Parker industries speculation

[Snoop Dogg]

Iron Man sacrificing or losing companies and suits and technologies happens all the time. That's why it's not the same. It happens all the time. He's the world's finest engineer. He'll find something else or bring back what he lost. That's his regular. Peter had that one-shot fall into his lap, used it to be the best version of himself he could be, and then at the end that meant giving it all up. Because powa and wesponshibilidy and blah blah blah. Not turning in the diploma isn't comparable to sacrificing the giant company as a countermove to the global fascist invasion, and he's a better character for being able to make that mistake when it ties into his fundamental flaw and he couldn't see the harm. Most people wouldn't.

[Snoop Dogg]

Is that why it felt like he was trying to write Iron Man ?

PI Spidey is actually a toss-up to Silver Age Shield. The globetrotting, the wacky gadgets, the spy and scientist supporting cast, the secret organizations and conspiracies. It's obvious during the Zodiac stuff but is really the entire book.

[Frontier]

PI Spidey is actually a toss-up to Silver Age Shield. The globetrotting, the wacky gadgets, the spy and scientist supporting cast, the secret organizations and conspiracies. It's obvious during the Zodiac stuff but is really the entire book.

That sounds more like the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Peter had that one-shot fall into his lap, used it to be the best version of himself he could be, and then at the end that meant giving it all up.

That's why Slott ruined the toys. He told a story that was not really reusable or redoable, it created consequences that undermined a good part of what defined Peter. Like Peter being a high school teacher, working at Garid or Tri-Corp or other tech firms as he did in the '90s is reproducable and redoable as a status-quo, hence Horizon Labs worked better than P.I. did. Whereas you can only do the businessman and corporate Peter once and you can't repeat it too often.

Not turning in the diploma isn't comparable to sacrificing the giant company as a countermove to the global fascist invasion, and he's a better character for being able to make that mistake when it ties into his fundamental flaw and he couldn't see the harm. Most people wouldn't.

The two aren't related to one another. If anything Peter divesting his company from the start could have solved that problem from ever becoming a problem. And you know, in terms of realism and relatability, plagiarism is something people do in real life and face actual real-life consequences for, whereas the other is some comic book goofball story that also flirts too much with the trope of the self-sacrificing "rich man", the idea that businessman are making some big sacrifice and so on, and it's part of the sentimentality behind the whole "too big to fail" idea.

To the extent you could explore "power and responsibility" as a theme in a businessman set-up or in terms of trying to monetize Peter's inventions...Slott never did that. Peter becoming a businessman was basically a Batman-like setting to farm out new suits, gizmos and props. In terms of potential stories such as trying to be an ethical businessman...does Peter farm out work to sweatshops, does he make deals with authoritarian governments...since a big part of the story was set in China, and since Disney/Marvel is in bed with China, the whole issue of a tech company doing business with such an authoritarian regime could not be touched upon (cf, Google and China, the Great Firewall). You could have told a story about the difficulty or impossibility to be a good man and a businessman magnate...themes that are a big part of why Batman is so problematic (albeit DC gets away with it being set in Gotham) these days. Like say Peter was trying to market his web-fluid in a way that doesn't allow it to be repurposed as a weaponlike that moment in Back in Black where Peter gloats to Fisk that he can use his web-fluid to fill up his nostrils and clog him from the inside...stuff like that could happen if Peter ever monetized and put the web-fluid on market since it would be an effective murder weapon and gun-substitute, and indeed there's a Punisher story where he stole a web-shooter to murder people.

You could have done a story where Peter's products are misused...similar to how Facebook and other websites are used for the Myanmari government's genocide of the Rohingyas. The only thing is that obviously these kinds of stories are better suited to Iron Man...since inventions being used and misused against his inventions are more his thing...and that just proves why the setting was never Spidey's.

