semen. Even aside from that, a lot of readers view the Darker and Edgier elements as absurd to the point of hilarity, with many feeling that using Miller's Dark Knight Returns is simply not a good fit for the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, tonally and narratively.
• Never Live It Down: Yep, you guessed it, radioactive spider-spooge. To be fair, the scene could be construed as Peter being partially radioactive in general, but everyone homed in on semen and had a field day with it.
• Signature Scene: The infamous Spider-Semen scene.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • This was a good story about Sandman meeting his daughter. It's a shame it was only a subplot in a Spider-Man meets Batman: The Dark Knight Returns story.
  • A "last" superhero story for Spider-Man is a genuinely good idea but rather than make something that is fitting and appropriate and in keeping with Spider-Man's story and mythos, we have the art-style of Miller-Varley-Janson's The Dark Knight Returns (explicitly rooted in The '80s) and the story beats applied to a character who is drastically different from Batman.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While there is some credence to the Motive Rant that the Venom symbiote lobs at Spider-Man, it kind of gets buried under all of its horrific actions, like turning New York City into an isolated Police State (which it seemingly sees as a good thing, claiming that it "saved" the city from "itself") and its plan to have everyone be devoured or forcibly bonded to other symbiotes as a kind of "payment" for all of the years of "peace" and "security" that were allotted by its aforementioned Police State. Though the "unintentionally" part is somewhat debatable, given that the character in question is clearly depicted as the villain; to some degree, we're arguably supposed to see the Motive Rant as at least a little self-serving.

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