Spider-Man character growth vs. staying in high school and Joe Quesada

[Mister Mets]

Spider-Man’s story is an integral part of the Marvel U. They can’t be separated. That’s why JMS’s original ending for OMD was rejected.



It is impossible to have one’s cake and eat it, too. That’s what the saying means.



This is an actually an argument for more continuity, not less, because readers now have easy access to back issues and information about previous stories

Yet previously stories advanced despite the lack of easy access, and now we’re stuck in a repetitive hamster wheel, which is even more head scratching.



Not how soaps work. I have family friends who wrote for soaps. People really should watch them for an extended period of time first to see how they work, because I see a lot people calling things “soap opera” when they aren’t.

Broadcast TV on the whole is on a decline, having lost a lot of its audience since its heyday. Kinda like comics…



The adventures of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker were and are still being published. By Marvel, in fact. And other publishers. The films are not the only components of the franchise.



Again, this is actually an argument for the opposite of what you are arguing.



ASM 122 exists.

Peter graduating from college exists.

Peter obviously progressed as a character.

You know what doesn’t exist?

Superboy and Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen. And they used to sell 550K+ issues a month.



Of course the earlier stories would exist. No one is coming to every house and ripping up all the old issues. Back issues still existed. Mags such as Marvel Age existed. Character guides existed

It’s just easier now.



I agree with this. Marvel is already making a mockery of their continuity by insisting it exists and yet not allowing character growth and progression. They need to give up the ghost already IMO.



Absolutely no one is asking for real time. That’s a straw man.

We accept the MU ages at a slower rate because the stories tell us it does. We know a story published over six monthly issues but in the world of the story only a week passes did not actually take six months - because the world of the story takes precedence.

For there to be a different framework, the story needs to provide it.

Spider-Man is a major character within the Marvel Universe, but the reason JMS' plan was rejected was more about making sense of continuity rather than the value of the story.

I'm not here as a lawyer for an illusion of change approach, only mentioning what benefits my "side." If I think there are arguments in favor of allowing Peter to "grow," I'll bring that up. This is something I hope most of us are willing to do, engaging in honest dialogue rather than just pushing everyone to agree.

My understanding is that soap operas often have retcons and factory resets.

With the Star Wars comparison, they continued the stories. But then they keep resetting.
The original Marvel comics continued after Return of the Jedi, mainly with the introduction of new villains very similar to the Sith.
This seemed largely ignored when novels were set in a new post-Return of the Jedi continuity.
And all of that got ignored when the new trilogy came around with its own continuity.

Amazing Spider-Man 122 is before the 150 cutoff. At that point, the status quo was more crystalized with a lot of illusion of change developments, or a focus on changes in the lives of his friends. Graduating from college was an illusion of change thing (Marv Wolfman said so) because it fundamentally set up a similar status quo.

I wasn't saying people asking for real time, but without it, we're stuck with an increasingly absurd canon for the character. If Peter Parker is in his late 20s, he gained his powers during the Obama administration, and every Lee/ Ditko comic is set after Obama's election, which doesn't track with what's on the page.

If the sliding timescale slides further, it gets messy with any story that requires time to pass if a decade's worth of comics matches a year in the life of the characters.

There are zero problems with killing a supporting character off, and I doubt anyone would have called Kraven a “staple” before KLH elevated the character. IMO, that’s allowing nostalgia to take the place of active storytelling that places the character and his world first over meta considerations that may or may not ever occur, or misplaced affection for an era that never was.

Thank all the deities that nostalgia to the point it stopped active storytelling didn’t exist when Gerry Conway and JRSR were on the book, or we would have never gotten the death of Gwen. Thank all the deities JMD never had nostalgia blinders (and JMD’s current work illustrates that godisawesome is correct, there’s a way to have cake and eat it, too, with flashback minis). Otherwise, Spider-Man would now be where Archie is, just a tired cliche hamster wheel of idealized 1960s high school life with zero consequences and zero significance to the stories, languishing on the shelves - or gone the way of Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal.

Spider-Man needs more character-driven storytelling, not more nostalgia locked in amber stagnation.

Again, all that locking Spider-Man into some fantasy version of the high school/Coffee Bean days does is preserve the character for a past generation while blocking future generations from having stories that resonate with them.

