#and yet still just as much potential for drama as any other spidey relationship

[kitausuret]

👀👀

hello bri 👀 for you I actually have a fic that was the result of an ask you sent me, because you were very nice and indulgent 💖 ....and because I already shared a bit from the upcoming Scarlet Witch fic.

From "Walk Without a Plan":

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Was it fair to potentially upend Harry's normalcy just because Flash wanted to be both a symbiote-partnered vigilante and a guy who does normal things like take his friend out on a date? But being away from Earth for so long had made him realize how nice normalcy could be, once the high of adventuring wore off. Was that so bad?

So he'd awkwardly stumbled his way through a few lines of I've liked you a lot throughout the years, but I wasn't really sure what I was feeling or how you would feel that sounded more like a bad Hallmark movie than something from his poetry collection. Which was pretty bad, considering they'd known each other for over a decade, but Harry had laughed a little shyly, his nose wrinkling as he did so and said, I think I'd like that, Flash. After all, there was no harm in giving things a try.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Friendly Nieghborhood Spider-Man vol 2 #1 Thoughts

I LOVED this!

SPOILERS below

 I like Peter David and I’m less harsh on his Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man run than many others. First and foremost I view it as a book hampered by crossovers that rarely allowed it’s talented creative team(s) to fully flex their muscles.

 This being said, Tim Taylor in one issue might’ve just earned the title’s name in a way PAD didn’t in his entire FN run; pun intended.

 It sounds so simple and so basic and yet it works.

 Spider-Man is often referred to (often mockingly by himself) as ‘your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man’. Why not have a ongoing series using that title...and why not have it actually be about Spider-Man’s nieghborhood!...and being friendly  whilst he’s at it!

 I must admit the solicits for the first issue worried me because they labelled Spidey as the worst neighbour ever so I was concerned we were going to see yet more 2010s ‘lol Spidey is a trash loser’ take upon the character.

 Within a few pages though Taylor dispelled this.

 Demonstrating a strong grasp of how the Parker Luck ACTUALLY works he presents Spider-Man with son wins and some losses in the form of minor inconveniences, wrapped up with one big problem tapping into his superhero life and another big problem very particular to his human life.

 Mostly this is a down to Earth story. It’s Spider-Man in essence between the more colourful and interesting adventures featuring larger than life super villains.

 Spider-Man barely interacts with any normal crime even, mostly he’s just helping people from natural/man-made disasters or really just being a normal guy on the street.

 In both senses he is just a friendly neighbour.

 Taylor’s grasp of Spider-Man’s core decency is reminiscent (albeit obviously lower key) of the Kid Who Collected Spider-Man.

 My heart melted a little both when the little girl tried to squish the spider on his chest and when he refused money from her father (in spite of his own financial situation) and instead asked him to donate it to some other people down on their luck. People whom we discover Peter regularly offers some modicum of charity whenever he can because he’s just that nice.

 Similarly we see the responsible side to Peter when he makes an appointment purely to help carry an old woman’s groceries.

 This doesn’t make for the most exciting of drama admittedly but damn it I just like seeing Spider-Man in or out of the suit be a normal guy, and a fundamentally decent one at that.

 Then we get to that back up. Holy Hannah!

 It’s wonderful to see the Peter/MJ romance isn’t going to be purely an ASM thing, with this being one of the more romantic scenes between the pair since their reconciliation, reminiscent in fact of Sensational Annual 2007, which Spencer homaged in the opening pages of his debut issue.

 But then you get to the Aunt May thing.

 On the one hand mixed feelings.

 Aunt May is sick. AGAIN!!!!!...Yawn.

 We’ve been here too many times for anyone to give a shit now, especially when one of those times had her actually die!

 On the other hand is this is played as an ongoing illness for May to battle it could be a more substantial, grounded and realistic depiction of an illness and how families cope with it, which seems to be in line with the book’s tone.

 However perhaps of more interest to long term fans is the hints that this might have something to do with OMD.

 Not only do we have hints in the ASM book, hints predating Spencer’s run but we also have in this story an Aunt May who is potentially dying (of some form of cancer), a very direct sign posting of Peter and MJ’s renewed relationship and Aunt May confronting the Kingpin, the man who put her on her deathbed in set up for Peter and MJ selling their marriage to Mephisto.

 So...who knows. I’ll be following this closely nevertheless.

 As for the art, it was I am afraid much weake in the back up than in the main story. Cabal’s art though is beautiful.

 It sits somewhere comfortably between Frank Cho and the Dodson’s for me and that is high praise. His Spidey in particular looks wonderful and his two page spread homaging Spider-Man’s history is begging to be a poster...in spite of the Superior reference.

 Speaking of which, the only bad thing about the story was the reference to Peter being a national disgrace following the plagerism scandal in issue #1.

