This thread's for the Spider-Man comics and spin-offs, whether they're decades old or brand new.
- Apart from the main Marvel Universe titles, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man "What If?" stories, crossovers, guest appearances in other books, Alternate Universe tales and things like Marvel's manga adaptations are all on-topic here.
- Spider-Man 'family' books are on-topic (as are their own crossovers, guest appearances etc.) - e.g. Spider-Man 2099, Miles Morales, Spider-Woman, Silk, Spider-Gwen, Venom, Carnage, Black Cat, Red Goblin and Spider-Verse.
- Characters and comics that originated in Spider-Man but are no longer directly connected to the spider-franchise (e.g. Punisher, Silver Sable) are not on-topic, unless you're discussing historical connections and crossovers. If in doubt, check before you write a long post. If this isn't the right place, there's a more general Marvel Comics thread
which covers them.
Technically, Marvel's Infinity Comics (and their predecessors, Infinite Comics) are webcomics, not comic books, but it's fine to talk about their Spider-Man stories here.
Discussions that are only about Spider-Man adaptations in other media (films, video games etc.) are off-topic, but discussing the differences between the adaptations and the original comics is fine - as long as spoilers for the adaptations are tagged.
Please follow the spoiler policy rules
- tag spoilers for the latest issues, for any previews or content leaks, and for off-topic comics. When including spoiler tags, try to write so that tropers can make an informed decision before viewing them (e.g. which series and issue will they spoil?).
Edited by MacronNotes on Jul 10th 2023 at 10:58:13 AM
x6 You’re forgetting that House of M Peter was also cheating on Gwen with MJ. Because he loves MJ but also obviously wishes Gwen never died, and that was the spell’s way of making him have both ways because that made him happy.
x3Yeah, I feel like it would be a major milestone for Peter’s development and sign that they’re really stepping back in the right direction if they just had Peter acknowledge that Gwen wasn’t really that perfect, that he’s built up a rose-tinted vision of her in his head, and that if she had lived their relationship probably wouldn’t have worked out… or worse, they would’ve stuck to it and ended up in a miserable, loveless marriage.
Peter needs to be back to being over Gwen in general. One of the worse things OMD and the lead-up to it did was dig up all of Peter’s trauma and guilt over Gwen’s death and make it a huge part of his emotions again, when Peter had gotten over it decades prior; he felt bad about it if it came up, yeah, but he barely thought about it anymore because it was in the past and life goes on. Hell, that was part of the point of the original Clone Saga; Peter knows he’s the original because Ben was still hung-up on Gwen while he had come to terms with her passing, admitted things wouldn’t have worked, and now loved Mary Jane. Which is to say, he knew he was the original because he grew up and the then unnamed clone didn’t because they were different people at the end of the day.
Edited by immortaleditor on Nov 4th 2023 at 6:45:53 AM
God, Sin’s Past was such a horrific fuck-up. How that made it to print is beyond me.
If I recall, the original idea for it was that the Stacy Twins would be Peter’s illegitimate kids that he didn’t know Gwen had, but that got shot down… not because it was a terrible idea but because editorial didn’t want Peter being a dad (oy vey). Why they changed the dad to Norman instead of just scrapping the whole idea I genuinely can’t fathom.
I mean, the idea they wouldn't work out seems the same sort of Character Derailment that MJ gets subjected to.
Also, this is a relevant comic panel of the Betty and Veronica and its inherent problems.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 4th 2023 at 6:51:10 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Eh, that’s how I read it, so it may just be my bias shining through when I said that.
God, I loved that scene. It did such a good job calling out the way Spider-Editorial treats the female characters in Peter’s life, particularly how Felicia and MJ have both been treated like “bad girls inferior to the prim and proper ladies who behave right” at times.
Either some of the build up to Sins Past had already been published, necessitating it have some payoff
Or JMS wanted to salvage the work he’d put into scripting it
Harry would have been a better option, I suppose. It doesn’t have the same emotional impact but given that Harry and Gwen were dead, Peter couldn’t ever get closure on the new information. While he could always find Norman and kick him in the nuts after the published Sins Past
Forever liveblogging the Avengers![]()
If it’s the first, than the idea of it being something necessitating payoff is pretty hilarious when one considers that this is a book that left stuff like FACADE or Peter’s implied to still be alive infant daughter as dangling plot threads unceremoniously dumped without care.
I don’t remember if that’s it or it was someone else who had the Norman idea, but I totally wouldn’t be surprised if it came from Joe Quesada.
Edited by immortaleditor on Nov 4th 2023 at 7:02:59 AM
FACADE in Dan Slott’s run: “It is finally time to reveal my secret”
Spider-Man: “Nobody cares!”
