Spider-Man: Life Story By Chip Zdarsky & Mark Bagley

[WebSlingWonder]

You know what I just realized? My impression of Peters age is really highly dependent on the artist drawing him. If Quesada’s goal was for Peter to be more youthful the most effective mandate would have been for artists to draw him younger looking.

Marvel:
tumblr_inline_pfp352ORsk1r4hkfd_250.jpg

[Revolutionary_Jack]

If you look at Spider-Man's history, Lee-Ditko-Romita wrote Spider-Man and Peter Parker as a kind of timeless figure, and that applied to his cast. Like why is Aunt May and Uncle Ben so much older than Peter's parents. They read like grandparents more than Uncle and Aunt. Ben and May are Greatest generation figures and Peter was born to the "silent generation" or at the very least a very young baby boomer. Then Gerry Conway followed Lee, and he was 19 years old...he was the only one who got to write Peter Parker while being the same age and same generation as he. That's the only time that has happened. And I think maybe they should do that, make Spider-Man the voice of the mid-20s guys of each generation. Which means writers should be around 24-27, and they have two-three year runs...and that way Peter would be able to be young and speak to the youth of each generation.

[WebSlingWonder]

If you look at Spider-Man's history, Lee-Ditko-Romita wrote Spider-Man and Peter Parker as a kind of timeless figure, and that applied to his cast. Like why is Aunt May and Uncle Ben so much older than Peter's parents. They read like grandparents more than Uncle and Aunt. Ben and May are Greatest generation figures and Peter was born to the "silent generation" or at the very least a very young baby boomer. Then Gerry Conway followed Lee, and he was 19 years old...he was the only one who got to write Peter Parker while being the same age and same generation as he. That's the only time that has happened. And I think maybe they should do that, make Spider-Man the voice of the mid-20s guys of each generation. Which means writers should be around 24-27, and they have two-three year runs...and that way Peter would be able to be young and speak to the youth of each generation.

Gerry Conway was 19 YEARS OLD when he wrote Spider-Man?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Gerry Conway was 19 YEARS OLD when he wrote Spider-Man?

Oh yeah, 19, and he was that age when he wrote the script for The Night Gwen Stacy Died...

And he already created a character like Hammerhead, one of Spidey's longest lasting secondary villains, and then he killed Gwen Stacy. Can you possibly be any more punk?

Conway pointed out that he was an anti-war left leaning guy, that he had dropped LSD and so on, so that allowed him to really relate to Peter and his gang. So when he wrote Harry's drug trips and visions he modeled it on his. Stan Lee had no idea about drugs, so he had Harry becoming an addict of LSD but LSD is a soft drug and not a hard one. It isn't habit forming so Lee had no idea what he was writing about. Harry should be a cocaine fiend since that was the popular drug of that era.

And of course Conway immediately knew why Mary Jane was special and had to be the girl for Peter. She was simply the only one of Peter's cast who actually felt like a character from the 60s in the same way Han Solo was the only one in Star Wars who felt like someone from 70s America while all the rest are kind of these archetypal figures.

[Inversed]

When JMS wrote Peter and Spider-Man he wrote him like an adult and even if sliding time scale kept him mid-to-late 20s and given his life experiences and trauma someone who mentally I think would be older than his years...so you could imagine that Peter in his mid-to-late 20s but also in his 30s and his 40s and it made sense, so he felt contemporary to the 90s, the 00s and so on. Which is another reason why I continue to think that not only was the marriage important it's necessary because it smooths over stuff and keeps all this sliding time business and other stuff under control. Are Peter and MJ married for 3 years or 6 years or 8 years, you could write them as old and young as you would like and it would fit.

I think what also especially helps is how JMS wrote him and JRJR drew him. He had his teaching job, which also makes you think of him as much older, but it helps that Peter was written as much more serious and mellow when with his students which made him feel that much older. Same with how he was drawn, having that stubble alot of the time and appearing more worn down occasionally.

It's funny considering Peter as a CEO does seem like a pretty adult job, and Camunocoli I think did appear to try to make him look older at points, its just how Slott usually wrote him, making him a goof and impulsive pretty much all the time is what makes him seem so much younger.

[Vortex85]

Marvel:
tumblr_inline_pfp352ORsk1r4hkfd_250.jpg

Lol. Behold the power of art.

Who feels more youthful?


