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  1. #76
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    Out of all the things Kindred could have pointed out about Peter's selfishness, I'm surprised he didn't point out Peter completely ditching him to be alone when he was recovering from drugs and then Peter acting like a total dick to him for another 10 issues or so after that.

    Not sure I'm feeling the story here as much as others here - I agree that the pacing is probably killing me and at this point the mystery is so dragged out for me that it will be *incredibly* hard for whatever the reveal is to mean very much.
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  2. #77
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    I think based on precedent I can already call the answer for you. =)
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  3. #78
    Astonishing Member your_name_here's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Snoop Dogg View Post
    these, along with the first issue, the gibbon, and the gog flashback, are the best stories in the run
    all one-shots
    hmmmmm
    Don’t remind me of The Gibbon my heart is not yet repaired.

  4. #79
    Astonishing Member your_name_here's Avatar
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    Digesting it all AGAIN...I think I’m going to have to wait for the next issue. I feel like there’s a knock on here with the solicits. The brutal fight etc...

  5. #80
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    Quote Originally Posted by WebSlingWonder View Post
    This current story has been going on since ASM #44. Let that sink in: Peter has been going back and forth between Sin-Eater and Kindred for over ten whole issues. That's a long time for a bi-weekly book. Take into account that these stories are also decompressed, so they could technically happen in fewer issues.
    That's fair. Spencer has devoted unusual level of time and made the Sin-Eater/Kindred Saga into a sprawling graphic novel, it's a bit like Hickman's Time Runs Out in that regard.

    I just wish the book was 18 issues a year instead of 24: that way, we could get more of these breather issues and focus purely on the characters as characters.
    That I agree with.

    One reason why the JMS run has so much value is that it was the last time you had a writer on Spider-Man do a run that didn't have a gratuitous event every year just to sell stuff. Since BND and Slott's run that has become the norm and expectation. Sometimes Spencer can deliver as with HUNTED, other times not at all, as with 2099. In the case of Sins' Rising, that was also a slow-burn story with twists and turns that was luckily redeemed by the fact that the conclusion and finale ASM#850 was an instant great issue that totally made up for everything that came before.

    For me, #850 is why I stick with Spencer.

  6. #81
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    That's fair. Spencer has devoted unusual level of time and made the Sin-Eater/Kindred Saga into a sprawling graphic novel, it's a bit like Hickman's Time Runs Out in that regard.



    That I agree with.

    One reason why the JMS run has so much value is that it was the last time you had a writer on Spider-Man do a run that didn't have a gratuitous event every year just to sell stuff. Since BND and Slott's run that has become the norm and expectation. Sometimes Spencer can deliver as with HUNTED, other times not at all, as with 2099. In the case of Sins' Rising, that was also a slow-burn story with twists and turns that was luckily redeemed by the fact that the conclusion and finale ASM#850 was an instant great issue that totally made up for everything that came before.

    For me, #850 is why I stick with Spencer.
    I agree with you on JMS. His first half up to issue #508 was full of just solid Spider-Man stories. The only events he had was issue #50 ("Doomed Affairs") and #500 ("Happy Birthday"), and even those were relatively low-key as far as content. His best feature was delivering stories that were character focused first before you got to the main event; like Peter and Ezekiel eating pizza and talking before Peter fights Morlun; Peter pranking a criminal before going to class; Peter and MJ getting their wires crossed at the airport before encountering Latverian terrorists; Peter being pranked by Julie the secretary from Hell before encountering literal Hell with Dormammu. You see what I mean?

    It was a pattern that worked to make the story feel fuller; I know it's different writing styles, but man...I really miss that style.

    That said, I loved #850 as well.

  7. #82
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jness View Post
    Out of all the things Kindred could have pointed out about Peter's selfishness, I'm surprised he didn't point out Peter completely ditching him to be alone when he was recovering from drugs and then Peter acting like a total dick to him for another 10 issues or so after that.
    Well not everyone agrees on that. Harry didn't pay rent in that time forcing Peter to handle that on his own, and then he blew up that apartment. So Peter was most d--ked against than d--king.

    The stuff about Peter not turning in Norman...that's never been pointed in 616 before, even if it's incredibly obvious and a sore thumb if you read it over. That's a new thing, and it's something Harry's absolutely right on.

