Having heard a lot about how badly Marvel Comics has screwed up the storylines of so many of its characters in recent years, I've mostly avoided the comic books ... content to indulge my superhero fandom at the movie theater. But, every now and then, I get the urge to see what's been happening with some of my old favorites so, needing something to read one day, I picked up a copy of Mary Jane & Black Cat: Dark Web, a book featuring two of Peter "Spider-Man" Parker's greatest loves.

Let's not discuss how Marvel once had one of the best comic-book relationships in the industry and destroyed it because the company's writers couldn't come up with any good stories for a married superhero. Sigh.

When the book begins, New York City is besieged by toothy demon newspapers (as sometimes happens) and Felicia "Black Cat" Hardy is on her way to make sure her old pal Mary Jane Watson is OK. Felicia is wracked with guilt, however, because she's afraid to tell MJ that she's rekindled her romance with Peter ... despite the fact that MJ is now happily married to another man with whom she has two kids. She arrives to discover that MJ now has superpowers of her own, albeit somewhat random and chaotic ones, and then the two women are zapped into Limbo (as sometimes happens) by the skinned demon Belasco who wants the Black Cat to find and steal back his missing soulsword. (MJ was an unintentional bonus, along for the ride because she was in close proximity when the spell was cast.)

Since there's no other way for them to get home, the ladies set off for the Screaming Tower, teaming up along the way with the pink demon S'ym, to complete their quest while fighting off hordes of other contenders (demonic and otherwise) who want the sword for their own purposes. Of course, Belasco plans to betray them anyway, so their motivation is half-hearted at best.

The art by Vincenzo Carratu is really good. The story by Jed MacKay is fairly dull, a routine dungeon quest with mostly one-dimensional obstacles in their path and a lot of chatter along the way about relationships and stuff. Felicia's guilt over Peter gets old really quickly, and one imagines that anyone who finds themself beset by dangers in a demon realm would forget about topics that could be better sorted out later, somewhere sunny with a glass of wine in hand, where no one is trying to kill you. The effect that Black Cat's subconscious bad luck powers has on MJ's luck-based slot-machine power wheel is briefly amusing, but it's not enough to carry the book.