There is a fundamental difference between zero consequences (essentially Silver Age DC) and the illusion of change.

[TinkerSpider]

Spider-Man is a major character within the Marvel Universe, but the reason JMS' plan was rejected was more about making sense of continuity rather than the value of the story.

I'm confused. Because rejecting it for continuity was about the Marvel Universe, not Spider-Man. If they were concerned only about re-setting Spider-Man, then JMS's story would have been of extreme value.

I'm not here as a lawyer for an illusion of change approach, only mentioning what benefits my "side." If I think there are arguments in favor of allowing Peter to "grow," I'll bring that up. This is something I hope most of us are willing to do, engaging in honest dialogue rather than just pushing everyone to agree.

But it wasn't framed as an argument for character growth? It was framed as the opposite, even though it actually supported character growth.

My understanding is that soap operas often have retcons and factory resets.

They don't repeat stories because they think the audience has forgotten them. On the contrary.

There are retcons such as the evil twin trope or secret baby trope, but they exist within the world of the story and are motivated. I am hard pressed to think of any factory reset, probably because it's hard to make an actor age backwards.

With the Star Wars comparison, they continued the stories. But then they keep resetting.
The original Marvel comics continued after Return of the Jedi, mainly with the introduction of new villains very similar to the Sith.
This seemed largely ignored when novels were set in a new post-Return of the Jedi continuity.
And all of that got ignored when the new trilogy came around with its own continuity.

The EU was one big story before the Disney purchase, from Marvel comics to games to books to the Dark Horse comics. The EU still exists as "Legends" or an AU.

Now the story continues with the new continuity. But my point is that there are new stories continuing to be told about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

Same for Star Trek. The universe has been expanded, but there are still new stories about Kirk and Spock being told. And the expansion of the universe allows for even more stories about other characters.

Amazing Spider-Man 122 is before the 150 cutoff.

My apologies, I thought you said ASM 50. My mistake. But I will point to Peter continuing to learn and grow from his adventures. He didn't reset back to zero with his memory wiped, contrary to how he seems to act post OMD, just going around and around on the hamster wheel, as made explicit in ASM 60 by Nick Spencer.

I wasn't saying people asking for real time, but without it, we're stuck with an increasingly absurd canon for the character. If Peter Parker is in his late 20s, he gained his powers during the Obama administration, and every Lee/ Ditko comic is set after Obama's election, which doesn't track with what's on the page.

The world of the story takes precedence over real world meta. No one is (or should be, as anything other than a fun supercommitted fan thing) trying to figure out the real world equivalent. We accept the world of the story.

If the sliding timescale slides further, it gets messy with any story that requires time to pass if a decade's worth of comics matches a year in the life of the characters.

Not if only a year passes in the comics. Again, the world of the story takes precedence.

The problem with ASM is that we are supposed to believe that Peter Parker is a human having these sequential adventures. If Peter is, say, trapped in a grave for a two weeks, we expect him to have a human reaction to that (and he does, in the story). We then expect the next time Peter is in a simiiar situation, he will remember/recall/flashback to what happened, and his actions/reactions then will inform his actions/reactions in the new situation. We expect the adventures to have meaning and significance, to build upon each other. For example, the symbiote sacrificing itself for Peter is not brushed off and forgotten, but instead is used to build a case that the symbiote is actually in love with Peter and feels rejected, hence why it bonded with Eddie (aka "Therefore"), and hence why Peter was able to trick it by pretending he wanted to re-bond (aka "Therefore") in ASM 317.

Therefore...we expect someone who has had all these adventures would...therefore...act accordingly and with the knowledge/wisdom/reactions/maturity that someone with that experience would logically have.

And that was nearly always true for Spider-Man comics until 2007.

Post OMD? Now Peter is an action figure who tossed around a play set but always snaps back to factory settings at the end of a story. He doesn't learn, he doesn't grow as a person, he doesn't develop, nothing builds. Nearly every arc just rolls off his back like the rubber duck toy he is. Which means for the reader his stories tend to hold no significance, no meaning, no resonance, they're just a string of one "and then" popcorn kernal after another with just as much substance and staying power as a single popcorn kernal.