  8. #83
    Astonishing Member your_name_here's Avatar
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    Yeah, this run really isn’t bad. Everything that’s happened hasn’t been bad, either.

  9. #84
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    I honestly enjoyed this, Spencer told us that Peter will be forced to face responsability of past mistakes, allowing Norman to go free to protect his identity is true, Peter could have handled that better, so it's exciting to find out more, Peter has a long list of mistakes and hopefully he faces them here, I get the feeling eventually they will point out how Peter denied his Aunt's final rest and that will cause him to accept he was selfish and he simply hurt the people he loved and himself, maybe Aunt May dies for good in this run, I just hope she gets to meet Ben Reilly, Kaine Parker, and finds out her relationship with Teresa before she finally leaves.

  10. #85
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    First, who were the children he mentioned part of the family? Did they retcon gwen's age or is she still 19?

  11. #86
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    Quote Originally Posted by ShadowSJG View Post
    First, who were the children he mentioned part of the family? Did they retcon gwen's age or is she still 19?
    Anya and Miles are the children. Gwen should still be 21 if I remember.

  12. #87
    Astonishing Member Vortex85's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pattern_Maker View Post
    Anya and Miles are the children. Gwen should still be 21 if I remember.
    How in the world is Gwen aging so fast?

  13. #88
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    I have to ask, when was the last time that happened? I don't mean that rudely, understand. Just genuinely got to ask.

    I really don't think it's possible to do universally liked and consensually loved Spider-Man stories anymore, certainly not in 616. When was the last time you had a title or story or run that did that?

    Before you had BND, then you had Slott...and was that really "solid Spider-Man stories" that everyone liked and had no complaints about? Fact is that nobody's perfect, and even a good writer can stumble and make mistakes. A new writer who comes to Spider-Man especially if they sign up for a long run, aren't likely to avoid the problems and issues that come with Spider-Man being 2 times a month and finding some way to work with OMD and so on and delivering event storylines every now and again.
    Warning: this turned out to be very long and a stream of consciousness about Spider-Man that I assume might be taken very harshly. =)

    TL-DR; Spider-Man as a comic character has been busted for a long time (at least 25 years), most modern popular Spider-Man media has succeeded by avoiding the trap the comics are in, and I think circumstances are such that we will not see the character "rescued" in comic books again. The situation with Spider-Man is very emblematic of the struggles the industry is dealing with too.

    Much longer note below:
    If we're being totally realistic about it - IMO, Spider-man as a hero archetype has been broken for years and years. Quesada mistakenly thought it was the marriage that was killing the character - that proved to be totally wrong, as Dan Slott famously proclaimed "single Spider-man" was going to outsell all the married stuff and had to walk that back after *readers* walked away from the book at the time. There isn't anything "new" to say with Spider-man for the most part, which is why you see current "in-canon" stories revisiting story beats that happened 15 years ago.

    I believe some of the other difficulties with Spider-Man is that he's essentially a product of his time, with me defining "his time" as from 1967 to roughly 1992 - 25 years. (I'll come back to this later). 1992/93 is around the time when you *first* saw Marvel attempt to "fix" Spider-Man by resetting his clock, so to speak (by introducing the Clone Saga and their eventual goal of sidelining Peter), so they clearly thought something was not going well either. There's a relatively continual period of growth and transition over the time between ASM #1 and ASM #350, with the 50 issues post-Venom being a little more formulaic / nothing ever changes here sort of deal). At this point onwards, there's attempts after attempts to "shake things up" in order to draw interest to the character (sorry if I don't have the order completely correct):
    * Clone Saga. Aunt May dies.
    * Ben is the real Spider-Man
    * Ben dies, Norman is back from the dead
    * Totem Spider-Man. Sins Past. Eek.
    * Spider-Man reveals his identity to the public (to be fair this was more an obvious cheat where everyone knew it would be reset, people just didn't understand the scope of it at the time)
    * they revert Peter to not being married (and imply he's now in his mid-late 20s)
    * they do the "Renew Your Vows" limited series but the writers find it so difficult to write a 9 year old that they age up May as soon as possible (to be fair, this *is* actually a well known problem in lots of fiction - not only does this age tend to be really annoying, but it's incredibly limiting in super hero fiction:
    a) at this point the hero comes across as grossly irresponsible if they're neglecting their child to go out and fight
    b) toddlers and small children tend to, well, be annoying on occasion and they're often a disruption to work around rather than a story element to work with)
    * period of relative stability with Slott's stories focusing far more on Peter's villains than Peter himself (Dr Octopus, Jackal, Lizard, Green Goblin). Kraven is brought back from the dead. Small status quo shift to the lab.
    * However, it's the same problem as with 325-350; the audience for the comic continues to get older and smaller, and Peter as a character remains relatively static. This is problematic. The hope was that undoing the marriage would lead to a *lot* of new fans picking up the book and so this would all be fresh and new and you can afford for Peter to revisit being a continual loser like he was in the first 75-200 issues of the book (which is what they were trying for). However, instead the audience is still getting older and smaller. The big arcs are:
    * revisiting a story from twenty five years ago (Kraven's Last Hunt)
    * revisiting a story from twenty years ago (Ben Reilly as Jackal),
    * removing Peter from the book entirely and focusing on a different character as the main one (Dr Octopus)

