Spider-Man General Discussion

My posts are usually not long. if you see above you will find small paragraph responses. In that case I was replying to three posts at once. Anyway, I did like Homecoming a lot, and I enjoyed Michael Keaton's Vulture aka "your friendly-neighborhood super-villain" and it's a compelling case for a decent man with totally justified grievances getting radicalized like that, while also avoiding making us feel too sorry for him. So I hope they do something good with Mysterio. I am glad they are going ahead with underused villains, though if they are doing Sinister Six, they will obviously bring Dr. Octopus back for the next film.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Nov 10th 2018 at 3:29:59 AM

I love Spiders-Man the mass of spiders that lives in a spider-man suit and wants to eat people

Reminds me of that Rick and Morty spoof, 1 million ants, a sentient ant-colony...but yeah it's a great extent of a spider-themed bad guy who isn't just another guy in a dark palette spider-suit.

Also he doesn't shoot webs he just shoots spiders

He doesn't even shoot webs, he just sprays everything with spiders◊. He's also allied with Spi-Norman.

We're getting his backstory in Vault of Spiders #2. Maybe he's AU version of The Thousand.

They should have called him Spiders Georg.

Edited by alliterator on Nov 10th 2018 at 8:49:32 AM

That reminds me of this◊.

The Protomen enhanced my life.

It didn't work out too well that time Strange gave him a chance to◊.

Looks like the next storyline for the newspaper strip involves Luke Cage...in a scenario reminiscent of one of his earlier 616 ASM appearances in that he's hired by Jonah to take care of Peter.

There's only so much you can stretch Animal Motifs so far. I mean take Batman. Aside from the fact that his helmet-and-cape ensemble when outstretched resembles a giant bat, he doesn't have anything bat-like about him. Heck Daredevil is way more like a Bat than Bruce...he's blind and he navigates by means of a complicated echolocation-like sense. The cool thing about Spider-Man is that his motif is an insect that historically has entirely negative connotations (though of course there aren't many insects with positive attributes, bees maybe?) as a kind of creepy predator, and ugly insect, associated with decay (you know spiders and cobwebs are classic signs of abandoned and haunted houses) into something vibrant, joyous, and adventurous. You know "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" shouldn't work in theory. Friendly-Neighborhood House pest-man? But the comics and Peter made it work.

Compare that to Batman where Bats are nocturnal and are kind of creepy and so Batman should be nocturnal and creepy too. Spider-Man did something original with that. The typical thing would be to make Spider-Man into some Grimdark hero because his motif is built entirely for that.

There's a running joke on Reddit that Daredevil should have called himself Batman and vice versa.

Peter Parker seems like a perfect mix of Batman and Superman. His civilian identity is like Clark Kent (raised by foster parents, being working-class, and being involved in journalism, and having relationship blues) but as a Small Steps Hero who swings around the city and fights crime, he's like Batman. What separates him is that Peter is always the underdog. Like if you look at Villainous Underdog you find that all of DC's villains especially Batman's and Superman's are significantly disadvantaged compared to them, whereas you can't say that for most, if any, of Spider-Man's villains. They have age, money, experience, networks, and other stuff on their side. You know Green Goblin throwing razorbats as projectiles is a lot like Batman, as does his use of gadgets which he draws from his bag to fight Spider-Man similar to Mr. Utility Belt. So any good Goblin versus Spider-Man fight is Spider-Man versus Batman.

Goblins have agility and strenght roughly similar to Spider-Man tho. Batman is human.

There are obviously a lot of aspects to Batman, and I was simply talking about some and not all of it. Norman Osborn chose to become a Goblin because Goblins terrified him when he heard fairy tales from his Dad as a kid, and he puts on the mask to make himself scary and frightening. That's quite like Batman's famous origin. Batman has this Batarangs whereas Goblin has Razorbats and in early issues, Goblin's use of gadgets was emphasized as much if not more than his super-powers. In the Arkham Knight game, Batman has a remote-controlled Batmobile that synchs with his costume, a piece of tech that Goblin has mastered with his Glider for a long long time. So there are some connections between the Goblin and Batman. Batman has been seen differently in different times. A lot of people now see him as this no-powers guy who kicks Superman or Darkseid around, but in the 60s (Adam West show) and later, he was seen as the guy with gadgets and tech, cool cars, cool planes, and putting his Bat sigil everywhere.

