Spider-Man General Discussion

That's a neat concept and premise. I was thinking a while back that someone should do this. So it would be cool. Although I kind of think it's going to be a little redundant based on what they are announcing, like what would Spidey do with the Vietnam War, well we know what he actually did...nothing. I mean Flash Thompson signed up and went to Vietnam, Peter and everyone supported it and saw it as a moment where Flash was becoming a hero, which means all of them supported the Vietnam War as did a majority of people at the time. Heck both Gwen and Mary Jane gave him A Kiss For Luck on the lips (Gwen with Peter's approval) in the pages when he shipped off. Which is still a very sweet moment especially after Go Down Swinging.

That's actually realistic because most of the soldiers who signed up for Vietnam were volunteers and draftees were rarely sent to battle. The only problem is that Peter would have been called for the draft and posted somewhere, so he would have to have gotten 4F or claim conscientious objector status. Claiming 4F is easy (say you are gay as many did at the time, mostly African Americans). The weird thing about Spider-Man is that it was always Two Decades Behind, like Aunt May and Uncle Ben are Greatest Generation figures but Ben is really way too old than Richard Parker to be Peter's Uncle. And the early issues feel like Lee and Ditko plucking from their memories of depression. Mary Jane Watson was the first really contemporary character who really felt like she was from The '60s. I mean she's like Han Solo who was a 70s guy in a genre setting where everyone was from different genre and setting. Then you had Harry Osborn's drug problems. My guess is if they are doing this real-time they might do this like Forrest Gump where Peter and MJ are like Forrest and Jenny, though with the joke that comics!MJ being an actual character from the '60s is a more progressive and feminist figure than the Jenny there, which is just this "cautionary tale" self-destructive hippies thing.

I wouldn't mind them actually dealing with some stuff like Stonewall which happened in New York but was never covered or addressed then, and it's really weird that no one in Peter's college gang and set (which in NY means bohemian and outre) is gay, then the AIDS crisis of The '80s. You could also have Peter get married and divorced and so on, which could touch on the feminist divorce revolution of The '80s. Maybe Peter marries Gwen but it doesn't work out and so on.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Dec 12th 2018 at 12:30:49 PM

iirc, either in the 60s or in Spider-Man: Blue, they explained that Peter probably wouldn’t be drafted because he was a scholarship student. Maybe I’m misremembering that. I don’t think that was an actual policy of the time, but I might be wrong.

Well, Anya Corazon, during her Araña years, was basically Kuuga with a origin more akin to Showa era Riders.

Hmmm...that does put a new wrinkle on the class thing, since the perception in the Anti-War Movement is working-class and poor kids go off to fight wars while rich bourgeois kids on daddy's money dodge the draft. I guess that was true in the broad sense but it's kind of weird if Peter got his privileged exception based on his smarts. Maybe George Stacy arranged it for him because he knew he was Spider-Man and dating his daughter and didn't want to break her heart...and oh the irony and tragedy of it all if that was the case. Stan Lee as EIC kept above the fray and apolitical during that time. In one of his letters' columns he said:

Lee also renamed Black Panther for a while to avoid association with the party that came up a few months after T'Challa's debut. Which is why I always found the whole Ditko was this Randian nut that Lee was trying to tame absurd, not only because it reduces Ditko and doesn't give him credit but because Lee was never that kind of guy. He always tried to be everyone's friend and he followed trends when it came up, hence Iron Man being this turn against their anti-establishment thing. Like during the Lee-Romita run after the Civil Rights became entrenched he started introducing African-American characters (Robbie Robertson and the Hobie Brown Prowler) and then he did the drug issues (and even then the focus is on the rich white American kid Harry Osborn buying junk which isn't a very accurate or realistic take on it). The Vietnam war was this bipartisan thing at the start, and it was so popular that Martin Luther King Jr. was pilloried for coming against it hard, and it was only after his assassination and so on, and even then only in the late Nixon era during the Pentagon Papers (cf, The Post) that the war became seen as this mistake. And Marvel after adopting Comic-Book Time started deciding to be apolitical. So instead of AIDS you had the Legacy virus, instead of Apartheid you had Genosha. And the X-Men became this stand-in for LGBT and other upliftment in the Claremont era.