    Nothing's really working.

    This whole "he has a new costume" deal *of course* isn't meant to last. It's designed to get a bit more attention paid to Spencer's current direction, but *finally* coming back to my original point, I don't believe that will work in the long-term either. The character's relevancy tapered off as after 25 years of evolving an originally teenaged character, there was nowhere left for the character to go that wouldn't make writing him much harder: i.e. if he has a child, you *cannot* kill the child without killing the book or doing some sort of massive universe wide reset. As it was they did that terribly ugly storyline with the baby and then part of the One More Day thing (IIRC) was to imply/assure that MJ's pregnancy never happened. You can't age the child either because that moves Spider-man *WAY* out of his zone of "every day hero". You don't want him to have a child because of the reasons I wrote above.

    The problem I think isn't the marriage: it's that the hook of Spider-Man was always *the growth arc of the character*, and without being able to do the growth arc he's just another no-name hero. Right now without the calling back to 30 year old stories, you could switch the costume and character around and this could be any late 20s/early 30s hero. Note that every iteration of the character in other media post the 1990s "Spider-Man" cartoon has almost always focused on Peter being in his teens (or in the case of Spider-verse, making the main character young and making Peter an alternate universe aged-up guy). This allows you a growth arc over the course of several seasons of a TV show, or installments of a movie series.

    The comic can't do that anymore, and even if Marvel could reset it, there are other issues:

    a) for better or worse, when Stan Lee was originally writing Spider-Man he was *very* dialed into youth culture for a 40 year old man. He was constantly visiting colleges, high schools, etc. and you can tell from the letters pages that Spider-Man was directly speaking to that audience. Spider-Man hasn't spoken to a teen audience for at least 30 years. Look at Waid trying to write Champions to see how embarrassing it is when a writer is completely out of touch with the demo they're trying to speak to.
    b) the entire comic book setup of how Peter's life as a teenager works makes no sense in light of the technology of today - I believe this is another contributing reason as to why his origin was skipped in the modern MCU. The whole inciting event for Peter doesn't work; reality TV, modern internet and the North American emphasis on celebrity means as a teenager in the States, Peter is far more likely to go to Youtube and show off his scientific skills or become a public celebrity, not a private one. But if you don't talk about the origin (which they notably did not in the Spiderman MCU movies), you don't have to address all of the anachronisms that show up as a result of the origin.

    c) The internet has led to a higher level of awareness for writers about the slow death of the mainstream comic industry. If you don't believe me, just look at the front page of this site, which at the time I'm reading it has *one* article about comics in the first 2-3 screens of scroll, that being a clickbaity "Did Batman Adventures just turn Robin into a KILLER?!!". The other articles are 50/50 split between comic book movies and all other forms of entertainment (this isn't the only site that can't live on comics news alone, a quick look at two or three other prominent ones will show you the same thing). This isn't an industry that is growing - people are paid terribly for the most part, many creators holding down a second job. Most talented writers who *can* speak to young people are doing it through their own graphic novels which isn't any worse of a gamble that creating something for a Marvel or DC that you don't own, and losing control over a story you're making. There's lots here to unpack but this is already long and veering way off-topic. =)

    More thoughts but I've typed enough, time for me to go breathe. =)
    Last edited by Jness; 12-30-2020 at 01:55 PM.
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  14. #89
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vortex85 View Post
    issue 56, Peter leaves the cemetary
    issue 57, Peter takes MJ to the hospital
    issue 58, Peter walks home and goes to bed

    LOL
    If anything like that happens, I'm blaming you :P.