Peter in his mid-20s in the 90s:




Peter in his 40s with a teenage daughter:

[WebSlingWonder]

Lol. Behold the power of art.

Who feels more youthful?


Peter in his mid-20s in the 90s:




Peter in his 40s with a teenage daughter:

LOL! Case in point!
Who's the second artist? I love that style!

[Vortex85]

LOL! Case in point!
Who's the second artist? I love that style!

Andres Genolet.

The image is from Spider-Girls tie in for Spider-Geddon from the Renew Your Vows universe. Came out a few months ago. I liked the art for the tie in. It was pretty cool.


There is a cool scene Peter and MJ's two daughters Mayday and Annie meet and MJ has a moment alone because in Renew Your Vows they lost Mayday just like in 616 in the clone saga. Cool to see that acknowledged and having an effect on MJ:

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Lol. Behold the power of art.

Who feels more youthful?

Yeah, but there's also the fact the first example is done in a realistic style while the second one is very cartoony, clean lines and so on, and that inherently looks youthful. And in a cartoony style, character design tends to convey age...take Fred Flintsone and George Jetson. The former feels older than the latter despite the fact that George Jetson is the father of two, with his elder daughter being teenage which should put him in his mid-40s, but he feels younger than Fred. Partly because of setting but mostly because of character design. The fact that Fred Flintsone is modeled on Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners while Jetson is an original character who was meant to just suggest "dad" and be a kind of henpecked sitcom dad.

And again sliding time scale...today's 30 and 40 year olds because of generational and social changes tend to be more youthful looking than before, partly its because gymming as caught on and you have a more health conscious generation. Leonardo DiCaprio for instance he's 44 and he still has some baby fat. He's still quite the babe. Nicole Kidman, she's 51 and she's still incredibly beautiful. Or take the MCU, the main romance of the biggest movie franchise in the planet, which informs the first words of the Endgame trailer is between Robert Downey's Iron Man, played by a 53 year old man, and Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, and she's 46...and while both of them feel older, they haven't lost some of the youthful charm and so on.

The best argument you can make for Spider-Man growing up is that the most popular and lucrative superheroes tend to be older characters. The MCU is headed by a 40 year old character. And you know Spider-Man: Homecoming was easily exceeded in profits by Black Panther released less than a year later. Black Panther is again played by a 40 year old actor and his character is maybe mid-30s at his youngest.

[Vortex85]

Yeah, but there's also the fact the first example is done in a realistic style while the second one is very cartoony, clean lines and so on, and that inherently looks youthful. And in a cartoony style, character design tends to convey age...take Fred Flintsone and George Jetson. The former feels older than the latter despite the fact that George Jetson is the father of two, with his elder daughter being teenage which should put him in his mid-40s, but he feels younger than Fred. Partly because of setting but mostly because of character design. The fact that Fred Flintsone is modeled on Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners while Jetson is an original character who was meant to just suggest "dad" and be a kind of henpecked sitcom dad.

And again sliding time scale...today's 30 and 40 year olds because of generational and social changes tend to be more youthful looking than before, partly its because gymming as caught on and you have a more health conscious generation. Leonardo DiCaprio for instance he's 44 and he still has some baby fat. He's still quite the babe. Nicole Kidman, she's 51 and she's still incredibly beautiful. Or take the MCU, the main romance of the biggest movie franchise in the planet, which informs the first words of the Endgame trailer is between Robert Downey's Iron Man, played by a 53 year old man, and Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, and she's 46...and while both of them feel older, they haven't lost some of the youthful charm and so on.

The best argument you can make for Spider-Man growing up is that the most popular and lucrative superheroes tend to be older characters. The MCU is headed by a 40 year old character. And you know Spider-Man: Homecoming was easily exceeded in profits by Black Panther released less than a year later. Black Panther is again played by a 40 year old actor and his character is maybe mid-30s at his youngest.

Yeah, I know the style matters. That's all part of the art. I'm just pointing out that it has a big effect on the feeling of youthfulness on the characters. Much more so I think than OMD did.

I have examples from Slotts run. If you look at issues of Giuseppe Camuncoli's art in early WorldWide, Peter looks like he could be in his 40s. If you look at Fall of Parker with Stuart Immonen, Peter looks early 20s. That's all from same era. It has a big effect on the feeling of age of the characters.

[WebSlingWonder]

Andres Genolet.

The image is from Spider-Girls tie in for Spider-Geddon from the Renew Your Vows universe. Came out a few months ago. I liked the art for the tie in. It was pretty cool.


