The George Lucasing of Spider-Man
I think “George Lucas” should be a verb, but unfortunately, there are so few opportunities to use it. To George Lucas something is to take a beloved property and screw it up so thoroughly that you actually make people retroactively lose affection for the original work. Lucas did this with Star Wars for me. I used to love the Original Trilogy, like most guys my age. But after his endless tinkering with the Special Editions and the dreadful prequels, I find that I can’t even summon much enthusiasm for the original movies any more. Now writer Dan Slott has George Lucased Spider-Man.
(I’m going to spoil the last few issues of Amazing Spider-Man, so if you haven’t read it or heard about it, be forewarned.)
I haven’t been a fan of Slott’s run on ASM for a number of reasons. First, there was the giant mess of the “Spider Island” storyline, which saw everyone in New York getting spider-powers and eventually transforming into giant evil spiders. It culminated in a fight between pretty much every superhero and a giant spider-woman-monster… thing. Somewhere along the line, J. Jonah Jameson’s wife gets killed, and Peter Parker declares that as long as he’s around… NO ONE DIES! There are a number of things wrong with this. For instance, does this imply that up to that point, he’d been fairly ambivalent about people dying around him? Also, at what range is he considered to be “around”? Am I guaranteed to live if I’m a hundred feet away from him? Two hundred?
Then there was the long streak that emphasized Pete’s technical genius. Every issue would have him inventing some new gizmo that would — quite conveniently — end up being just what he needed to defeat the villain of the week.
And finally, there was ASM 700, in which Peter dies in the stupidest way imaginable.
Okay, I’ll back up. Otto Octavius has been in the process of dying for the last few years, his body withering until it is just a husk, fully reliant on his mechanical arms. In the last few issues of ASM, Octavius manages to swap bodies with Pete, Freaky Friday style. Pete struggles to get his body back, but it’s all for naught, and Octavius’ body finally dies, taking Pete with it. But not before Pete manages to replay some of his key memories for Octavius, thereby convincing him to use his new Spider-body for good.
Now, there are two possibilities here. Either this is another one of the tiresome death events that are clearly not intended to be permanent developments in the Marvel Universe, but are instead just marketing ploys. I’ve ranted about these before and if that’s what this is, then it’s simply a bad idea, poorly executed. But Slott insists that this is not some temporary setback, but a brave new direction for Spider-Man as a character: a tougher, meaner Spider-Man, who doesn’t pull his punches. And if that’s the case, then it’s about the worst betrayal of a character that I can imagine.
If you’re going to kill off a beloved character like Spider-Man, you better make it an epic death. He should go out in a blaze of glory, valiantly sacrificing himself to save the world, or at least the people he loves. Here, he just fizzles out as he tries to get his body back. Yes, the scene where he injects his own most meaningful memories into Octavius’ mind was supposed to be a big heroic moment, but it falls flat. First of all, it’s not entirely clear what he actually did. Octavius already had all of his memories, so Pete essentially just showed them to him again, but with feeling. And it doesn’t seem to have that much of an effect in the end. Sure, Octavius learns that he should protect Pete’s loved ones and gains a vaguely heroic ethic, but he’s still a merciless thug who doesn’t seem to truly embrace the most essential of Pete’s tenets: that with great power comes great responsibility.
What we’re left with is a Spider-Man who thinks nothing of punching a guy’s jaw clean off. That’s a long way from the good-natured kid who hung crooks from lampposts on his way to dinner at his aunt’s house.
The shame of it is that a story about Octavius walking a mile in Pete’s skin could actually be pretty interesting, if it weren’t presented as the new status quo. But this wipes out Pete in a most unheroic way and throws away everything that made Spider-Man who he was.
Perhaps it’s hasty of me to wash my hands of Spider-Man entirely. After all, the news of Disney taking over Lucasfilm and making new Star Wars movies without Lucas at the helm does have me intrigued. And if my assumptions are correct, and Peter Parker returns to the mantle of Spider-Man, someone other than Dan Slott will be writing his stories, and perhaps they can do the character justice.
This, among many other reasons, is why I have stopped reading mainstream superhero comics…for the most part. Marvel has been off my buy list for quite some time now. The thing is, I love superhero comics and the genre, I just can’t stand the way the big 2 treat their franchises and thus, their fans. These events are nothing more than money grabs or publicity stunts and we all know by now they are because they never stick. With that being said, I don’t think Dan Slott deserved death threats over the issue. Personally I am all for shaking up the established characters, trying something new, but you have to go forward with reverence for the past. This just seems stupid to me.
Hey, everyone, it’s Kevin Gentilcore, creator of Teenage Love Zombies!
Thanks for bringing up the death threats! I had meant to address that in my post, but I forgot. As much as I hate what Slott has done with my favorite character, he absolutely did not deserve death threats, or any kind of threats for that matter. People need to keep things in perspective, and I find the degree of entitlement of these readers to be a far worse than anything Slott did.
And you’re right about Marvel in general. I’ve been tempted to stop reading for a good while, but I’m a sucker. I’m always waiting for the next creative team to take over and make things better. And to be fair, some decent comics do still rise above the middling quality stuff that they’re mass-producing. But this “death” of Peter Parker, apart from being awful in its own right, is part of the whole “Marvel NOW!” thing, which is the most meaningless publicity stunt since the last one.
