This thread's for the Spider-Man comics and spin-offs, whether they're decades old or brand new.
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which covers them.
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Edited by MacronNotes on Jul 10th 2023 at 10:58:13 AM
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, there's nothing wrong with a hero that doesn't want to kill, but absolutely will if put in a no-win situation. If you have the power and means to kill a guy before he kills someone else, and there really are no other ways to diffuse the situation, yeah it's sad you have to get blood on your hands, but you do what you gotta do.
All this talk about "power and responsibility" is hollow if you view your own personal distaste against killing to be more important than other people's lives. Exponentially so if you go out of your way to resuscitate someone like the Green Goblin or Joker.
The resuscitate part is what really irks me with guys like the Joker or Peter jumping infront of the bullet JJ shot at Norman.
These guys are mass murderers and in Norman's case just finished the supervillain equivalent of a mass shooting for fun!?
No one is gonna shed any tears if JJ sends that monster to hell.
It's tone death as hell and writer interviews where they joke about killing off side characters (ie: having MJ raped and murdered to end the marraige) firmly cement my point.
These supervillains are nothing more than their toys to play around and smash stuff with before putting them in their toy chest (jail) for next time all while waving the finger to the reader that killing them is bad and makes the hero worse.
Edited by FKJ10 on Aug 23rd 2023 at 2:14:28 AM
I think this is what people really mean, whether they know it or not, when they say certain superhero writers like the villains a little too much. It's not giving them their own books, making them turn face or even giving them sympathetic backstories. It's having them get away with all manner of vile acts and spitting on the heroes' mercy.
Precisely when I read the "Joker's friend" where the clown routinely broke out of prison to torture this one guy including his friends/family. All I said to myself was
How is Jason in the wrong for wanting to put a bullet in his skull.
With Osborn everytime I see him as Gold Goblin I'm constantly saying to myself. How the hell does this man still have his company? He went on a mass killing spreee with a symbiote not to long ago and tried to overthrow the government with his "Dark Avengers".
There's no consequences for these guys while the hero constantly suffers for this "moral victory" of not getting their hands dirty and just killing them.
It makes me think they don't like Frank Castle beyond the alt right fans is because Frank doesn't give any room for repeat colorful supervillains. As his nature is "shoot first then double and triple tap."
They're constantly doing the same with Jason taking away his guns in favor of a katana and crowbar.
In the real world, the principle is that cops still try to get medical assistance for wounded and dying criminals. And the Punisher etc. would simply be mass murderers, even if all their victims were 100% guilty.
The revolving door of supervillain prisons/deaths undermines much of that.
(Less so for the Punisher, where most of the people he kills would simply get jailed. No superpowers and fancy costume, no jailbreak or Boxed Crook moment)
But it's still really problematic to have a hero who simply executes a defeated foe (also a war crime, iirc?), or allows them to die because they're not worth saving. It sends a message that contradicts a lot of what Spider-Man's supposed to be about.
Edited by Mrph1 on Aug 23rd 2023 at 11:25:08 AM
The Punisher is a mass murderer.
There's actually a lot of fun stories that use him as a villain but a principled villain like Magneto. Which is where he can stay if people would write him that way. You can also have him have his own series with that too, showing how damaged and wrong he is.
BUT
The reason "Heroes don't kill" is due to the Moral Guardians who created the sexist, racist, and oppressive Comics Books Code Authority designed to suppress artistic freedom from writers. It has no actual moral value other than a bunch of White Men were afraid for "the Children"
Spider-Man doesn't need to kill the Green Goblin but "Oh no, Norman Osborn fell down into the ocean. He's dead until we need him again" is still a form of justice. So would be him actually being in jail—which the comics are allergic too.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.And I'm not convinced that the 1990s Colombian police are the standard that most people want Peter to aim for.
(The Other Wiki also suggests that Escobar's death was less clear-cut than that. So perhaps not a bad comparison to a villain falling into the ocean or otherwise squandering their last chance)
Punisher works best in gritty down to reality crime drama stories where he's fighting the absolute worst of society.
Human traffickers, child abusers etc (i.e: the kind of people even hardened prisoners will kill strictly out of principle)
And the comics code authority was the worst case of self censorship in recent memory. As it basically killed the horror comic genre.