There is a fundamental difference between zero consequences (essentially Silver Age DC) and the illusion of change.

IMO, the only real difference is DC Silver Age had the honesty to label their illusion of change stories as "imaginary."

[Agent Z]

There are zero problems with killing a supporting character off, and I doubt anyone would have called Kraven a “staple” before KLH elevated the character. IMO, that’s allowing nostalgia to take the place of active storytelling that places the character and his world first over meta considerations that may or may not ever occur, or misplaced affection for an era that never was.

I wouldn't call Kraven a favourite of mine, but I was quite surprised to see how many online fans had such a low opinion of the character outside of Kraven's Last Hunt.

Thank all the deities that nostalgia to the point it stopped active storytelling didnÂ’t exist when Gerry Conway and JRSR were on the book, or we would have never gotten the death of Gwen.

Not that I'm disagreeing with your overall point, but Gwen's death is a change that hasn't really aged well and I'd say it represents the Spider-Man franchise's issues with handling female characters. Issues that have been plaguing it long before the current ASM book.

And as for Archie, that comic was never meant to be anything but the hilarious adventures of high school teenagers.

[TinkerSpider]

I wouldn't call Kraven a favourite of mine, but I was quite surprised to see how many online fans had such a low opinion of the character outside of Kraven's Last Hunt.

I don't think overall fan opinion was necessarily low, but I highly doubt anyone would have put Kraven on the same level as, say, the Green Goblin or Doc Ock prior to KLH.

Now he's enough of an iconic villain for Sony to decide to make a film about him.

Not that I'm disagreeing with your overall point, but Gwen's death is a change that hasn't really aged well and I'd say it represents the Spider-Man franchise's issues with handling female characters. Issues that have been plaguing it long before the current ASM book.

One can make a case that Gwen is fridging, but Gwen's death went on to matter very much in the world of the story and was used as a catalyst not just for Peter's growth but also MJ's while also affecting Harry - it pretty much turned Peter's world upside down - and it made Peter's world that more real and resonant (as well as unpredictable) as killing the girlfriend was previously pretty much off the books at the time.

The problem is all the comics and other stories that came after that used girlfriend death just as a cheap gimmick, to be forgotten in six issues or less, so Gwen gets lumped into that, unfortunately -- to the point that now we get a page of "MJ" graphically dying only to be revealed it's Kamala, only for Peter to shrug off seeing both female characters die in his arms pretty much instantaneously.

And as for Archie, that comic was never meant to be anything but the hilarious adventures of high school teenagers.

Oh, that's a reference to an earlier conversation in this thead. It was brought up that Ditko apparently told Marv Wolfman he thought Peter should have been frozen at age 16, and I pointed out that at the time Stan had Peter graduate high school, the best selling comics included Superboy at #2, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen at #4, and Archie I believe at #7. So if Stan and Steve truly thought Peter should have stayed in high school, then they had very successful examples in front of them of comics that did just that - froze their characters at that age.

Yet they didn't (we have an essay from Ditko in which he said he and Stan together came up with Peter graduating high school, and he later asked Stan if that was still a story he wanted to tell).

Hence my reference to Archie. Because they could have followed that example - Archie was selling around 500K/issues a month in 1965 IIRC - but they didn't.

[Mister Mets]

I'm confused. Because rejecting it for continuity was about the Marvel Universe, not Spider-Man. If they were concerned only about re-setting Spider-Man, then JMS's story would have been of extreme value.


But it wasn't framed as an argument for character growth? It was framed as the opposite, even though it actually supported character growth.



They don't repeat stories because they think the audience has forgotten them. On the contrary.

There are retcons such as the evil twin trope or secret baby trope, but they exist within the world of the story and are motivated. I am hard pressed to think of any factory reset, probably because it's hard to make an actor age backwards.



The EU was one big story before the Disney purchase, from Marvel comics to games to books to the Dark Horse comics. The EU still exists as "Legends" or an AU.

Now the story continues with the new continuity. But my point is that there are new stories continuing to be told about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

Same for Star Trek. The universe has been expanded, but there are still new stories about Kirk and Spock being told. And the expansion of the universe allows for even more stories about other characters.



