I was excited to hear we got an animated Spider-Man flick in for review, but was a bit wary when I saw the front cover; the artistic style is very simplistic, looking something like an American interpretation of Anime, not too dissimilar from the look of the Teen Titans cartoon. The character designs, from The Lizard, to Electro, to The Vulture and Spider-Man himself show that The Spectacular Spider-Man: Attack of the Lizard is taking Spider-Man in a new direction. The most unnerving thing about the character designs is the eyes. Specifically, most of the eyes have huge pupils and very little white in their eyes. Other characters, specifically dim-witted henchmen, have much smaller pupils. It appears that pupil size is indicative of intelligence. The other eye-related thing that bothers me a bit is that Spider-Man's eyes on his costume squint. A lot. It's obviously for effect and to help portray emotion even through a mask, but a mask squinting? How ridiculous is that?
The story in The Spectacular Spider-Man: Attack of the Lizard took a little bit of liberty with some origin, specifically Electro and Vulture, but even though they work all of the characters into a tightly intermingled web, um, network of friends, coworkers and rivals, they manage to pull it off, making for an interesting and believable (enough) story.
I will say that the cover image is not misleading; although the name of the story is Attack of the Lizard, it features the origin of The Vulture and Electro, as well as The Lizard. Electro worked for Dr. Conners, who became The Lizard when an experiment went wrong. Vulture is an inventor, seeking revenge on Norman Osborn for stealing his invention. In addition to this madness, Hammerhead decides that Spider-Mab is a viable threat and sends The Enforcers to eliminate him. This just isn't Petey's week.
One likely reason for the large number of baddies on the cast in a story that is called Attack of the Lizard is that the "full-length animated adventure" is also the first three episodes of the television show, The Spectacular Spider-Man, all run together. [Specifically, Survival of the Fittest (ep. 101), Interactions (ep. 102) and Natural Selection (ep. 103).] Surprisingly, if you haven't seen the cartoon, you wouldn't necessarily notice that it wasn't originally a movie, with the exception of the first episode, which ends similarly to the way it begins, giving away the fact that an episode was ending, even though the "movie" continues.
I know a lot of people bag on the third Spider-Man movie, but I had problems way back at the first movie, when they chose to make his web-slinging abilities biological in nature, rather than from web-shooters of his own invention. This is a very important part of the Spider-Man character, in that it shows his intelligence and ingenuity, as well as requiring him to keep stocked up with web-fluid lest he run out (effectively losing one of his most useful "powers"). Luckily, The Spectacular Spider-Man: Attack of the Lizard doesn't suffer from this illness. Spidey has his web-shooters and they are prominently displayed when Peter Parker is shown changing into (or out of) his Spidey digs.
All-in-all, I was pleasantly surprised with The Spectacular Spider-Man: Attack of the Lizard. It's not my favorite art style, but the story is well done and the voices are great, from Lacey Chabert as Gwen Stacy, to Josh Keaton as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, to James Arnold Taylor as Harry Osborn, and even Robert Englund as The Vulture, the voice-acting is top-notch.
