Spider-Man General Discussion

Honestly Hobgoblin would be perfect as an Arch Enemy to Miles. Hobgoblin's big gimmick as the new Goblin doesn't work, but his motif as an identity seller and legacy character would make a great dynamic with Miles.

Tombstone is a great villain but I don't think he should be a Miles villain. Because it creates this sense that Miles' villains are POC like him. You already have Aaron and so on. Adding an African-American albino gangster seems too much.

It perpetuates subtextually the sense of "black-on-black violence" when what people want is to see their African-American hero get one over the white villains. Will Smith pointed this out as the reason he turned down Django. He didn't get to kill Leo Dicaprio and instead the character killed Sam Jackson's character which is one of the reasons I didn't care for that movie. That defeats the entire purpose of making a black cowboy movie.

ITSV understood that perfectly. In the finale, it is Miles all by himself who takes down Kingpin, on his own, without help from anyone.

Well Django did kill about 40 other white guys.

And I think it also depends on what sort of relationship Miles and Tombstone have. As an archenemy, no, but the fact Tombstone is a black man and gang leader in a white driven crime economy is going to have more meaning to fights between him and Miles (see The Hate You Give for about how a black crime lord can be horrifying to the community while thinking he's a benefit) than it would ever be for Spiderman vs. Tombstone.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 21st 2019 at 7:52:03 AM

I get what you mean, but Tombstone has menaced other Street level heroes. It makes sense for him to go after Miles.

I guess so. Tombstone was created by Gerry Conway for Spectacular, and in his opening arc he was presented as an enemy to Robbie Robertson having gone to school with him, but only Tombstone broke bad.

Tombstone was awesome in the Spider-Man game, as this biker gang leader. That boss-fight where he matches Spider-Man quip for quip is great. Like when Spider-Man tells him he should start a soup kitchen, Tombstone says, "I will when it pays well." That's legit gangsta. He also has actual superpowers so he isn't a joke to fight against unlike 616 and game Kingpin.

I wonder if Hammerhead or the Owl would be useful for that.

Or some old favorites like the Crime Master or Big Man.

Both Crime Master and Big Man are dead. The original versions though there are, and can be legacies. In fact, Gerry Conway said he created Hammerhead and Tombstone as surrogates for them, being a huge fan of their stories and wanting to add in gangster supervillains.

No stays dead forever but Uncle Ben.

:)

How is a grand total of two black villains "too much"? I'm reminded of Dwayne Mc Duffie's saying of how you can't have more than two black people in your cast without being accused of making your story about race.

Until the Clone Saga, in Spider-Man at least, dead did mean dead. Spider-Man actually held out against Death Is Cheap longer than a lot of Marvel (and DC) titles did. The one potential exception is the Robotparents angle just before that, but even that was this hoax and so on, and you know...robots. Now, for instance, nobody has doubts that Flash Thompson is going to return someday. I mean a major supporting character going back to AF#15 conveniently bonded to a symbiote at the time of death...yeah he'll be back eventually.

Really, I think it was Superman's death and resurrection that opened the floodgates industry wide.

I think it was the X-Men, Jean Grey's death that really started it. A defining moment and defining storyline and not even a decade passed before they brought her back. Then against Frank Miller's wishes, Elektra was brought back from the dead. I am sure there are other instances people can cite. Iron Fist was also killed off for a long while, and then John Byrne brought her back, and Byrne is an author who has made it clear that he will always undo character deaths. His reaction when he brought back Aunt May in the worst possible way is more or less, I am paraphrasing If you hate my story it's not my fault, it's the fault of the people who made me retcon in the first place. I mean yeah.

In the case of Death of Superman, the writers and editors didn't really intend to kill off Superman, whereas in the other instances death was meant to be death. Like Aunt May's death in ASM #400 was definitely intended by the Marvel editorial and the writers as her actual death. There were no plans to resurrect her whereas that was there in Death of Superman all along. When Barry Allen Flash died in COIE, that was intended to stick. DC's own publishers and editors thought Barry was a dull character and asked Wolfman to kill him off, it took more than 2 decades and change in management before the green light came to undo that.