And of course later on, I think Flash's Vietnam background got played down since obviously it would age the characters in a contemporary setting.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Dec 12th 2018 at 1:16:40 AM

Spiderman Life Story fascinates me, because if Peter aged in real time, he'd be pretty old right now.

71 years old, and probably still in good shape due to his Spider powers.

You know I always headcannoned that Spider-Man's superpowers would age him slower than humans...It's a 6 Issue Series and each one (based on promos) seems to be one-per-decade, so it's 60s-70s-80s-90s-00s-2010s. Since they're going to have "Spider-Man's whole history" across time, I imagine they'll take a multiple divorcee and multiple kids approach. And the end will have Miles Morales of the contemporary era as his successor. It's a pretty ambitious project by Zdarsky and done right this could be the "superhero last adventure" in the mold of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow that nobody has ever done for Spidey, not satisfyingly at any rate (don't get me started on Reign).

It's just that focusing on Vietnam like Spidey with helicopters seems odd to me because that kind of heavy duty stuff belongs to Captain America or even the X-Men. I feel that Spider-Man works primarily as social history, like you know gentrification in New York, the gay rights movement, class, relationships, divorces, 2-Income marriages, blended families and stepfamilies, and so on. Because the mainline Spider-Man comics already did have that social detail in the background in a large sense and bringing it out and acknowledging it would make the mainline comics that much more impactful. The big exception of course is the LGBT movement and AIDS.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Dec 12th 2018 at 2:51:55 AM

The problem of the legacy characters already has a solution: the spider-verse. What do Miles Morales (initially), Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man noir, Spider-Man 2099, etc; all have in common? That they all come from a universe of their own, where they are "the" big Spider hero, and do not live under ther shadow of Peter Parker (or it is an alternate Peter Parker). On a meta level, yes, they are all derivatives of the one and only Spider-Man, the Peter Parker of the Prime Earth, and they may acknowledge his authority when they meet, but in-universe you read their adventures and you don't feel like you are reading the adventures of Robin the Boy Wonder (a feeling that I do get from post-Secret War Miles, Anya Corazon, Silk, etc.). Of course, team-ups may be harder to do, but it's worth it. I have heard once that they wanted to move Spider-Gwen into the prime earth; but so far it seems that it was just a rumor.

That’s a weird feeling to get from Silk considering she always had very little to do with Peter lest they start making out all the time

I think the way to do it would be how they got Ultimate Fury to Prime Earth. Have a modern teenage girl, Miles' peer or something be a daughter of some Stacy relative or I don't know George Stacy's secret mistress' love-child (which would be more logical and less of a character assassination then Sins' Past, since George Stacy is this old Silver Fox type who could pull it off and it's not inconcievable for cops like him of high social standing to have mistresses, and he's a widower so it's not adultery and we don't know a lot about him, and since he's a pretty good character this would allow him to continue have a connection to the present day). Have her look like Gwen, get Spider powers and then have her and Spider-Gwen merge somehow, have her renamed and presto...You have a real Gwen, not a clone, not Peter's age, and so on and she can look like the Spider-Gwen of the animated movie, you know slightly punk and hair shorn off, so it won't look like the classical Gwen. Besides Gwen Stacy is this character with multiple versions and variations, each different from the last and Spider-Gwen is basically an original character except for some details, so there just needs to be the name and connection to George Stacy and nothing else.