Ironically Steve Ditko if he was given free reign would have been all for Peter killing or at best not bothering to save his villains from death.
Oh I already know the Colombian authorities were working with another rival cartel to take down Pablo. Because at that point Killing Pablo really meant more than any moral high ground.
Edited by FKJ10 on Aug 23rd 2023 at 5:07:35 AM
I think there's also a spectrum.
The Punisher is not a character for children to read or aspirational. But there's certainly a place for him in comics.
Spider-Man is for children.
And adults.
And is meant to be aspirational.
Yeah, it's Mêlée à Trois and I mean civil war in the absolute sense with Pablo being less of a drug lord and more of a warlord, the Cali wanting to just get back to selling drugs, and the police becoming a Rabid Cop because the government had been cowed by terrorism (and then engaging in terrorism themselves). Any moral judgements have to be taken in the sense it was no longer about cops and robbers.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 23rd 2023 at 5:16:57 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.And thats my main problem with post comics authority comic books.
Almost everything has to be inspirational or some kind of good message for the kids or Twitter.
Sometimes a story should take you to a dark place of no clear morale choice and leave you wondering.
It's why I can understand why alot of the MCU actors got burnt out beyond the crazy workouts Disney forced them into. You can only do so many quipy jokes and hopeful messages before you feel your acting prowess is being wasted.
RDJ expressed how rusty he felt doing Oppenheimer after a decade of Iron Man.
Plenty of comics do that. Including some of the Marvel ones.
But that's never been the Spider-Man brand (or, at least, not the Earth-616 version), and Marvel/Disney are unlikely to go too far in that direction with a character who appears on lunchboxes, toys, kids' clothes etc.
Edited by Mrph1 on Aug 23rd 2023 at 1:59:05 PM
Too far and in between and usually it was the Punisher offering those stories with the MAX series penned by Garth Ennis.
Whenever Marvel tries for moral ambiguity in a mainstream story we get Civil War 1 and 2.
Which had a "lovely" effect on the wall crawler.
Hell the latest Punisher series ended with the writer having all the heroes, and Frank's recently revived wife telling the guy his war on crime was a joke, he's crazy and she's divorcing him. Frank then erases himself from existence.
Literally the author waving their fingers at the reader saying Punisher is a bad character and you shouldn't like him.
Edited by FKJ10 on Aug 23rd 2023 at 6:11:53 AM
It's always going to be hard to see Frank as a truly bad person when he's going after the worst of villains. To keep this on topic, remember that the only reason Frank ever went after Spider-Man was because he thought Spider-Man killed Gwen and then backed off when he thought the Wall-Crawler was innocent. Marvel is in this weird middle ground where they want us to see the Punisher as morally questionable at least but very rarely have him actually do something that he can't walk back from.
I know a guy online who dislikes the Punisher yet also hates that scene from Runaways where he tries to kill the kids and gets punched because it just comes across as making Frank a joke instead of really deconstructing his ideology.
I mean, it's not really deconstructing his ideology. I made the Punisher Expy the reason my protagonist went insane and became a supervillain but I think it's BS. It's like making Batman someone who targets black people.
It's just making up stuff to make the character a Strawman to punch.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
On the other hand, there was that time Civil War had him kill supervillains who were helping Cap fight the superhuman registration act. The other thing about Frank is he's not really big on redemption.
Peter, in comparison, is a bit more open to the idea. It got screwed over by Hunted, but he was totally willing to just let Kraven be a good guy in that brief period where he was a squirrel girl supporting character, he hired Clash to work at his company back when he had one, that sort of thing.
That was Spencer's idea and his worst one. It ignores all the good that Squirrel Girl did trying to confront Kraven with his own hypocrisies and asking him whether he really was a decent hunter if all he did was kill people weaker than him.
And it led to a lot of discussion of his immortality and whether he could be redeemed.
(and unlike Osborn, Squirrel Girl didn't actually come to the conclusion he could)
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 23rd 2023 at 7:43:11 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

RYV Spidey is best Spidey for me.
You can’t beat that dad energy.
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"