Forever liveblogging the AvengersIf FACADE ever does reveal who they are it'll probably be an anticlimax at this point.
The Protomen enhanced my life.That would honestly be a pretty good way to do it. He reveals who is and Peter is like “dude, what? I don’t even know who you are”.
Either that or they could totally flip the script and use Facade’s true identity as the centerpiece of some massive elaborate Arc Welding that ties together a bunch of different hanging threads and continuity in brilliant manner.
Either one would be really funny to me.
So was Hulk's deepest desire ruling over Australia? Because that's how things ended up for him.
You'd think Banner's desire would have been not to turn into the Hulk, but his backstory in House of M remained mostly unchanged.
Granted, doesn't Peter always feel guilt over the people he couldn't save? Like George Stace, Dewolf and of course, Uncle Ben.
Edited by Cortez on Nov 4th 2023 at 10:54:45 AM
House of M certainly made some… interesting choices. Almost as if the whole event was just a weak excuse on Joe Quesada’s part to force the X-Men back into a shitty status quo only he liked.
And yeah, Peter guilts himself over the people he fails to save a ton, but it’s not all he does. He feels bad when it comes up and pushes himself harder, but he doesn’t spend his entire life harping about it. With Gwen nowadays, and admittedly Uncle Ben too, it’s like he never finishes grieving when he did finish grieving in mature, well-written ways in earlier stories.
Does being married to Gwen necessitate that his relationship to MJ is being insulted?
Because I can easily see it as an insult to Gwen that MJ would be his dream girl.
It wasn't a Status Quo but something wholly new and shocking for the line. Mutants had never been on the verge of extinction before.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 4th 2023 at 8:03:55 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
I wasn’t saying it was done before. It WAS the status quo from there on until the Krakoan Age. It was just new at the time. M-Day was also a prime example that not all status quo shifts are good and undoing them sometimes really is necessary, because it was terrible and plunged X-Men into an Audience-Alienating Era that lasted for over a decade and had to be swept away en masse to salvage the series. That’s what I’ll say on it here, since this isn’t the X-Men thread and I don’t want to go too off topic.
Though I will also add that while mutants being near-extinction was never done before, in all practice, M-Day was basically the X-Men’s OMD in that it was blatantly meant to force things back to how they were back in the editor’s favored era; it slaughtered or depowered mostly characters who weren’t from the 60s, 70s, and early 80s and the cutting down of mutants’ numbers was to try and make things more like the early days of the X-Men by reducing the number of characters and reemphasizing the “hated and feared” aspect when the comics had been increasingly pushing into the mutants actually becoming somewhat accepted and exploring what being a minority really meant.
Recently watched Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and I just gotta say: I really love the different animation styles and Medium Blending throughout the film - which makes me all the more saddened after learning about the animators' mistreatment.
My only other disappointment is the lack of Supaidaman in that movie.
"You’re forgetting that House of M Peter was also cheating on Gwen with MJ." I read House of M not long ago, and I don't remember any mention of Peter having an affair with MJ. I think he talked about marrying her in his diaries, but that was his dreams of his real life.
"It wasn't a Status Quo but something wholly new and shocking for the line. Mutants had never been on the verge of extinction before." It was a return to the status quo of there being few mutants. Morrison, and the era they brought in, tried to treat mutants as an actual minority group, which meant they had a sizable population, and a culture. There were mutant pop stars and shit. But nostalgia-ridden jackasses couldn't get over the earlier comics were mutants were small in number and constantly hiding from the world, so boom. M-Day. The actual logic behind it was that there were too many mutants. Literally, that was editorial's logic for M-Day. There were too many mutants, and they wanted to get back to the good ol' days of few mutants.
Nostalgia is a disease. Like the man said, "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.![]()
Yeah, I know. I just didn't feel like I needed to specify it was him who said it. I assumed most of the people here are probably also Star Wars fans, because geeks gotta geek.
It sucks that one of the themes of The Last Jedi - namely, the need to look beyond what's come before in order to build something new - was then entirely undone by the following movie, because Abrams, on Star Wars, was so wholly unable to looking beyond what's been done before, and instead just kept recycling shit from the original trilogy.
And then Rise of Skywalker was generally seen as a disappointment by a lot of people.
It feels like there's a lesson in there.
Edited by Tiamatty on Nov 4th 2023 at 2:29:37 PM
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.

Yeah.
Though nobody liked the idea of her having sex with Norman Osborn.
Even people against Saint Gwen (which is everyone) called bullshit on that one.
One Strip! One Strip!