My apologies, I thought you said ASM 50. My mistake. But I will point to Peter continuing to learn and grow from his adventures. He didn't reset back to zero with his memory wiped, contrary to how he seems to act post OMD, just going around and around on the hamster wheel, as made explicit in ASM 60 by Nick Spencer.



The world of the story takes precedence over real world meta. No one is (or should be, as anything other than a fun supercommitted fan thing) trying to figure out the real world equivalent. We accept the world of the story.



Not if only a year passes in the comics. Again, the world of the story takes precedence.

The problem with ASM is that we are supposed to believe that Peter Parker is a human having these sequential adventures. If Peter is, say, trapped in a grave for a two weeks, we expect him to have a human reaction to that (and he does, in the story). We then expect the next time Peter is in a simiiar situation, he will remember/recall/flashback to what happened, and his actions/reactions then will inform his actions/reactions in the new situation. We expect the adventures to have meaning and significance, to build upon each other. For example, the symbiote sacrificing itself for Peter is not brushed off and forgotten, but instead is used to build a case that the symbiote is actually in love with Peter and feels rejected, hence why it bonded with Eddie (aka "Therefore"), and hence why Peter was able to trick it by pretending he wanted to re-bond (aka "Therefore") in ASM 317.

Therefore...we expect someone who has had all these adventures would...therefore...act accordingly and with the knowledge/wisdom/reactions/maturity that someone with that experience would logically have.

And that was nearly always true for Spider-Man comics until 2007.

Post OMD? Now Peter is an action figure who tossed around a play set but always snaps back to factory settings at the end of a story. He doesn't learn, he doesn't grow as a person, he doesn't develop, nothing builds. Nearly every arc just rolls off his back like the rubber duck toy he is. Which means for the reader his stories tend to hold no significance, no meaning, no resonance, they're just a string of one "and then" popcorn kernal after another with just as much substance and staying power as a single popcorn kernal.



IMO, the only real difference is DC Silver Age had the honesty to label their illusion of change stories as "imaginary."

If I'm having a hard time seeing Spider-Man as one story, I'm not really going to view the Marvel Universe that way. No one's really expected to read every Marvel comic. I'm aware of one guy who did and he got a book deal out of it.

If Spider-Man's story was rebooted so his career started five years later, that would have implications on other series at the time, like Bendis' Avengers and Brubaker's Daredevil, to say nothing of later comic books. But I'm looking at this more in the context of what it means for Hickman's Fantastic Four than what it means for Marvel as a story.

I am trying to distinguish between stories and icons. War and Peace is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end. The Wire was a TV show, but it is a story. I think Spider-Man comics are more containers for stories than one big story. It's like Hercules, where so many people have told different versions that there isn't one story. There are many. Some of which can be about one version of the guy, but some of which have to be about a different version.

I'm not trying to frame points in any way. I'm working through some questions here are myself.

My impression of soap operas is that familiar status quos return. Couples that break up reconcile. Someone who is disgraced is respectful again. Someone who leaves a familiar job may return to it. And sometimes these are played by different actors.

A point I'll add about Star Wars is that the new trilogy shows the potential problems with continuing with characters too long. Fans can get disappointed with the changes. Rise of Skywalker may be the worst-regarded Star Wars film, and that hurts the brand. I suspect a major reason Solo bombed so badly is that it came after a Star Wars film in which Han Solo was murdered by his son, and that's also going to taint the fun of seeing a movie where he's a young man. We'll have new adventures of Luke and Leia, but these are likely to continue to be different universes rather than one Star Wars story (or there will be one shifting official "story" with lots of pruning.)

Picard Season 3 seemed like a satisfying conclusion to that character's saga, although I wouldn't imagine too many people are going to watch the old Next Generation episodes, or experience the various untold tales in comics and novels. The numbers are likely to be a fraction of those following something new.

After 150, change was more sporadic. I wouldn't mind that having that discussion, but it is a tangent.

The world of the story takes precedence, but it would get nonsensical. The comics benefitted from coming out in a particular era when a lot of social changes didn't have to be explicitly mentioned. So gay characters weren't mentioned until it was non-controversial, but there were no homophobic plot points either. But the further we're getting from the silver age, the harder it is to reconcile the earlier adventures to things that were supposed to happen about a decade ago. This is a major argument for not keeping the character in amber, or at least to allow a version to grow.

