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
Again not really the point. The ostensible purpose of an Ultimate is to bring in new readers in a universe not died down to too much continuity.
Regardless of whether Absolute DC succeeds or not at that, bringing back an old universe from the 80s would not accomplish that. Thats just more nostalgia pandering, the opposite of what DC/Marvel should be doing.
Edited by slimcoder on Jun 22nd 2024 at 2:37:48 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."The problem with Ultimate universes is that they often start to creak under their own weight of continuity. A great jumping-on point for readers in issue #1, not much different to the main universe by issue #75.
Especially if there are multiple books with crossovers and spin-offs.
Crossovers with main continuity are often even worse, as they diminish anything that's special and unique about the Ultimate setting.
And there is a temptation to wreck the world (which also applies to things like 2099) for short-term shock value and sales, leaving it a poor setting for long-term stories (and further harming it as a jumping-on point).
That said, Marvel's sometimes been pretty good on this with Spider-Man. The original Peter/Miles story was good. Miles has made the jump to 616 while keeping his popularity.
And Hickman is good at this stuff, so I'm cautiously optimistic that new Ultimate and its version of Peter won't go down the same path as the original 616 or the original Ultimate.
Edited by Mrph1 on Jun 22nd 2024 at 11:38:25 AM
The best option for something like an Ultimate line would probably be to have some sort of specific time frame in mind for when to end it. Even better if there's a set plan for its life ahead of time, but definitely a plan for how long it will run before it ends. No more than 10 years would probably be best to limit the risk of it collapsing under its own weight of continuity.
Stories benefit from having a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Big Two comics by their nature, don't really have an ending. An individual run ends, but then someone else takes it over. Characters who've completed their stories get brought back. Nothing's really allowed to truly end. So if you're going to do an alternate line that's meant to be more new-reader-friendly, something that's different from the main line, then designing it with the intention that it will eventually end is a great way of going about it.
So, 5-10 years, depending on the exact details of the line.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.And really, I don't even think a lengthy continuity in and of itself is even the problem.
Just that with continuity that is packed with floating time and the retcons either cause of such or even writers/editors doing so for reasons, that is where the complication lies.
Such as an Avengers story where Cap, Hawkeye, Goliath (Hank) and Black Panther go back to before Bucky Barnes (seemingly) died. Like with Superman rules of time travel, the four Avengers became immaterial phantoms cause they already existed in the past.
Captain America self-explanatory since he was kept non-aging via suspended animation, but where as the story during it's time in the 60s could still have the other three being babies who lived in the 40s, today that doesn't work.
Or heck, any story where Cap met some friends from his Pre-Iceberg days that were still fairly young again wouldn't work today as they would be extremely old if not deceased.
It would depend on Marvel and DC not being dependent on their Silver Age stars, but arguably a timeline going further from day one without adding in Simpson time would be more simple cause established facts wouldn't need to be altered to be just a few years ago.
That's well said. Big, dense continuities are just the natural result of any serialized series going on for long enough, and can often be a boon; a lot of my favorite Marvel and DC stories wouldn't exist in a reboot because they're built around the deep lore and history that the universes have acquired over the years. And Ultimate Universes being done as a "jumping on point free of continuity" is a self-defeating idea, as they're just going to develop their own dense continuity as they go on. It's perfectly easy for noobs to jump into series with long continuities at any number of points, it's easy to make jumping on points that aren't a total reboot, and it's not at all unreasonable to expect writers to put in the bare minimum effort of following continuity as best as can be managed. The "problem" that people hate with these kind of things are the countless stupid retcons and floating timelines that make it unclear as to what is and isn't canon or lead to writers headbutting over what ideas they prefer.
I don't even think long-running continuities are really the problem - it's interconnected continuities. When reading a superhero comic, often the hardest parts to understand aren't references to something that happened in the same book a decade ago - it's references to something that happened a month or two ago in a completely different book.
For me, the best outcome of New Ultimate Spider-Man would be a long but consistent story that follows Peter to the end of his career, year by year.
The sort of thing that could remain in print as a multi-TPB collection containing a standalone story with a beginning, middle and end. Other Ultimate books may be mentioned, crossovers may happen - but you shouldn't need to read any of them (although, if they get it right, you'll want to).
Vertigo's been mentioned in previous posts - and that's how you do a Marvel Sandman series. It's not the occult subject matter, it's the coherent self-contained story with an emotionally fulfilling payoff.
I've recently seen some scans of a very strange-looking AU where the Spider-Man equivalent is a villainous Bloody Mary-esque adolescent urban legend and everything is illustrated in a very "early-2000s goth" style, ie. Burton, Vasquez, Snicket etc. Anybody know what I'm talking about? And was it any good?
Yeah, that's the risk when other titles start dragging a non-616 setting down. Someone trashes the whole thing with a Crisis Crossover.
There are some interviews about well-remembered short Marvel books (Young Avengers springs to mind, but I'm sure there are others) where the creators mention that the run length was so that they didn't get dragged into crossovers.
