#So I guess this is meant to be Vietnam or something because the word 'robotic' wasn't really a thing in WWII.

[averbaldumpingground]

The man who comes back home, he's not Eliza's brother. It's not the scarring down his side, the limp, it's how he hasn't smiled since he's returned. It's how he barely hears her when she's speaking.

Eliza does her best to give him space. But it's not fair, the grinning, gangly boy that she helped raise, who used to help out at the corner grocer's, she hasn't seen him since she walked him to the train.

The ghost that haunts her hallway and spare bedroom, that eats his food with a robotic disregard, it's almost like her brother really died. And sometimes, when he's wandering at night, she wonders if he wishes that he had. She wonders if he should be left alone.

And sometimes, in his sleep, he calls a name. He's always more detached the mornings after. Eliza wants to ask, she really does, but it feels like a sacred thing. A prayer. Like how their father always said their mother's name.

But she thinks she already knows the answer. And it's those extra dog tags on his neck. It's how he doesn't even notice when he's crying.

[traincat]

I wanna ask. If you could re-write Spider-Man: Life Story, what would you do?

I was waiting on talking about Life Story until after it was finished, because there was some slim hope maybe everything was going to turn around, but we’ve got, what, one issue to go, and so I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t think Spider-Man: Life Story is a good comic. I think it has a very interesting premise – following Spider-Man decade by decade and reimagining the events if time progressed in comics like it does in real life – but its execution totally fails that.

I have three main problems with Spider-Man: Life Story, so I guess my answer to the question is, I would do all of these things completely differently. The first is related to the premise and the execution of the idea. It’s a very intriguing premise, but looking at it practically, it’s also a really hard one to pull off. There are over 800 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, 300 of Spectacular Spider-Man, there’s Web of Spider-Man, Spider-Man Unlimited, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man, etc. The Marvel wiki lists his appearances total at over 4,000 issues, and while those aren’t all Spider-Man comics or stories that are relevant to his life in the greater picture, that’s a lot of comics to compress. Coming into it, I was hoping for something a little more akin to Marvels, which focused strongly on one or two major events in the Marvel universe per issue, albeit with more of a Spider-Man focus. 

That’s not what Spider-Man: Life Story is.

Let me be very clear that Zdarsky clearly knows his Spider-Man canon and history very, very well. I’d actually like to posit that’s part of the problem: Life Story’s so all over the place, throwing around so many different references to different stories, that I cannot imagine it’s an engaging or coherent read for novice Spider-Man readers, and as a more experienced Spider-Man reader, I just find the way it uses canon both frustrating and boring. It takes stories like Kraven’s Last Hunt, the Clone Saga, and the first Morlun story and remixes them in ways that provide nothing new or interesting and that, because of the compressed nature of the story telling, lack any of the emotional depth of the original. Let’s take, for example, the death of Harry Osborn. Now the original event in Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is one of my favorite comics ever. I think it’s a totally perfect issue – but it’s also the denouement of a lot of similarly great comics, like The Child Within. When Harry saves Peter (and it’s very notable that Harry in the original doesn’t intend to outlive killing Peter), it’s this perfect redemption moment in part because we’ve seen Harry struggle with his love for Peter and the life he’s carved out for himself against his father’s toxic influence, his childhood abuse, and his own mental health issues. It’s good because it’s earned.

In Life Story, Harry also dies in the act of saving Peter, ending up impaled on one of Doc Ock’s arms in a battle between Doc Ock, Peter, and Ben Reilly in issue #4. The problem with this being that we hadn’t seen Harry since issue #2, which doesn’t seem like a huge gap – until you realize that each issue is a decade, so that’s at least 10 years of a Harry and Peter relationship we have no context for. We haven’t seen them interact. We have no idea about this legendary friendship. The only proof it even exists is that Harry leaps in front of Peter to take the blow. As Harry dies, his last words are to Peter, saying “you’re my best…” and trailing off. It’s an obvious callback, if you know Spectacular Spider-Man #200, where Harry dies calling Peter his best friend. Except we have no proof of that here; we don’t see Harry and Peter being best friends. For all we know, Harry was trying to call Peter his best investor. Life Story depends so heavily on the already existing canon to fill in the emotional impact its readers are supposed to feel that it doesn’t bother to take the time to establish it itself, which, I think, is ultimately more important than throwing as many references to various Spider-Man plots at the wall at once and seeing what sticks. If I have to depend on the original comics to feel anything for Life Story, why are we even bothering publishing Life Story? 

Similarly, in issue #5, which attempts to remix the first Morlun story along with Life Story’s remix of Civil War Take 2: Not In Vietnam This Time, and the death of Ben Reilly, but, you know, boring, when Ben’s death is reported on the news, Peter exclaims that it’s just like Ezekiel warned him! 

Ezekiel being a character who never actually appears in this book. (I’m gonna hit on some other things in this exchange in my second and third points, because this whole section really illustrates every single problem I have with Life Story in one go.) So like, I get the whole story here, because I’ve read (and adore) the first Morlun story – which is, IMHO, a million times a better read – but what does this even look like if you haven’t? A clumsy exposition dump at best, I assume, or something that would leave you flipping back previously trying to see if you missed something. The book doesn’t even offer you an old style little citation box in the corner of the panel, telling you what issues you could find the original story in, something that I think would’ve been more than helpful and actually a fun and interesting little addition in a book that insists on being this relentlessly canon heavy without expounding or providing context on a good 50% of it. It also alters bits of canon that I feel ruin the nuance of the original, like when it depicts its version of Flash Thompson as enlisting – while 616 Flash does serve in Vietnam, in the original comics he is drafted, he does not enlist, and after the fact is clearly conflicted and deeply regretful about that service. If you’re setting your comic in the original time period, there’s no reason to alter Flash’s story like that.