[Inversed]

The thing is, Slott ended Superior with Peter now in charge of the Parker Industries company. He was gonna be working with an 8 month time jump, and we know Slott loves playing with big and unconventional types of stories with Spidey, making PI into a global billion-dollar company and seeing how Peter would run it was literally the only real place that story could go. I thought that aspect was the most consistently good part of that era, and it was interesting to see what Peter did with all of these tools. And I while I don't think the whole thing and everything that happened during it was perfect, I think limiting and restricting to what types of stories can be told with Spider-Man can be dangerous, sometimes experimentation can be a good thing.

Just like how his teaching job hasn't been brought up alot since, or his Horizon Labs job, and now how his PI job, thats just the nature of new writers focusing on new stories, they don't need to have to constantly bring up what happened. Yeah, losing the PI job is on a much grander scale than any of his others, but ultimately the MU has so much other stuff to care about, nobody's gonna overly obsess about it.

[jetengine]

Keeping Parker Industries as the Status Quo would have been better frankly then reverting Peter. It just required better writing.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Keeping Parker Industries as the Status Quo would have been better frankly then reverting Peter. It just required better writing.

The writing to revert that was way better than the writing that brought that in to start with. Nick Spencer undid the entire thing by taking an obvious sticking point...Peter walking past a degree he did not earn and did not report...and puncturing that entire set-up. He did it in one issue.

Peter didn't earn that success. It was started by Dr. Octopus in his body. And if Peter feels that he shouldn't be blamed for what Ock did in his body, keeping the trinkets and goodies Ock had kept lying around, isn't a good defense.

It also undermines Slott's entire point that this is some Knightfall moment that shows why Azrael/Superior wasn't all that good and regular Peter was best. The writing sure doesn't prove that. I mean the entire reason why Kraven's Last Hunt was only 2 months across all Spider-Titles was that obviously J. M. DeMatteis knew and readers knew that keeping Peter in that grave was insupportable and that he had to get out and that reading a Spider-Man without Peter was insufferable. Slott clearly thought otherwise since he kept Peter out of his own books for a year and a half, Superior Ock never gets his comeuppance and is still kept lying around and is now a Spider-Family guy, which again has deprived Spider-Man of a major toy, the scuzzy thug-in-labcoat version of Ock that was at the heart of some of Spider-Man's greatest stories. Keeping Parker Industries also undermines that idea. And considering that Slott says that Peter doing the right thing at the cost of his livelihood is "self-destructive" I actually think that any moral posture in such stories is purely cynical.

The thing is, Slott ended Superior with Peter now in charge of the Parker Industries company. He was gonna be working with an 8 month time jump, and we know Slott loves playing with big and unconventional types of stories with Spidey, making PI into a global billion-dollar company and seeing how Peter would run it was literally the only real place that story could go.

There are other ways. Like Peter becoming a science editor under Robbie...unlikely as that was, since Peter has never shown writing/editing skills wasn't a bad idea. Slott brought that at the end when that could have been done before. Ethically the thing Peter should have done is divest his name from that company and so on, and sell it to Alchemax and that would create issues and tension later on. Peter does the right thing but he potentially aids and empowers Norman Osborn.

I think limiting and restricting to what types of stories can be told with Spider-Man can be dangerous, sometimes experimentation can be a good thing.

The idea of Peter as a businessman is no new thing. It was done in the Fox Cartoon, in Mark Waid's House of M Spider-Man, and I think the Shattered Dimensions game or Edge of Time, one of which Slott worked on admittedly. But it's been done. In every occassion, Peter becoming a businessman made him a corrupt douchebag. Slott sticks to script in that Superior Octopus creates the business so obviously Peter isn't tainted by doing that. But that's just hedging the bets. Peter becoming a high school teacher...that had never been done before anywhere. It was something simple, logical, and back-to-roots but again that was something really new and original.

It never felt in character for the story and setting, never felt organic, and that's why every take on businessman Peter was an exercise to make Peter into an evil jackass since that's all writers felt was fitting with that.