RIP Stan The Man

Looks like Stan Lee has joined Steve Ditko in the Marvel Bullpen of the sky.

Peter, among many others, is finally a real orphan. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/stan-lee-marvel-comics-legend-721450

He got to at least see Peter and MJ reunited this year, and the last newspaper strip arc ended with Peter telling MJ they'd paint the town red as soon as she got back home from her gruelling tour

Take Pete's advise and paint the town red with Joan Stan. You've earned it.

Stan Lee is a guy that provokes a lot of mixed feelings but even people who criticized him like Mark Evanier admit that he's at heart a nice guy. Marvel comics would never have become DC's rival and these days outright superior (courtesy the MCU) without him.

I tend to see Spider-Man during his time as being the work of Steve Ditko and Romita Sr. rather than him, with Gerry Conway (who took over from Lee) being Spider-Man's first real "writer" but Lee is the one who came up with With great power and so on...

I actually wonder how long the newspaper strip will last without Lee. It's been ghost-written for a while now without his say-so. But now that he's gone, they can't really credit him anymore. And without that, I think that strip, with the fading of print media and so on, might actually wind up.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Nov 12th 2018 at 11:36:33 AM

They really should do a Speechless equivalent to Stan Lee like they did with Mel Blanc when he died.

If the newspaper strip surivves, it faces a future without either Lieber brother. Larry retired as the main artist in the summer. No idea who ghost-writes it, I've heard Roy Thomas and Larry took turns but can't verify that for sure. Dan Slott wrote the Spider-Verse tie-in with the strip.

I am amazed the strip lasted so long. Before the internet and before the Raimi movies, the strip was probably the most widely read part of Spider-Man comics, at least by headcount than the monthly comics. It was certainly how people in other countries were first exposed to Spider-Man since the comics didn't show up on stands and when they did it was expensive imports, and even then it was so bogged down by continuity that it wasn't accessible. Now of course with the decline of newspapers and the internet and so on, and the movies and cartoons being widely available, I think the strip has lost readers or at least much of what it made it popular, i.e. a cheap, accessible, easily digestible way to get regular readers who don't know spider-man, superheroes, and comic books involved. IN fact, I actually don't know if there is such a thing anymore since the MCU have so saturated the world.

It's probably why it needs to go online, which is what a lot of longtime comic strips have been doing.

The Scrappy is back in today's Amazing Spider-Man: Carlie Cooper reconnects with Mary Jane and sets her up with "The Lookouts" a support group for superhero friends and family run by Jarvis

Edited by Zarius on Nov 14th 2018 at 7:29:06 AM

You know a while back I was thinking about The Night Gwen Stacy Died, a story that I always thought was overpraised and essentially harmful. One of the ideas I had was that instead of killing Gwen Stacy which Gerry Conway and others decided to break up the Official Couple, what if they made her into a supervillain instead. At the time Gwen blamed Spider-Man for the death of her father, and she had been in Europe for some time and it would be a cool way to bring back Gwen's original harsh characterization from the Steve Ditko era. What if she found out Peter's secret, had some accident or other and became an actual supervillain. That would have been better than fridging her for sure, Spider-Man could finally have a compelling female enemy which he is notably lacking in (they are trying to do that with Black Cat but it doesn't stick). Of course you can't do that now. I mean with Spider-Gwen and so on and all the stuff that came later, and I definitely don't care for Sins Past at all. So it's not something you can do now, even if I feel that eventually they should, and they will, bring Gwen Back from the Dead for real.

I am wondering if they can do that with Carlie Cooper, except there she's The Scrappy and there wouldn't be the sense of tragedy you get of seeing good-guy gone bad that you get for instance with The Dark Phoenix Saga. It'd be closer to Madelyne Pryor going Goblin Queen and assuaging the fans' conscience about Cyclops' cheating on her with Jean Grey (still more understandable than when he cheated on Jean with Emma). I mean as a character she has this absurd baggage and nobody knows what to do with her, and fridging her is definitely a terrible idea.

Guess she is just not a Goblin now. Shrug.

Mileena Madness