 This is more a problem with Slott and Spencer cleaning up the mess than Spencer himself but it’s still so broken that Peter be that famous.

 Other than that though, brilliant issue.

 I think we’ve finally hit the jackpot by having a strong ASM and a strong satellite book with two different but vital tones and directions!

 As Peter will probably be saying in issues to come, pick this baby up!

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

ASM vol 5 #10/811 Thoughts

I suspect I’m gonna be a bit more down on the issue than everyone else!

 Fundamentally the things that put my feelings into conflict with this story are how the past of the characters should be reconciled against the needs of the present.

 What do I mean by this?

 Well in this issue we have Peter being chill with Black Cat and also MJ claiming that for the longest time she couldn’t handle worrying about Peter and this would lead to a cycle of them breaking up and getting back together, and she also felt she was not on his level that she was dispensable and that maybe he should be with someone else. These pieces of dialogue are accompanied by images clearly evoking marriage era MJ which allegedly post-OMD still happened but they were not married.

 If you go by recent history Peter should just not be this chill with Felicia. She is literally a burglar and he was willing to let her walk away which wasn’t his origin entirely about how doing that once killed his uncle? This isn’t even getting into her body count during her Queenpin tenure. I now they provide a sort of fix for that but my point was before that fix happened in the story he was clearly still chill with her and that is BS.

 If you go by the wider history of Peter and MJ her statements do not really add up. Even in the 1990s MJ didn’t literally spend all her time worrying about Peter (she went out partying in Torment for example) and both back then and even before they married she clearly could handle his life, just not handle it in a wholly stressfree manner (because nobody could do that). The idea that this inability to handle his life, specifically the fact that she worried constantly about him, was the reason they’d break up before getting back together is also not true.

 If you even include their break up under Marv Wolfman’s run MJ broke up with Peter the first time mostly due to her commitment issues. The second time they sort of broke up was in Spider-Man vs. Wolverine where there was a miscommunication problem but that was also due to her commitment issues a little bit. However it is obvious Spencer wasn’t referring to that stuff but the stuff during their marriage and during their marriage (I know they weren’t married now but you know what I mean, I’m just using ‘marriage’ as shorthand) they broke up just twice.

 The first time was during Mackie/Byrne’s run and it wasn’t because MJ worried too much about Peter it was because she felt dispensible to him, that she didn’t really matter in his life, that he did not in truth need her and that he didn’t in effect love her much more than he would have loved a mistress or a trophy wife. The second time was in OMIT where they broke up over MJ feeling like being with Peter endangered her family too much. Granted that last one was indeed about not being able to handle his life but it wasn’t about concern for him or even herself as the issue implied. Moreover multiple times during the marriage, in fact very specifically during the issue they reunited under JMS it was made clear to MJ that she WAS indispensible and that Peter truly needed her. He said as much even in Spencer’s debut issue (if you discount the FCBD issue of course).

 All of which means MJ’s statements don’t really ring true to her character or her shared history with Peter. She knows she doesn’t need to be a part of his world to matter. Now I say all that with the caveat that you can of course explain away the discrepancy to a degree. Perhaps in this one moment out of nervousness, or the chance to FINALLY unload her feelings, the sake of brevity and/or some combination of those things MJ is misremembering things.

 There were periods where she found coping with Peter’s life very hard, and they did break up. And perhaps in seeing him with Black Cat and Mockingbird feelings of inadequacy crossed her mind and in this moment all those things are mingling together coalescing into her not truly accurate account of their relationship.* Equally her presenting their relationship as a constant merry go round of breaking up and making up could be her conflating the entirety of their relationship before and after their marriage, including all of Slott’s dumbass teases of them getting back together (and the Superior stuff too). Remember in-universe all the stuff she is talking about played out across several years and their break up depicted in OMIT was several years ago circa this issue (Superior alone played out across 1 year in-universe).

 So there are totally ways of explaining this in-universe, even if there aren’t any for why Peter was so chill with Felicia.

 However this is where we get into the ‘needs of the present’ as I discussed above.

 Because it is plainly obvious to me that Spencer with this story was doing yet more clean up of BND and Slott’s mess more than trying to religiously fit everything into continuity.

 Spencer has done much already to fix things but there is still much that is broken, so much like JMS I think we need to say its okay for him to bend certain bits of characterization in service of over all setting the ship back on course and cleaning up the mess he inherited.

 As I said JMS did this too. To be incredibly harsh right now the fact that Peter and MJ were stayed broken up as long as they did under the JMS run really wasn’t in character for either of them.**

 However his genius game plan was to course correct the series over all and do that by illuminating just WHY their relationship was so important and he did that by examining their feelings about NOT being together and making a story about them working to get back together.