I honestly think Marvel's best move might to go with some kind of reboot, continuing the 616 Universe in one line of books, while the main line focuses on a more familiar status quo.

Continuity has remained a part of the comics since One More Day. There are plenty of references to history. Of the major Spider-Man writers of the last twenty years, the most continuity-lite was JMS.

Silver Age DC comics were different because nothing happened that had an impact an issue later. The illusion of change comics allow for some developments, but the idea is to avoid breaking the character.

I wouldn't call Kraven a favourite of mine, but I was quite surprised to see how many online fans had such a low opinion of the character outside of Kraven's Last Hunt.



Not that I'm disagreeing with your overall point, but Gwen's death is a change that hasn't really aged well and I'd say it represents the Spider-Man franchise's issues with handling female characters. Issues that have been plaguing it long before the current ASM book.

And as for Archie, that comic was never meant to be anything but the hilarious adventures of high school teenagers.

An issue with Gwen's death is that you can't do many more stories with that level of impact.

If we had something that big every decade, Spider-Man might be unrecognizable, and easily not a character we want to read.

[Garlador]

An issue with Gwen's death is that you can't do many more stories with that level of impact.

If we had something that big every decade, Spider-Man might be unrecognizable, and easily not a character we want to read.

Going off "deaths" alone, they killed Captain Stacy, which was a big deal, then they killed Gwen, then they killed Jean DeWolff, then they killed Harry Osborne, then they "killed" Aunt May, then they "killed?" Mayday.

There was High School graduation, College Graduation, marriage, the first big costume change that create the symbiote saga that shook up the entire Marvel universe... Events that had decades of influence.

I'd argue that every decade up to the late 2000s was full of "something big" that breathed new life into the book, steered it down a fresh path, and changed the character in ways that left a mark on his development from that point forward. Some were retconned and backslid, of course, but many didn't and many weren't created with the intention of being reverted either.

And, personally speaking, it was those eras that changed the book by moving it forward that made it EXCITING for me, both as a young and older reader, because that's what a good narrative does; it respects what came before while steering the characters into new waters in an organic and thoughtful way.

I posted earlier that I watched LEGO: Code Red with my daughter, involving the Avengers fighting The Collector, and how The Collector is painted as this pitiful villain who desperately and futilely is trying to grab characters at their "prime" and preserve them, freeze them in place when they were "perfect", and clings to the idea of them as static and eternal... all for the heroes to roll their eyes and go "why are you afraid of change?" and endorsing the idea that people learn and grow and evolve, and that it's selfish to prevent these characters from moving into something new and unrecognizable, because future generations might embrace that change.

That's a children's cartoon. It has a stronger message endorsing change and growth than 616 Spider-Man with an audience statistically in their 30s. Something's gone wrong here.

[Huntsman Spider]

Going off "deaths" alone, they killed Captain Stacy, which was a big deal, then they killed Gwen, then they killed Jean DeWolff, then they killed Harry Osborne, then they "killed" Aunt May, then they "killed?" Mayday.

There was High School graduation, College Graduation, marriage, the first big costume change that create the symbiote saga that shook up the entire Marvel universe... Events that had decades of influence.

I'd argue that every decade up to the late 2000s was full of "something big" that breathed new life into the book, steered it down a fresh path, and changed the character in ways that left a mark on his development from that point forward. Some were retconned and backslid, of course, but many didn't and many weren't created with the intention of being reverted either.

And, personally speaking, it was those eras that changed the book by moving it forward that made it EXCITING for me, both as a young and older reader, because that's what a good narrative does; it respects what came before while steering the characters into new waters in an organic and thoughtful way.

I posted earlier that I watched LEGO: Code Red with my daughter, involving the Avengers fighting The Collector, and how The Collector is painted as this pitiful villain who desperately and futilely is trying to grab characters at their "prime" and preserve them, freeze them in place when they were "perfect", and clings to the idea of them as static and eternal... all for the heroes to roll their eyes and go "why are you afraid of change?" and endorsing the idea that people learn and grow and evolve, and that it's selfish to prevent these characters from moving into something new and unrecognizable, because future generations might embrace that change.

