I like Kaare Andrews' work a lot. After this review you might not believe me, but, really I do.
Spider-Man: Reign is an homage to Dark Knight Returns. The problem is, the darkness and political paranoia just don't work with Spider-Man. It's the wrong character to throw into a world of dead wife hallucinations and oppressive governments with shadow leaders.
But more than just the general premise doesn't work for this story. The art and dialogue just try to be too dark and too moody. Kaare is a wonderful artist, but here it all looks slightly unfinished and undefined. Add to that three-quarters of the book is just old men running around yelling or hallucinating, much of the time Parker in his underwear. It's simply not interesting.
Kaare has proven himself a decent writer, but when you've got dialogue like the following and endlessly rambling thought boxes, it all becomes silly: "A corpse with metal arms took him away from his reckoning once. Will he dare face us again? I think his courage is too small." It's just eye-rolling writing. So much so, that when the idea that MJ is dead from Peter's radioactive "fluids" (a basic idea used in Incredible Hulk a decade ago) it just makes you grown.
The only pages that rang true were late in the collection between a young Peter and MJ. All a hallucination, of course, but at least it felt like the characters we've known.
An unfortunate experiment from Marvel and Kaare Andrews.