Books like Spider-Man: The Return of Anti-Venom

Eh, most of this collection is fine. It's a brief series of stories to get our cast ready for the tumultuous Spider-Man: Spider-Island story, and as time-killers go, I've read worse. Slott tries hard to sell Anti-Venom as a character, which doesn't really work for me. I like the comedy of Eddie Brock having all the right answers but being unable to do anything about them because he's perceived (correctly) as a raving lunatic, so he has to, for example, tie Spidey up in an abandoned meth lab so he can go after the bad guy without getting attacked. It's a cute series of frustrations, but not quite enough to overcome my lack of interest in the character. Slott also brings in a new Wraith figure, and while I like the way she lets Spider-Man's supporting cast shine, she's not all that interesting on her own, and I'll be OK if she doesn't come back. Also, she and Anti-Venom are tasked with finishing up a Mr. Negative storyline that.. maybe isn't as racially sensitive as something I think Slott would have generated from scratch? I blame earlier writers, though, since I get the clear sense that Slott has to work with what he's been given, and in this case he's stuck with a secretly villainous Chinese man who feeds the homeless but also torments old women and smuggles opiates in terra cotta statues (yeah, I'm serious). At least this book writes him out of Spider-Man's cast for a while, I hope. (I think he turns up in Spider-Island, but not in any of the stories I really cared about, so I choose to ignore them.)The last main story (not counting a well-illustrated "can't get no respect" sort of story and a really moving tribute to Aunt May's maternal role as she prepares to leave NYC) is kind of troubling, though. Betty Brant has to go to the movies alone because Peter Parker is stretched too thin as a superhero on a million different teams, and she gets pulled into a dark alley and beaten. Slott is careful to make sure the doctors tell us she wasn't sexually assaulted, despite the severe beating and robbery she suffered, and I like where the story goes, with Spider-Man going a little nuts trying to beat up every thug in town until he can punish the right guy, and Peter's supporting cast (reasonably) demanding that he support them by actually being at the hospital for his friend. It's a story that makes sense for Peter's perspective, playing off of his origin story and the emotional cost of his absence at key emotional moments, and Slott even works in a little welcome humor with J. Jonah Jameson's over-the-top response to the victimization of another important woman in his life... But it's all a little Girlfriend in the Refrigerator for me. Betty Brant is a strong character who has been developed for decades as a woman who tends to date villains but always holds her own when times get tough, and I don't like how she has to get raped by a stranger for Peter to have his emotional growth. Yes, the doctor said she wasn't raped, but every image in her attack scene implies rape, so we're supposed to be hit with the shock of that violation but it's all OK because she's not really damaged that way afterwards... If Slott wants to look at how society views rape victims (and I think there is still a widespread attitude that a woman is somehow less after being victimized in exactly that fashion), then I applaud his efforts to do that with a character who is so beloved and who has the decades of street cred to tell a story about, "I am strong, but this thing happened to me, and it wasn't my fault, but I don't always feel like that..." But he doesn't seem to want that story. He goes out of his way to draw a circle around the idea that he's not telling that story, and the result is a story where a female character is brutalized for the emotional development of a male protagonist. I hope I'm way out of line here, and that Betty gets her own development after this in the stories I haven't read yet. I love Slott's work with Spider-Man, and I don't want to mar his image for a reader with my fabricated inferences for a story that really has a lot of strengths. But my read of the last issue in this collection makes me really uncomfortable, and I can't write a fair review without explaining a little of that.