That's a children's cartoon. It has a stronger message endorsing change and growth than 616 Spider-Man with an audience statistically in their 30s. Something's gone wrong here.

And a modern/recent "children's cartoon," no less. 25+ years ago, the finale of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon had Spider-Man meet his (co)creator Stan Lee and admit to him that after all he'd been through, he was finally in a place where he liked himself and his life and wouldn't change a thing about either. When Stan expressed surprise at that, saying it didn't sound like the character he'd been writing all those years, Spidey's response was a sage one for the ages: "Well, Stan, we all have to grow up sometime, I suppose. Even us characters of fiction." I still remember that very fondly to this day, as the summation of his growth and development as a hero and a character throughout the entirety of TAS, which could have also applied well to the original comics version until One More Day.

[TinkerSpider]

If I'm having a hard time seeing Spider-Man as one story, I'm not really going to view the Marvel Universe that way. No one's really expected to read every Marvel comic. I'm aware of one guy who did and he got a book deal out of it.

I’m still confused. The story very explicitly states that Spider-Man’s continuity is Marvel U continuity and vice versa. That’s the world built in the story.

If Spider-Man's story was rebooted so his career started five years later, that would have implications on other series at the time, like Bendis' Avengers and Brubaker's Daredevil, to say nothing of later comic books. But I'm looking at this more in the context of what it means for Hickman's Fantastic Four than what it means for Marvel as a story.

I continue to be confused. If Spider-Man’s continuity affects Avengers and Daredevil and Fantastic Four, then it is, quite clearly and explicitly, affecting the Marvel Universe.

In fact, the Marvel Universe does not exist as its own separate entity; the Marvel Universe is the collective term for all those books.

I am trying to distinguish between stories and icons. War and Peace is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end. The Wire was a TV show, but it is a story. I think Spider-Man comics are more containers for stories than one big story. It's like Hercules, where so many people have told different versions that there isn't one story. There are many. Some of which can be about one version of the guy, but some of which have to be about a different version.

This is true, from a certain point of view.

There is 616 Spider-Man.

There is 6160 Spider-Man.

There is 1610 Spider-Man.

There are innumerable alt U and alt history Spider-Men.

There are the film versions, the animated series versions, the novelized versions, etc.

However, my understanding is we are discussing 616 Spider-Man.

616 Spider-Man IS a story, and is supposed to be one continuous, uninterrupted story.

And those other Peter Parkers have their stories with a singular continuity specific to them.

The question of character growth vs. staying in high school has been explicitly framed as being about 616 Spider-Man.

If you wish to shift the conversational goalposts to Spider-Man as a character who can be adapted into various stories, that’s an interesting topic to explore, but it’s a side bar.

My impression of soap operas is that familiar status quos return. Couples that break up reconcile. Someone who is disgraced is respectful again. Someone who leaves a familiar job may return to it. And sometimes these are played by different actors.

Again, it is my firm belief that if people want to use a genre or a medium as a frame of reference, it’s helpful to have engaged with it first.

A point I'll add about Star Wars is that the new trilogy shows the potential problems with continuing with characters too long. Fans can get disappointed with the changes. Rise of Skywalker may be the worst-regarded Star Wars film, and that hurts the brand. I suspect a major reason Solo bombed so badly is that it came after a Star Wars film in which Han Solo was murdered by his son, and that's also going to taint the fun of seeing a movie where he's a young man. We'll have new adventures of Luke and Leia, but these are likely to continue to be different universes rather than one Star Wars story (or there will be one shifting official "story" with lots of pruning.)

Picard Season 3 seemed like a satisfying conclusion to that character's saga, although I wouldn't imagine too many people are going to watch the old Next Generation episodes, or experience the various untold tales in comics and novels. The numbers are likely to be a fraction of those following something new.

You should watch Stange New Worlds. It’s awesome. Discovery, too. They both include prime universe Spock.

This is also heavily borrowing trouble from a mythical future than may or may not come to pass. It’s a very fearful, restrictive and unproductive position to take about storytelling IMO. Sure, a story may bomb. But it might also be highly successful and inspire whole new generations. Nothing in art or media is ever, ever guaranteed. Sometimes stories resonant. Sometimes they don’t. That’s just how art and culture work as the zeitgeist moves in mysterious ways and can’t be predicted.