[jetengine]

You can easily have both Doc Ock and Superior Spidey. He's probably the best of the Anti-Hero spiders because you dont need to refer to the clone saga much to make any sense of him.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

You can easily have both Doc Ock and Superior Spidey. He's probably the best of the Anti-Hero spiders because you dont need to refer to the clone saga much to make any sense of him.

There is an anti-hero Spider-Man who needs even less references than both...he is Venom. You know the star of a $800million movie (that is actually highly entertaining and fun), the biggest villain in Spider-Man since Steve Ditko left the title.

Explaning Superior Octopus is just as convoluted as the Clone Saga, especially since part of that involves the Clone Conspiracy. Spider-Man got his body hacked by Dr. Octopus. How? Well there was this brain scanner thingy that Spider-Man used over a course of 100 issues to combat different threats, and it gave Dr. Octopus a perfect scan of Peter's brain...okay how does having an external scan of Spider-Man's brain allow Dr. Octopus to hack the real thing, well there's this other thingamajig. Okay Dr. Octopus hacked Peter's body and that lasted for a year-and-a-half real-time and then Peter came back...okay good. Wait why is there still a Superior Octopus? well he created a younger slimmer more swole clone body in the end.

And again this kind of story has been done better before. Hacking the identity and so on is Chameleon's thing, and Bendis hit all the beats Slott touched on in his Ultimate Chameleon Twins story, which again was shorter, compact, made its point and didn't f--k around. You have Kraven's Last Hunt, again shorter and less convoluted, and self contained.

You also have Aaron Davis Prowler running around as the Iron Spider after stealing the costume but got to give priority to white dudes even if Aaron Davis became this breakout villain of Into the Spider-Verse.

And I don't know why you even need an anti-hero Spider-Man? In the Marvel shared universe, you have plenty of anti-heroes with whom Spider-Man comes to blows with already -- Deadpool, Wolverine, The Punisher, even Black Cat in some stories. Whatever dynamic you want to have can be had there. And then again, anti-hero versions of the main hero's main appeal is as a cautionary tale to the hero about how he would be like were he to break bad? Except we got that story...in AF#15. Peter is haunted by the person he once was and what that cost him, so there's no need for this kind of thing anyway.

[Miles To Go]

You can easily have both Doc Ock and Superior Spidey. He's probably the best of the Anti-Hero spiders because you dont need to refer to the clone saga much to make any sense of him.

Except you kind of do (Clone Conspiracy)

[jetengine]

Explaining Kaine and Ben requires explaininf the entirety of the Clone Saga which is a damn mess. Ock is literally 2 sentences.

Ock transfered his mind to Peters body, became Spiderman for a while, learnt to be a better person and gives Peter his body back. A backup of Ocks mind then transfers to a Hybrid clone of Spiderman and continues forward.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Explaining Kaine and Ben requires explaininf the entirety of the Clone Saga which is a damn mess. Ock is literally 2 sentences.

Ben Reilly is a clone of Peter that lost his memories and adopted a new identity before coming to Peter's life as his legacy character.

Kaine is an ugly clone of Peter who has all the power but none of the responsibility.

The core of both characters are easily understandable and explicable in single sentences of normal length. People liked Ben Reilly and Kaine as characters, so the design and concept was strong and accessible. They only turned against the Saga when they decided to make Ben the "real Peter"...in other words they liked the characters for everything except the purpose they were intended for and the story they were made to serve. So the characters owe more to design, presentation, and writing than concept and origins, as such can, theoretically, exist apart from the saga.

Ben Reilly's big problem is that the role he briefly fulfilled is now taken over by, and with far greater success, Miles Morales. On the other hand, Kaine probably could still work, and considering how well Scarlet Spider has been doing, still works.

Ock transfered his mind to Peters body, became Spiderman for a while, learnt to be a better person and gives Peter his body back. A backup of Ocks mind then transfers to a Hybrid clone of Spiderman and continues forward.