Edited by Mrph1 on Jun 22nd 2024 at 7:45:19 PM
Interrupting a run for event crossovers isn’t even necessary
Event branded one-shots and miniserieses is where it’s at, IF WE MUST
Forever liveblogging the AvengersNgl curious what Ewing would do with all the spider totem stuff. He might reverse Morlun's weird vilain decay. It's really weird he's never been as much of a threat as his first arc. Coming home.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
Yeah, Morlun's threat decay is a prime example of how the BND-onwards writers utterly butchered JMS' awesome Spider-Totem lore. Like, you read the JMS run - a modern classic and imo the last great Spidey run before OMD ruined everything - and Morlun is this terrifying vampiric Humanoid Abomination who seems nigh-unstoppable, a major Wake-Up Call Boss who drives home to Peter that even with all the adventures he's been on, he's still been in the shallows and learning more about the nature of his powers means he's going straight into the ocean. Even if he bordered on being a Generic Doomsday Villain, his purpose in the story was anything but. Than you get every subsequent appearance from the character and he's just this lumbering, obnoxious brute with an more lumbering, obnoxious family who at best exist as lazy excuses for Spider-Verse slaughterfests, at worst get worfed embarrassingly. The only decent uses of him since JMS are Nick Spencer having him be a One-Scene Wonder as the person who kills Boomerang and Chip Zdarsky using him as the penultimate villain in Life Story.
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Also accurate. Events interrupting runs is always the absolute worst. At best, events should be a Red Skies Crossover; there's something or another happening in the background or talked about vaguely, but just as in a "there's something else going on in the world" way that doesn't connect to the unrelated book.
Edited by immortaleditor on Jun 22nd 2024 at 12:42:25 PM
I'd argue that like with a story rooted in continuity (One of my early favorite reads with little knowledge of DC history was the 90s Return of Barry Allen), a crossover between say Ultimates and 616 wouldn't have to be a misfire.
Just say something like having someone in a continuum free of heavy mandates be sent to stay in the 616 books. Basically why it is good that Gargoyles isn't incorporated into Marvel.
Plus other details like Gargoyles sticking to their time travel rule and their Odin being merely a child Not literally) of Oberon. Not to mention that with more convicted attempts at keeping true to it's degrees realism, the public finding out about gargoyles and reaction wouldn't work in a world of many Marvels. Like Galactus coming by for lunch at times or Onslaught having Sentinels causing havok.
Sounds like the "Terrible Horror of the Spooky-Man" story from the second issue of the last Edge of Spider-Verse series.
his story is interesting he is a new kid to spiderling high and the red headed cheerleader who is called Sailer he has a crush on is dating a guy named Fish who tricks gleumy and tosses him down stairs where he breaks his neck. he wakes up the next day with pale skin and pitch black hair, and Sailer runs after him to explain she didn't know what Fish would do, when Professor Krackentopus hijacks the cheer ceremony to transform him and others into the sinnerster six. gleumy is killed again saving Sailer and is taken over by the Spooky-Man who is basically a symbiote and he has 4 arms and is constantly rhyming. Sailer is caught and her and her cheerleader buddies are caught in a trance and they summon the great beast who posesses the whole school, so spooky-man disurpts the ceremony by eating Sailer. She is fine afterwords but thanks Gleumy for saving her before leaving with Fish and Spooky-Man consoles Gleumy that he isnt alone and tells him if theres trouble he just has to die to become spooky-man
Yeah, I was never into the totem stuff or Morlun and if anything his first impression just made me angry that this was the guy that really ticked Peter off. (Also the horrible grossness of wanting to literally eat Peter.)
The Protomen enhanced my life.I also think Morlun is a lame ass villain who JMS tried to hype up, and it just fell flat.
Also Morlun is patient zero of adding dumbass out of place magic lore to Spider-Man's mythos.
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"The Other was just Changes:The less shitty version, much like The Good Dinosaur was just Dinosaur:the less shitty version.
Where Queen could have been a good villain had her premise not been undermined by so many questionable narrative choices, Morlun was a transparent Plot Device to move the story forward. Also, Queen being a mere class 1 in the Marvel rankings was ridiculous! Drop any object with one ton of tensile strength off a sky scraper and tell me how that works out! At least with Morlun one could buy that he's probably not that strong but it feels that way to Spider-Man because Spider-Totem mumbo jumbo.
And if you think eating Spider-Man was gross, at least it served a purpose. The giant pregnant spider thing was just gross for its own sake. Might as well have just had Queen rape Spider-Man. It could have been tied to the childhood molestation trauma Parker thought he had gotten over and lead to him suddenly unleashing his new powers, killing Queen on pure instinct before he even knew what he was doing. The metaphorical rape she gave him and the rebirth "Mind Screw" managed to be far more disturbing than plain old sexual assault, especially when the mundane variety could have easily been done mostly off panel.
Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on Jun 23rd 2024 at 12:20:04 PM
Buldogue's lawyer

No of course not, Vertigo was more uniquely DC, something Marvel had no answer for and thus far more interesting. Marvel hasn't rebooted their universe five times, that's why the Ultimate setting was so appealing for them...accept it really wasn't, it was mainly being carried by Spider-Man, but still. DC's already given us new fresh takes on their characters a half dozen times or so, give or take. Going back to the golden/silver/post crisis/new 52 would be the fresher DC move at this point.
Post Crisis and New 52 are kind of off the table thanks to certain developments in Superman's book, which suggest Rebirth is the merging of the two, but Golden/Silver should be on the table thanks to Dark Crisis, and Convergence before that. Or better yet they should all be on the table anyway because of The Kingdom, or better yet don't even try to explain it beyond "alternate universe/alternate timeline".
Admittedly, there's always a way to make an alternate take on a setting, a character, an event, interesting. But letting people know you're aping the red brand right out of the gate doesn't seem like a winning strategy or novel premise. If Marvel, conversely said they were launching their own Vertigo that would be something new for them, at least to the casual observer.
Buldogue's lawyer