So I'm reading Spider-Man/Deadpool and it's everything I never even knew I wanted. I think the moment this series won me over is when Deadpool and Spidey dance for Jenny and Jane's amusement.

Also Deadpool wears Spider-Man undies.

Wikipedia has a page on comic book death and the two cited example are Jean Grey and Superman. Going by our Death Is Cheap page it seems Superman's 'death' codified the trope even though other examples came first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book_death

People should note that while DC Comics was never intending to keep Superman dead, they actually did a very good job of pretending for the general non-comic book fan audience. They cited that Superman's "sales were down" and that they acted like it was the public's fault Superman was being killed.

Last people knew, Robin was dead (and they thought it was Dick Grayson too).

You know this reminds me of when Ultimate Peter died, and the non comic book reading audience reacted like Mainstream Peter died, like one day my dad brought it up like is it true Spider-Man died and they replaced him with a latino? I mean it felt like one of those deaths that would actually stick but didn't. Or that time Doc Ock killed Peter and took his body. (Which they still never explained how he's still alive)

In the case of Ultimate Peter, for a generation, he was the "Default" Peter. USM was the continuity-light introduction and it brought in tons of new readers. For them, Ultimate Peter and his gang was their Peter. The other Ultimate Versions never caught on to the same extent, so when in Ultimatum they killed off god knows how many heroes, nobody really cared. Ultimate Spider-Man was the emotional and moral center of the entire Ultimate Universe and Bendis and everyone knew that, and that's why his death was this big event and treated that way. So Death of USM hit those marks. And I think going in, Bendis intended that death to stick. Because he had no idea and clue that Miles Morales would become as popular as he would. When that happened and Peter's supporting cast still stuck around without any clear way to integrate them with Miles and too many unresolved stuff, Ultimate Peter obviously had to be brought back as an older kid, I guess an 18 year old who then takes a long-deserved vacation with MJ while Miles continues as "your one and only Spider-Man". But yeah Death of USM was definitely an "event" not nearly the same scale as Death of Superman but considerably so. And of course Bendis does allude to that story when at the end, MJ cradles Peter's body like Lois did Superman's at the end of that story.

In the case of Superior Spider-Man, obviously Peter was eventually gonna come back. The "peter ghost" thing was there in the next issues and so on. Slott said that he would have continued keeping Ock-in-Peter a little longer but the upcoming release of the second Garfield movie nixed his plans, and that led to the rather hasty way that entire arc was undone and Peter came back (Slott didn't even script the final issues, Christos Gage did). Spider-Verse likewise was going to feature the Ock-in-Peter but at a Marvel writing summit, everyone (editors, fellow writers and others) felt that an event like that (all Spider-Man, every AU and adaptation colliding) needed to be done with the real Peter Parker.

Technically speaking, Death of Superman isn't anything new. Kraven's Last Hunt did it first. That story was the first-of-its-kind Bat Family Crossover, a single story across all Spider-titles because Editor Jim Salicrup felt that for the story to convince readers Spider-Man was dead and buried, there couldn't be appearances by Spider-Man in subsidiary titles that still had him adventuring. So the same story had to be done, across two months, in all three monthly Spider-Man titles (ASM, Spectacular, Web of Spider-Man). That's an example of such a crossover being done for creative reasons. And until the end of Issue #3 with that final page having the caption going "Mary Jane" over Spider-Man's grave, you had no hint about Peter still being alive. And given that Peter is missing for "two weeks", that's an example of real-time storytelling since KLH Part 1 and Part 3 would have been released two weeks apart. The major difference is that KLH did it over 2 months, and Death of Superman stretched things for like a year, so when Superman returned to life, it didn't quite have the same oomph that Peter punching through that grave proto-Kill Bill style did.