Miles Morales is unique in that he's directly continuous to the Miles of Ultimate Marvel. Marvel wanted him to have that connection and continuity because that way he has integrity. But I don't think Spider-Gwen needs that because what defines her isn't really tied to classical Gwen Stacy. The supporting cast in Spider-Gwen isn't interesting and well-liked so you can have replacements of them. They can still call the band The Mary Janes, because MJ is an actress and celebrity in Marvel 616 and maybe one of the girls likes her in some TV show or something she did, and name it in tribute, and Mary Jane would of course love that.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Dec 12th 2018 at 3:59:11 AM

Fuck you, Nick Spencer. Why'd you have to make Hippo a villain again? Squirrel Girl helped him!

Saladin Ahmed's first Miles Morales issue today was pretty solid. First half was mostly spent doing window dressing and establishing Miles' current status quo most notably that Goldballs is no longer in the book and Judge is now roommates again with Miles and Ganke. He's also been retconned into not knowing Miles is Spider-Man. Miles' relationship status with Barbara, the love interest Bendis introduced really late into his run, is "complicated."

Venom Blast is also no longer an auto-win attack. Miles uses it on Rhino and although he hurts him, and he doesn't actually knock him out. They decide to call a truce after their brief scruffle after Miles realizes that Rhino isn't actually committing a robbery. Turns out there's a crime ring controller a bunch of kids to commit burglary, two of which is Barbara's cousin and Rhino's niece.

See if they want to give Miles Morales a love interest it should be done organically, they shouldn't try and give him his own MJ or whatever or transplant MJ or Gwen types, or for that matter Spider-Gwen...which I don't know feels odd, because Miles knows the Ultimate Gwen who's an older sister type to him (admittedly by at best four years). And I feel the same way to it as I do with Wonder Woman and Superman, it makes two characters who work separately and occupy their own spheres into diminished figures, and two Spider-people in a relationship just feels bland. The reason why MJ became MJ was that it happened organically, accidentally, and over time, based on fan response. Mary Jane was written out of the books many times but demand, expectations, and interest always brought her back when that didn't happen with say Betty Brant or Liz Allan or Gwen Stacy even. Same with Felicia Hardy, in her first appearance she was a villain and fan demand and interest made her Spider-Man's love interest, when originally Wolfman intended her to be a villain for the 616 Jessica Draw.

And you know if Miles has better chemistry with guys or something like that, that could be explored and cool. I mean that would be interesting.

And Miles is here to stay until the comics business dies out forever. So no need to rush it. I'd much rather see Miles get his own Jameson his own separate new rogues gallery and so on. Like look what they did with Batman Beyond, where the new Batman has his own rogues, not all of them memorable or good but different from the old one.

On his Twitter, Ahmed wrote "it's fun to write superheroes kissing". So it's fair to say that, unless Barbara gets powers in the following issues, Miles is getting a new super girlfriend.

Everyone knows Miles's answer to Mary Jane is Ganke anyway.

Well with Goldballs out of the book, I imagine we're going to get more followup on dangling Bombshell plotline.

Miles and Bombshell wouldn't be a bad pairing actually.

Huh I thought they were a thing.

Though I did stop reading Miles’ comic around the Civil War tie-in so my knowledge is limited. Last time I saw Bombshell she was driven off by Miles’ crazy-ass grandmother after trying to give him a school assignment.

Oh fuck is that old witch still insane?

Edited by slimcoder on Dec 12th 2018 at 8:55:05 AM

She kind of stopped appearing around that point. Like a little after that, she convinced Miles' mom to hire a PI to snoop into what exactly Miles was hiding from them. That PI ended up being Jessica Jones.

But yeah, by that point, I feel like Bendis kept changing the direction of the book and kind of lost focus lol

Oh good, she was a terrible person.

Was rather sad when I dropped Miles' series. His first Ultimate comics run was actually the first comic I ever read period along with Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force.

So it was a hard choice but I ended up doing it because I realized that something changed from since the beginning and how Bendis wrote Miles just wasn't fun anymore especially as it appeared that he was spinning his wheels & had no actual focus at all. Indeed bringing Miles into the 616 universe was not exactly a wise choice.

Should get into this new series though, as being better than the last run isn't really a high bar to surpass after all.