 It was a neccesarry direction to go in as it conveyed to readers on a meta level WHY them being together was a good thing and why it was in fact vitally important to the lead character and over all series.

 Spencer in this story I think was doing something similar.

 On a meta level he essentially connected Felicia losing her memory of who Spider-Man was, of what their relationship was like WITH her mischaracterization since OMD. Which works in-universe perfectly fine but along with Peter’s chill attitude to her it was set up for his big fix of her re-learning his secret and essentially going back to (starting to go back to) what she used to be like and what she always should have been like.

 After all it NEVER made sense for Peter to have kept her in the dark at all so bending his characterization by ignoring her recent activities is equivalent to how he ignored the baggage from post-OMD to just immediately get Peter and MJ reunited.*** Although he again here provides a short yet solid explanation even for that just to address everyone who really was annoyed by Slott’s BS characterization being ignored.

 With the MJ thing I think that storyline existed more for Spencer through MJ to essentially address readers’ (especially recent readers’) beliefs surrounding the character and her relationship with Spider-Man. It was essentially post-OMD MJ bringing up common arguments raised against her being with Spider-Man by editorial and characters within the comics (including her from Slott and other author’s stories) and then through the story debunking them. In this way using Black Cat, Spider-Man’s most famous super hero girlfriend (and sometimes romantic rival to MJ) as a representative of every potential argument in favour of Spider-Man not being with a civilian like her was simply genius.

 It was Spencer writing on a level Slott never did, weaving these disparate plots together organically to deliver a statement on the characters, who are the reason we are reading this after all.

 So that is where I am at with the story.

 Trying to reconcile the technical mischaracetrization with that mischaracterization being in over all service of fixing the decades long mischaracterization and misconceptions of the characters.

 I suspect with time I will be more okay with it and lean more towards the latter. I do hope though we don’t see more stuff like it though because I’d rather the marriage era be celebrated positively than negatively the way post-OMD portrayed it.

 Other points I want to hit up.

 -          Ramos seemed better this issue than in the other ones

-          There were some honestly hilarious scenes like the phone app and the reference to Spider-Man’s hyphen

-          The lack of jealousy from MJ was a nice piece of maturity and subversion of expectations from her, especially given who she was dealing with. I also adored Peter just being up front with her and clear about what went down. You know...doing the resposnsible adult thing. That’s not even great to see in Spider-Man, it’s subverting an annoying as Hell trope in countless pieces of fiction to generate cheap drama.

-          I almost feel Centipede guy is like Scarlet Spider because his costume colours were very reminiscent of Spidey’s but he also adorned a hoody

-          There was a misplaced word balloon which is...c’mon guys try to catch those obvious mistakes...

-          The cover hilarious and a great meta joke.

-          Bandini’s art was still gorgeous

-          I don’t know if all of MJ’s jobs and life prior to working for Stark (which still makes no sense) honestly could be regarded as the opposite of Spider-Man’s career strictly speaking. After all...they both earned money from posing for photos so...Maybe from her pov tha’ts just how she feels about her jobs, a little like how she felt in Unlimited vol 3 #2.

 I’d give this an A- at worst, A at best.

 Which is like...I know I brought up a lot of draw backs but look how far we’ve come in such a short space of time!

 I was honestly jealous of everyone who read this before me! That’s where I am at with modern Spider-Man and it feels good!

  *Also whilst Peter might’ve made his need for MJ explicit in issue #1 that might not have fully convinced her thereafter that maybe he’d be better off with another super person. After all he said what he said after almost dying so he might not have been thinking with a totally clear head.

However given how MJ, in two brilliant little scenes, takes Jarvis’ words of wisdom and also seems to absorb and grow past her insecurity rather quickly you could argue that said insecurity was less truly something weighing on her mind and more a wobble she was having at that moment. We all have little wobbles and moments of insecurity that do not necessarily speak to anything deepset within us.

 **It made a little more sense when JMS retconned in the reason for why MJ left Peter but he didn’t reveal that for the first ¼ of his overall run so MJ appeared to be OOC for that time.

 ***Also once Spider-Man learns Felicia’s misdemeanours are partially his fault because they are connected to her loss of memory which he caused and perpetuated then it makes his willingness to forgive her and (presumably) trust she is on a path to redemption more believable.

p.s. Flash’s death being used as the explanation for MJ and Peter’s reconciliation is a microcosm of the issues I discussed with the story.

On the one hand Flash’s death is at last acknowledged. On the other it’s lack of acknowledgement before this and presumably after this story will continue to be eye brow raising because why be so unaffected by the death of your close old friend?

But at the same time diving into the realistic ark and depressing emotions of grief that should accompany Flash’s death would compromise the necessity of fixing the broken Spider-Man series so once again, we got to ‘bend the rules’ as it were.