The second problem I have is that Spider-Man: Life Story has a big problem in how it depicts women. With the possible exception of Peter’s daughter, depending on how the last issue goes, women in Life Story have two purposes: to sleep with Peter, to die, or both. Aunt May is only there to get dementia and die. Gwen similarly is there to be a plot device in its Clone Saga remix: the “real Gwen” dies, and Clone Gwen, apparently happily married to Original Peter as far as her own recollections, goes off without any on page internal struggle on her part with Ben Reilly upon the discovery that she’s a clone, because clones are meant to be with clones, I guess. I would think it would be difficult to give Gwen less agency in a new version of the story where an older man who is obsessed with her clones her in order to possess her, but somehow Life Story manages it. She’s never seen on page again. As she goes off, in comes Mary Jane to comfort Peter in a far more hollow version of ASM #122′s door scene, to bear his children, to take care of his ailing aunt, to leave him only to take him back, because of course she does, she’s a good woman, to be terrorized by Peter and then beg and plead with Morlun for her children’s lives. Mary Jane goes from her complicated, nuanced character in 616 to a beat down caricature, watching paralyzed with fear in front of the television as Peter fights. Additionally, she becomes her original self’s biggest fear: a battered wife. 

Which brings me into our third problem: Peter himself. It’s hard for me to tell whether the intention is to depict Peter as an abusive husband and father, however, by issue five, it’s hard to deny that’s what he is. Look at the above bottom right panel: Peter’s fist is clenched, his wife and children cowering in his shadow. I won’t lie: it’s a deeply uncomfortable page. Part of the reason I wish Life Story was more tightly written was so I could be sure it meant to do the things it is doing with Peter: depicting him as a man who is simultaneously deeply damaged and deeply unlikable. There’s no two ways around this: in Life Story, Peter repeatedly abuses Mary Jane. Not only is there the threat of physical abuse in issue #5, but there’s the fact that he made her take care of his ailing aunt long past the point May should have been kept at home, refusing to put her in a care facility. Let me be very clear as someone who has cared for elderly relatives for dementia: it is not caring to keep a relative with dementia at home past a certain point, especially when, as Peter does in Life Story, you have more than enough money to put them in a good care facility. It is abusive behavior both to May and Mary Jane, predicated solely on Peter’s selfish wishes and egotistical behavior, and it goes against 616 Peter’s characterization. 616 Peter did, at a point in time, put May in a care facility, because it was what she needed at the time, and while he stressed about paying the bills, he still did it, because it was the right thing to do and because he loves her. During the saga of his parents’ “return” (they were robots – I note Life Story chose not to tackle this particular story), when Peter fears May has Alzheimer’s, he tries to make plans about what to do if that does turn out to be the case. He does not force Mary Jane to take care of her. He’s not abusive. Life Story’s Peter is. And worse yet, Mary Jane is expected by the narrative to take him back after that. 

To be totally fair, I think Life Story tries to make Peter unlikable on purpose, to show that you can’t do what Peter does over a period of five decades and not have it take it a toll. The problem is there’s a huge gap between a hardened man or even an unlikable man and an abusive one, and Life Story doesn’t seem to understand that. If you look at Spider-Man canon as a bigger picture, there’s a pretty clear pattern present of men who have great power and abuse it among his villains: Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius. Curt Connors and the Lizard are a pretty clear domestic abuse narrative; Martha and Billy Connors live in fear of the reemergence of this violent “other” side that exists in Curt and could manifest itself at any time and upend their lives. What sets Peter apart from his villains is specifically that he is not an abusive man. 

Life Story also fails to understand the purpose of Parker Industries – though to be fair I think Dan Slott lost this towards the end, too – as something that does not organically coexist not with Peter Parker, but specifically with Spider-Man. Slott’s Superior Spider-Man is not actually the first appearance of Parker Industries. It first comes up in the prelude to Peter selling his marriage to Mephisto during One More Day, when he’s shown two alternate paths he might have gone down if he hadn’t been bit by the spider. In the life where ordinary Peter Parker forms Parker Industries, he’s rich and respected, but his emotional life is hollow and empty:

(Sensational Spider-Man #41) In the second appearance of Parker Industries, it is founded by Otto Octavius in Peter’s name in a bid to be a “better” version of Peter, ie, a more successful one, the critical message here being that Otto doesn’t understand Spider-Man’s true value as an unselfish protector of the people. To have Peter found Parker Industries of his own free will and volition, with no mitigating circumstances, fundamentally misunderstands the point of Peter as a protector of the people and why his socioeconomic status is important: Peter is not rich in the larger web because he stands for the ordinary people against the corrupt corporate landscape, just like Norman exists as his “biggest” villain because he is the symbol and the representation of that corruption. Life Story fails to understand that within its narrative, and so it fails to understand Peter Parker, especially when it tries to set him up in opposition to either Reed Richards or Tony Stark – both of whom I also find written very poorly.

I admit I was unimpressed with Zdarsky’s Peter in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man because I found his dialogue too rambly and light; I felt like he couldn’t commit to writing a serious Peter; in Life Story he’s writing a very serious Peter, but in a way I feel fundamentally betrays and insults the core of the character. If he writes another Spider-Man series, I hope he’s able to find a middle ground. I will say the covers he did for the book are incredible, though. I’d love to have them as posters.

Basically, if I were redoing Spider-Man: Life Story, I’d focus on these three main points: streamline the canon and cut extraneous references, give the women of the book some actual agency within it, and make sure Peter is not depicted as a domestic abuser. Which, now that I’ve written that out, seems a little bit like scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of things to hope for in a Spider-Man series. There’s one issue to go and while I hope the book goes out on a good note, at this point there’s really no way it can recover from the grim landscape the previous five issues have set.