Edited by slimcoder on Dec 12th 2018 at 9:00:48 AM

Miles Morales' best stories were really that sweet spot between Ultimate Peter's death and Peter's later revival. And the best arc and best villain was the one with the Prowler. More time was needed to develop a rogues gallery around Miles and Bendis doesn't have chops for character creation of villains and the decisions he took with say Ultimate Venom and later Ultimate Goblin really made them unusable for stories going forward. I liked Ultimate Scopion, and Ultimate Prowler and Aaron Davis was a twisted mix of Uncle Ben and Green Goblin and he's great. I think the way forward is that Miles should get his own city and stomping ground. Like Peter Parker always has to be in Manhattan because of web-swinging, but Miles' best powers are the camo and venom blast, so he doesn't need to be in a place with tall stuff and so on I think. And you know I think you can do Spider-Man well in different environments. I mean read the Lee-Ditko issues, ASM#1 has him leaving New York to interfere in a rocket flight, ASM#14 has him going to California and fighting the Goblin, the Enforcers and the Hulk in a desert and then a cave. So you can try and re-tool him.

Still Saladin Ahmed may have already thought about this. He has big shoes to fill as the first guy to follow Bendis on Miles since he stepped down. Miles Morales along with Jessica Jones are Bendis' great original creations for Marvel.

He already backslided in The Scarlet Spider and Venom.

Would have been nice if the latter brought up him starting out as a Venom villain.

So I read a digital copy of Spider-Miles #1. Saladin Ahmed's dialogue is great. There's some really good social commentary.

I cannot stand Javier Garron's art. It turns me off so much. I can't read any comic he's on, I just can't. I wish the book the best, I hope it does well, but I can't read it as long as Javier Garron's doing the art for it.

I read it myself just now and it feels like Bendis' stuff and yeah the social commentary is pertinent but it feels I don't know lacking something. I remember reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' original run on Black Panther: A Nation under Our feet, and right from the get-go you had some intense stuff, moments, scenes, and context...that felt continuous but charted out a new direction and signal of intent. This feels too Bendis-like Decompression and while he did it well, I don't know if that's the way to continue or only style. Coates' artist-collaborator Brian Stelfreeze did the Cover Art and it's pretty good. Black and Green, Black and Red...and I love Miles' Spider-Man logo...so modern and yet in keeping.

This is another complaint but I kind of feel that Miles needs his own take on "With Great Power..." (and to be honest, maybe it's time to downplay it since that's how it was done in the first thirty and the best thirty years of Spider-Man comics) because the fact is that he's a different Spider-Man than Peter. I like that bit where he mentions that Peter told him not to tell his parents but he did and he feels better, which is great that he's striking out and becoming his own man, and not following the path of Mr. Liar. Because "with great power" doesn't make sense for Miles because he never f—ked up majorly like Peter did by letting a burglar go because fame and celebrity went to his head. He's always been a humble and nice guy. He doesn't need to learn it and it doesn't have the same meaning for him as it did to Peter. Again its just a caption at the end of the issue not his green lantern-esque oath. And in the long-run it gets sillier to focus on it.

Like Batman's original motto is "Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot..." which later writers felt was kind of silly and pompous but then again he's a rich guy who beats up the poor and the insane, what else would he say. Then The '90s gave us the Metal-as-all-get-out "I am vengeance" which honestly doesn't mean anything but it just works...Miles needs his own equivalent of I am vengeance. Slott tried to do that with "no one dies" but that was just vague BS that didn't make sense, and doesn't sound cool, and which MJ pointed out in another issue was indicative of a guy thinking he's God.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Dec 12th 2018 at 11:12:37 AM

Im really looking forward to this "Spider-Man in real time" story. Always thought something like that would be cool.

What's wrong with Javier's art?

Honestly, the only panels of his that I thought were bad was the breakfast scene between Miles and his mom. Other than that, I thought it was solid for the most part.