But thank all the deities artists and writers and storytellers take that risk. Or our culture would be reductive and stagnant and so much the poorer.

After 150, change was more sporadic. I wouldn't mind that having that discussion, but it is a tangent.

Peter still learned from his experiences. He moved forward. His adventures built upon each other.

Since BND, it’s just a string of one stale popcorn kernel after another. Peter doesn’t learn. His adventures don’t build upon each other. He’s stuck on an ever diminishing returns hamster wheel. I agree with Nick Spencer in ASM 60, it’s character breaking for Peter.

The world of the story takes precedence, but it would get nonsensical. The comics benefitted from coming out in a particular era when a lot of social changes didn't have to be explicitly mentioned. So gay characters weren't mentioned until it was non-controversial, but there were no homophobic plot points either. But the further we're getting from the silver age, the harder it is to reconcile the earlier adventures to things that were supposed to happen about a decade ago. This is a major argument for not keeping the character in amber, or at least to allow a version to grow.

The world of the story is not the real world.

Readers are able to keep two ideas (and many more) in their head. We understand fiction is an allegory for real world but is a mirror. Fiction has versimilutude but it’s not objective reality, can never be objective reality.

We are able to understand that Peter referring to John Belushi on SNL does not actually mean that adventure took place fifty years ago in Peter’s life and Peter is now fifty years older than he was then. Because real time and Marvel time have never actually lined up. Marvel is its own world, with its own rules.

The reason why Peter should be allowed to grow is because that’s what humans do.

We learn from our experiences (and if we don’t learn, that is a tragedy and another type of story to explore).

We are motivated, inspired, switch our positions, change our minds, create new goals in response to our experiences and how we act and are acted upon by the world.

If Peter Parker is to be a fully dimensional and relatable human character, then he MUST learn and grow. And that’s what he did, until 2007.

This doesn’t mean that big, sweeping changes are made at the end of every story or a major character dies at the end of every arc or Peter gets married one year, divorced the next, remarried the following year.

What it does mean is that Peter’s experiences matter and his reactions are motivated and consistent. If he learns that the symbiote is susceptible to sound in one issue, he uses that knowledge the next time he sees the symbiote.

This isn’t Spider-Man, but let’s look at Jackpot. Mary Jane encountered Francine Frye in ASM 25 by Spencer. She uses her acting skills to disarm Francine.

But in Jackpot #1, MJ acts as if she has never encountered Francine before, and then she overacts and can’t fool Francine - and it’s not explained why MJ suddenly can’t fool Francine and why she’s suddenly a terrible actress.

That’s treating MJ as an inanimate action figure, not a character. And it happens to Peter over and over and over again as well.

We want Peter’s experiences to matter.

I honestly think Marvel's best move might to go with some kind of reboot, continuing the 616 Universe in one line of books, while the main line focuses on a more familiar status quo.

I agree Marvel should reboot, but because they are making a mockery of their continuity - especially in Spider-Man with this insistence over most of the last 17 years that he is just a rubber action figure to be taken in and out of the toy box - and they should just give up the ghost and just pump out the same old, same old ever-so-cyclical hamster wheel stories (to the point that “supervillain taking over Peter as Spider-Man” was done in KLH, then came Superior, and now we’re on our second “Spider Who Gobbles” in a year) since that’s clearly the tack they want to take. But stop trying to pretend this is still a continuous story and the Peter in the issues being published this month has any relation to the Peter published in AF 15 - 2007. The Peter we’re reading today is just a soulless, empty toy, to the extent that he keeps getting unnecessary and immediately forgettable costume changes pretty much just so new toys can be made :shrug

Silver Age DC comics were different because nothing happened that had an impact an issue later.

Except…that’s what is happening in the current run. Okay, maybe we get an issue of Peter sleeping with a dead teenage girl’s mask that he had to have robbed from her corpse. But nothing seems to affect Peter. He just snaps back into place and it’s barely, if ever, referenced again.

An issue with Gwen's death is that you can't do many more stories with that level of impact.

If we had something that big every decade, Spider-Man might be unrecognizable, and easily not a character we want to read.