Those are two sentences in the strict literal sense, albeit they have multiple clauses and aren't of the proper length. In other words, I think you are cheating. And inaccurate. Superior Octopus lapses back to supervillainy at the end of the saga and he only really became redeemable in Go Down Swinging where Peter says things are "square"...creating the same problem as the notorious "Pact" of Venom.

The set-up for Superior Spider-Man took some 100 issues (600-700), continued for another 30 odd issues not including supplementary tales and was followed up on in other series. The whole point of Superior Spider-Man is that it was a status-quo as opposed to Kraven's Last Hunt or the Chameleon Twins story in USM, which were single extended arcs with beginning-middle-end. The tension for that story was the whole stunt...how long will this go on, will he actually do it, as such it was entirely narcissistic. And according to Slott, Peter came back earlier than intended because the second Garfield Spidey movie was coming out and they needed to bring Peter back at the time of the movie...which is probably the only good thing that movie did. So there was never a real ending planned for that, and as such it was never a story with a real point or anything tangible to say. It was just spinning wheels.

It's mostly a story and event that works entirely in 616 Comics and is hard to impossible to translate it in another medium The equivalent of Superior Spider-Man would be say an entire Spider-Man movie watching someone in Tom Holland's body while Peter will return in the closing act of the second movie. And believe me nobody will ever fund that. Right now they are adapting it for Marvel's Spider-Man animation, a cartoon nobody watches and cares for and the execution doesn't land mostly because doing it with young versions of the character takes away from the entire history and context behind it, and the versions of Dr. Octopus and other characters we see are more or less reduced versions of anything from the other stories.

And again, Superior Octopus deprives us of Classic Octopus. Dr. Octopus was ugly and didn't care about how he looked. He was fat, had horrible taste but he didn't care. He was unique among Spider-Man rogues in that he didn't actually wear a costume or a mask. To the extent that Dr. Octopus was for a long time a traditional villain he shared something in common with Luthor and Joker, namely the rivalry with the hero was entirely professional and didn't extend to, nor did it ever need, Octopus knowing the hero's identity. Instead of that unique and compelling design, we get the new Ock is younger, who wears a stupid costume and mask as Octopus, and you have a nerfed version of the character, and now he's basically just like Venom and Goblin.

[Ursalink]

Truth be told, I would really like Parker Industries back. Mary Jane's job at Stark Industries could help her to keep the company safe while Peter saves the world. It was a real shame to lose the company, but for once, I could see Peter in a balanced status between power and responsability. I mean, he always carried more responsabilities than he could, so having a little more power (not too much, of course) would be fitting.

[SuperiorIronman]

No, the company should come back, Peter should not be a f****** idiot.

The company angle should not be in-service to Spider-man, it should be in service to Peter Parker doing the good he can do outside of Spider-man. I said this before during the Parker Industries era, Peter's plan for market was all wrong. He did a phone and some light bulbs. What Peter should do is use the technology he develops as Spider-man and use that in ways that benefit the public.

A few examples;
- Web shooter able to be next-gen fire extinguishers
- Insulated electrical suit (There is huge risk of something going wrong and getting electrocuted or blown up on the job)
- Next-gen highway construction with vehicles who can go up walls
- Next-gen first response vehicles who can maneuver around city structures easier to get to hospitals faster
- Web constructions like temporary office buildings or providing a skeletal structure quicker for buildings to complete construction in half the time.

Peter could've even finally monetized his secret identity what with Spider-man being the official body guard to Peter Parker with Peter finally capitalizing on his likeness.

It absolutely needs to come back because Spider-man has tons of room to grow. Even if it's not a global company a local company specializing in super-tech would be a fun way to go while keeping Peter down to Earth. And for god sake they should actually use the cast this time.

[Vortex85]

I’m not too keen on seeing it return. I found it boring but maybe another writer could make it more interesting. The whole CEO of a company just doesn’t feel right for Peters world. It’s more of an outlier story to me. I want to see Peter more down to earth than that.

Maybe a smaller, local, financially modest company could do but I really would like Peter do something different.