Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane - Volume 4: Still Friends

I just love this book series. I've always like Spider-man, but this realy apeals to my girly drama needs. I would completely recomend this if you like high school drama stuff.

"Still Friends" is Volume 4 of a trade paperback digest and collects issues #16-20 of the comic, "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane." For continuity purposes, the trade paperbacks flow like this: Mary Jane Vol. 1: Circle Of Friends (Mary Jane #1-4) Mary Jane Vol. 2: Homecoming (Mary Jane: Homecoming #1-4) Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane Vol. 1: Super Crush (Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #1-5) Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane Vol. 2: The New Girl (Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #6-10) Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane Vol. 3: My Secret Life (Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #11-15) Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane Vol. 4: Still Friends (Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #16-20) Volume 4 of this series is written by Sean McKeever and penciled by David Hahn. It is aimed at a younger audience, more specifically young teenage girls. There is almost no fighting in the series, which instead focuses on the interpersonal relationships of a 15-year old Mary Jane Watson. During Volume 4, she is dating Harry Osbourne and her best friend, Liz Allen is dating Flash Thompson. As the cover accurately suggests, Peter Parker is almost non-existent in this volume, as he is in most of the series, only serving as a backdrop to justify the title, and possibly to set up for future story lines when he starts a relationship with Mary Jane. Parker appears in maybe 4 pages. Spider-Man has a little more time, but not nearly as much as the 4 principle characters. Throughout the series his relationships are explored as well. The main story lines you will see are going to be things like: "Will he ask me to the prom?" "Why doesn't she like me?" "Flash Thompson is a jerk." "Felicia Hardy is a slut." The writing in this series is pretty decent, and even though I am well-skewed from the target demographic, I enjoy the series. I've enjoyed Spider-Man for 20 years now, but the fighting no longer interests me, and I'm more drawn to the relationships with the characters. I do enjoy the Parker/Mary Jane storyline in Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Collection, Vol. 1 much more and it's definitely more appropriate for adults, but having to wade through 15 pages of clone saga or fighting The Human Torch around buildings makes me lose interest quickly. The artwork is fairly mediocre and drawn more in the manga-style I guess. Not much detail in the images and very cartoony, but it's not too bad. The digest form is fairly small, but not cramped like some digests are and the speech balloons are easy to read. I would never purchase this series since I'm NOT a 15 year old girl and it would be creepy, but I do enjoy reading it in the library.