Garlador has an eloquent post on this.

[Lee]

And a modern/recent "children's cartoon," no less. 25+ years ago, the finale of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon had Spider-Man meet his (co)creator Stan Lee and admit to him that after all he'd been through, he was finally in a place where he liked himself and his life and wouldn't change a thing about either. When Stan expressed surprise at that, saying it didn't sound like the character he'd been writing all those years, Spidey's response was a sage one for the ages: "Well, Stan, we all have to grow up sometime, I suppose. Even us characters of fiction." I still remember that very fondly to this day, as the summation of his growth and development as a hero and a character throughout the entirety of TAS, which could have also applied well to the original comics version until One More Day.

John Semper saw that scene as the end of Peter's story.

https://dcanimated.com/WF/sections/s...iews/semper10/

Why did the show end with Spidey and MJ not being reunited, and Spidey still spiralling through limbo, when Marvel Films' order was always for 65 episodes?

Oh, as I've said elsewhere, when Peter Parker faces his creator, Stan, and finally says 'I like myself' then his story is complete. He's gone beyond his creator. He's now his own creation. A lot of people think I threw Stan in there as a cheap gimmick, but the bigger, more cosmic issue is overlooked. Here's a guy facing his creator (in essence his deity) and saying, "Guess what? I'm beyond what you created, with all my flaws and problems. I faced the challenge you set out for me and I've progressed beyond it. And I really like myself."

When he can say that, then the hero's journey has been told and the saga is complete. Who cares if he gets the girl or not?

But I left it open in case the series was continued - which was always a possibility. The initial order was for 65 episodes, but Fox could have renewed us for more if they'd wanted. However, the head of Fox Kids Network at the time, Margaret Loesch, hated Avi and wanted to put him out of business, so there was no chance of the show being continued. The show was canceled and, as she had intended, the studio, Marvel Films Animation, went out of business. In the end, my show, which was a number-one-rated hit, was scuttled because of vindictive internal politics. Welcome to my world.

The Spider-Man comic writers don't get to end Peter's story.

[Tuck]

I am trying to distinguish between stories and icons. War and Peace is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end. The Wire was a TV show, but it is a story. I think Spider-Man comics are more containers for stories than one big story. It's like Hercules, where so many people have told different versions that there isn't one story. There are many. Some of which can be about one version of the guy, but some of which have to be about a different version.

Well, Marvel should do more of that. The kind of stuff like Peter David's Symbiote stuff and JMD's stuff set in the old continuity.

But more stuff like Life Story and the kind of projects DC likes to do with characters set either in their own version of continuity, or at least with vague continuity. (It's also easier as a reader to buy a six or ten issue limited series or a one-shot every now and then, than it is to fork out $5 twice a month in perpetuity.)

[Garlador]

John Semper saw that scene as the end of Peter's story.

https://dcanimated.com/WF/sections/s...iews/semper10/

The Spider-Man comic writers don't get to end Peter's story.

And the X-Men writers ended the original series with "Graduation Day" and a "perfect" ending.


Interviews with the writers have repeatedly stated that was supposed to be it. The end. Everything culminated to this finale. "As indicated above, this story [Graduation Day] was crated specifically to say goodbye to the series."

... Probably a good thing Marvel made more though, right?

[TinkerSpider]

John Semper saw that scene as the end of Peter's story.

https://dcanimated.com/WF/sections/s...iews/semper10/

And then he wrote a treatment where Peter finds Mary Jane.

https://spiderman-animated.fandom.co...inds_Mary_Jane

The Spider-Man comic writers don't get to end Peter's story.

They “end” it all the time, or come close to the end.

JMS wrote Last Stand
Dan Slott had his story in AF 1000 with an elderly Peter
Chip Zdarsky gave Peter an end in Life Story
Earth X provides another older Peter
Peter has died in numerous stories

Stories are infinite and malleable and expansive. The only limit is human imagination. Stories can come to an end - and then find a new branch and keep going.

What is not infinite and expansive is sealing Peter Parker in early GenX amber and forcing him to repeat the same old story beats over and over to diminishing returns.

No wonder Marvel is having a harder time reaching younger readers and getting people into the comic book stores, as Dan Buckley recently discussed.