To be honest I am not to familiar with the NOW stuff. Seemed to me it was Marvel reacting to the DC New 52. I understand your continuing to read Marvel because I fell for the DC New 52 and am reading a couple of those titles. I am sure it is only a matter of time before the New 52 fall back into gimmicks and crossovers and major deaths. It is even spilling over into indie books I love, the supposed BIG ULTIMATE DEATH THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. Kirkman has been doing it with Walking Dead and now Invincible. Both 100 issue’s promised a big shocking death. To me that isn’t storytelling that is carnival barking.
That’s a good analogy (carnival barking, I mean)!
Yes, the Marvel NOW initiative strikes me as a direct response to the New 52, but because Marvel doesn’t do big continuity resets the way that DC does, it’s difficult to understand what the event actually is. Basically, they’re ending their main titles and starting new titles with the same characters. So it’s just another way of reseting their issue numbers without doing much else. Amazing Spider-Man is being replaced by Superior Spider-Man. Bleh.
And yes, they’re pulling a few stunts in an attempt to shake things up, like the Spider-Man death, and a few redesigned costumes. But it seems pretty meaningless to me, and as a response to the New 52, it’s kind of pathetic.
It feels gimmicky to me. Like the 90’s. It doesn’t bode well for the industry but that is a whole other topic.
It’s kind of ironic. I groaned inwardly when I heard that Bendis was killing off Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-man, but then when I actually read the comic with Miles Morales, I loved it, and have continued to read it.
I’ve always hated these “big death” things and then the ensuing resurrection, but Bendis created a character that felt totally right. Miles continues a lot of what I enjoyed about Peter Parker while being a breath of fresh air at the same time.
I’ve been enjoying it enough that I’d been thinking lately that it might be fun to start picking up titles in the main Marvel universe where Peter’s still alive.
So yeah, about that…
When I heard about this death, I was amused to realize that this was exactly the kind of thing I’d been afraid Bendis would do, but that he actually avoided.
The funny thing is, I’m still optimistic. I’m betting that this is a relatively short term thing (by comparison to Captain America at least), and that the trade paperback of how Peter Parker comes back from this will be fun to read.
On the off chance that this isn’t the case, well… That would suck.
Whatever happens, I’m unlikely to pick up a main universe Spider-man comic for a while.
I railed against the death of Peter Parker in the Ultimate universe, thinking that it would be a temporary publicity stunt, so the fact that Miles is still Spider-Man is a pleasant surprise. And from what I’ve read (about six issues), the series does capture the spirit that I expect from a Spider-Man book.
I do expect Pete to return to his body in the regular continuity before too long, both because of the fan backlash to the whole thing, as well as the nature of the mind-swap. Because it was accomplished through some sort of neural override or somesuch, it would be so easy to just have Pete’s consciousness reassert itself in his brain or something. They wouldn’t even have to resort to some far-out resurrection storyline.
Regarding “NO ONE DIES!”
I felt as though Slott was providing meta-commentary on the things that we’re discussing now. Comics have a way of killing characters off to increase hype and sales only to bring them back later and make the death “meaningless.” However, Peter Parker has a number of people tied to his life who have died and not come back [there was a great two-page spread by Marcos Martin, I believe]. Him proclaiming that no one will die on his watch is not to say that his position on saving lives has changed but that we the audience may not take comic book deaths seriously because of too many authors having “cried wolf.”
With Doc Ock taking over Peter’s body, we get to have the death hype without an actual death. Easily reversed without a time machine, clone, deal with the devil, or cosmic ordeal. In the meantime, we get to read some comics with awkward megalomaniacal Spider-Ock pretending to be Peter while Peter attempts to regain control. Sounds good, right?
Hey, everyone, it’s Tony Esteves, creator of Legendary Woodsman!
Your interpretation of the Pete’s no death policy is a lot more generous than mine! Given that Marla Jameson wasn’t someone of great importance to Pete, like say, Gwen Stacy, and that her death wasn’t something that Pete was responsible for, his reaction seemed kind of overwrought.
If Slott was trying to make some kind of statement about meaningless deaths in comics, I’d say that his “killing” of Peter Parker makes him a hypocrite. Even if Pete wasn’t technically killed, and the situation is comparatively easy to reverse, it’s not much better than any of the other non-deaths that have plagued comics for the last couple of decades. It’s still being touted as a big deal and used for publicity. (Or, as I said, if this death actually sticks, it’s an unforgivable betrayal of everything that Spider-Man is about.)
I am not for one single instant convinced that Otto is going to be wearing that Parker suit for that long, and I can sum it up in one word: Trademark
The problem is, that super hero characters are more than just fictional creations around which we read their adventures. They are also hot intellectual properties upon which literally billions of dollars have been generated, a business that’s built on brand recognition. And part of the billion-dollar-building of said brand recognition is a familiar back story that everyone knows (because it works so well with the crowd at large).
If the folks in charge over there want to keep the property viable and not have to work around all their existing licenses (the film deal with Sony, for example) that would need the consumer to be brought up to speed on the paradigm, they are not going to let Otto keep Pete’s body. If anything, the harder job is going to be in explaining how they got Otto Octavius a new body in the series, as he much like Parker is also a trademarked property around which all sorts of merchandising is sold…