To me there's a difference between stories where the death was planned from the start as temporary and undoing deaths that were intended and set up to be permanent.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Apr 23rd 2019 at 4:56:32 AM

I didn't even know Ultimate Peter came back before the world ended.

Not a lot of people do. Because it was underplayed in a big way. For Bendis, Miles Morales became Ultimate Spider-Man full time, so Ultimate Peter's return was basically a dangling subplot of a supporting character at the time and not Miles' story. Spider-Men II revived the Ultimate Universe supposedly destroyed after Secret Wars 2015 but it looks like 616 Reed and Sue and the kids of the Future Foundation fixed it too and many people don't know that either.

Basically the problem with Death and Return stories is when the Death ends up being more memorable than the return. That happened with Death of Superman, and also with Jean Grey's "Death" and also Superior Spider-Man when Peter eventually returns and it just doesn't have any impact. Compare that to KLH where Peter coming out of the grave is basically a moment that's been compared to the lifting machinery thing. It's interesting that in both major occasions when Peter Parker grew up, going to college, and getting married. Immediately after that you had all-time masterpieces that are primarily about the new world and reality that Peter is in. The Master Planner saga and Kraven's Last Hunt respectively. Whereas any time they try to regress Peter, you have crap like the Clone Saga, OMD, and so on. It's a pity we never got the masterpiece that would have shown Peter as a new father in 616, although Spider-Girl and RYV are fine as it is.

Yeah, Peter's death is pretty anticlimatic in Kraven's last hunt compared to his other deaths, Kraven just pulls out a rifle and shoots him. Maybe mundane is the word i'm looking for, but then again, the motif of the story is death and what better way to illustrate the point than having Spider-Man gunned down anticlimactically and suddenly?

Speaking of that, i'm also thinking of Knightfall, where Bruce is crippled and then replaced by Azreal. Sure Batman doesn't die, but the beats are there: Hero is horribly beaten to death(or crippled in Batman's case) body is cradled, someone or some people take over the identity of the hero for a year or so, hero comes back and defeats successor. Yes all these beats are in both Kraven's last hunt and Superior.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 23rd 2019 at 6:53:10 AM

Peter's death in KLH is anti-climactic but not his survival and resurrection. To do a Death and Resurrection story, both need to feel as big and great in equal measure. There aren't many cases where that's the case.

Since KLH came first, it probably inspired the Batman and Superman examples. In the case of Knightfall, Bane breaking Batman's back is far more famous and oft-adapted than Azrael taking over and so on. The Knightfall arc, leading to Batman's back-breaking is awesome — Batman's hubris, him doing it all by himself, being a jerk to Dick Grayson when he offers to help, feeling guilty about Jason, overextending and fatiguing himself, and then having his back broken. It's a story with a logic and purpose and tragedy to it. On some level it's sad, on another level it's kind of deserved and part of Batman's tragic destiny.

Azrael doesn't really fit the storyline of Knightfall.

Either Bruce or Dick should have defeated Bane, basically.

Much like Doomsday Bane was a plot device to bring about a certain outcome

Azrael was a product of the times, he was a commentary on all those fans who wanted Punisher as Bats. If Bane broke the Bat physically, Azrael broke the Bat spiritually, he basically shat upon everything Batman stood for and it was awesome when Batman came back and showed him how wrong he was.

Superior misses the point, the one who rehabilitates Spider-Man's image is ironically Green Goblin, he's the one who shows why Otto's methods don't work thus that's partly why Peter's " My Turn " moment falls flat. Peter doesn't defeat Otto, Peter comes back on Otto's terms. Dan Slott seems to agree that Otto is better than Peter despite the big message from Otto.

Part of the issue a lot of comic book writers failed to get is all characters are plot devices.

How you use them is what creates character.

Bane was far more interesting than Azrael to the average comic book reader.