There is a cool scene Peter and MJ's two daughters Mayday and Annie meet and MJ has a moment alone because in Renew Your Vows they lost Mayday just like in 616 in the clone saga. Cool to see that acknowledged and having an effect on MJ:

That Annie/MJ seem almost had me tearing up. It's amazing (pun intended) what happens when the full history is a part of a character's life, and then some.

And the art is gorgeous too!

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Yeah, I know the style matters. That's all part of the art. I'm just pointing out that it has a big effect on the feeling of youthfulness on the characters. Much more so I think than OMD did.

Joe Quesada in an interview with CBR around the time he rolled out OMIT mentioned the fact that when he did OMD, he was conscious of slowly drawing the characters looking quite old, and then in the epilogue he drew them younger. He said that in the issues he did, he wanted a sense of Peter and MJ drawn to look as their final day together ends, looking in their 30s and 40s and so on.

The end result didn't work. As Erik Larsen said: Joe Quesada seemed to go from tracing photographs of ugly people or apple dolls to trying to draw characters "on model" and the end result was like stringing together a bunch of scenes from various 007 movies and trying to pretend all of the actors that portrayed Bond were the same guy, ignoring all of the physical changes that were only too apparent.

I always found Quesada's face of Peter quite odd and ugly looking. It doesn't look like Ditko or Romita's Peter.

My sense of the art in JRJR and JMS' run was that Peter and MJ looked mid-to-late 20s, and maybe early 30s but they are written as people in that age, rather than Post-OMD where Peter's in his 20s and is written to be "mentally 15" according to an apocryphal Slott quote. But if you compare that to the Spider-Man/Human Torch series by Slott and Templeton, the latter look younger, and again that's because Ty Templeton (whose influence is all over those Spider-Girls drawings) has a cartoony kind of style.

[Vortex85]

Joe Quesada in an interview with CBR around the time he rolled out OMIT mentioned the fact that when he did OMD, he was conscious of slowly drawing the characters looking quite old, and then in the epilogue he drew them younger. He said that in the issues he did, he wanted a sense of Peter and MJ drawn to look as their final day together ends, looking in their 30s and 40s and so on.

The end result didn't work. As Erik Larsen said: Joe Quesada seemed to go from tracing photographs of ugly people or apple dolls to trying to draw characters "on model" and the end result was like stringing together a bunch of scenes from various 007 movies and trying to pretend all of the actors that portrayed Bond were the same guy, ignoring all of the physical changes that were only too apparent.

I always found Quesada's face of Peter quite odd and ugly looking. It doesn't look like Ditko or Romita's Peter.

My sense of the art in JRJR and JMS' run was that Peter and MJ looked mid-to-late 20s, and maybe early 30s but they are written as people in that age, rather than Post-OMD where Peter's in his 20s and is written to be "mentally 15" according to an apocryphal Slott quote. But if you compare that to the Spider-Man/Human Torch series by Slott and Templeton, the latter look younger, and again that's because Ty Templeton (whose influence is all over those Spider-Girls drawings) has a cartoony kind of style.

Interesting. I wasn't aware of the effort to change the art style before and after the deal with Mephisto. It doesn't look like he pulled it off very well if that was his goal.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Interesting. I wasn't aware of the effort to change the art style before and after the deal with Mephisto. It doesn't look like he pulled it off very well if that was his goal.

So, to that point, by the time we're in the fourth issue, I'm drawing Peter and MJ as real as our readership perhaps unconsciously wants them, at least as real as my abilities will allow. I wanted to give the reader a sense of what it would really be like if we made Peter's world an echo of our real world, and he was flesh and blood and started aging along with us. The Peter and MJ in this segment of the story aren't twentysomethings, they're definitely in their thirties to mid thirties.


- Joe Quesada

https://www.cbr.com/the-one-more-day...ada-pt-1-of-5/

[WebLurker]

You know what I just realized? My impression of Peters age is really highly dependent on the artist drawing him. If Quesada’s goal was for Peter to be more youthful the most effective mandate would have been for artists to draw him younger looking.

No kidding; Both Spider-Girl and RYV showed a Peter, and MJ, for that matter, well into their 40s, but, despite the latter being older (since Annie is younger then Mayday), they look exactly like they did in their twenties and seem to have the energy to match, while the MC2 ones look and seem older.