    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Letting Norman go after ASM#40 was understandable but not after the Drug Trilogy and major relapse.
    And it wasn't just Drug Trilogy that he came back, there's also Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine#2, and ASM did reference that once or twice, so Drug Trilogy was at least the second time Norman got his memory back and became Green Goblin, so Peter letting Norman go again was one of the most irresponsible things he ever did, 'cause if Norman got his memory back twice, what would stop it from happening a third time? And that third time is what got Gwen killed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    I actually wonder if this kind of thing is down to marketing/editorial more than Spencer. Spencer's run has always had arcs with a clear stopping point. I wonder if this padding was a result of pandemic delays, reshuffling and so on.
    Well, ASM#53's solicits said that there would be "the most brutal Spider-Man ever", and in the issue itself, Peter and Harry barely touch each other, so it looked like another lie, but then ASM#54 Kindred kills Spidey over and over and over again, so it either that fight was originally planned for ASM#53, or they made some dumb mistake, but the possibility that the fight would originally happen in ASM#53 is still out there, and maybe ASM#56 would be the actual epilogue for Last Remains...


    Quote Originally Posted by Wall-Crawler View Post
    Also, it's pretty silly complaining about the pacing, I get it, it's frustrating having to wait so long to get answers, but that's due to the format of comic books, their releases of once or twice a month, because the actual pacing of the story has been phenomenal, once we get to read this in trade it will be 100x better, and it is already great as it is.
    Nothing silly about complaining about bad pacing, specially considering Sins Rising was just a prologue for Last Remains, and that one had far better pacing.

    Quote Originally Posted by TheCape View Post
    I didn't expect Harry to call out Peter for letting Norman go twice, but is actually the only legitimate point he made and did like MJ talk with Harry.
    It was actually 3 times, but Harry/Spencer forgot about the one from Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine#2 lol.

    Quote Originally Posted by WebSlingWonder View Post
    One thing that is constructive I hope Mr. Spencer does is give us a single-issue breather more often. So far, we've only had two: "Arrivals/Destinations" from issue #29 and "Time and Time Again" from #37. The latter was even more interesting with the Clairvoyant, which Pete hasn't used since then (how did he not use it to figure out Sin-Eater and Kindred's plan? How did he not use it to figure out most of the book going forward?).
    Jamie has the Clairvoyant again, and he's using it for stuff like Chance's cassino, so maybe that is why Peter isn't using, but Spencer could explain that, say he tried but couldn't find Jamie lol.

    Quote Originally Posted by Pattern_Maker View Post
    Anya and Miles are the children. Gwen should still be 21 if I remember.
    Quote Originally Posted by Vortex85 View Post
    How in the world is Gwen aging so fast?
    She's probably either 18 or 19, though paradoxically, she's called a teenager in those pages that say the basic story of the characters, so maybe she's included in the "children" part lol.

    Anyways:



    The fucking issue starts and ends with blank pages, I hate those so it already started by annoying me.

    This issue also leaves questions like:

    How did Harry even get these powers?

    Norman apparently learned how to counter Harry's magic back in AC's tie-in, even though what he used there is completely different from Sin Eater's power steal, so how the **** did Norman learn how to counter that? Specially since he's a science guy going against someone who uses magic? Are we getting a bad explanation like the whole "Red Goblin is magically immune to fire and sonics" nonsense from GDS again?

    Does MJ know about OMD?

    Are we ever getting an explanation about what's going on between Kindred and BND Harry? Are we getting Byrne's "Sandman was lying to the reader about being good" bullshit again?

    Should I even care about finding out those answers when Spencer so far is giving us bad pacing stories with maybe the hint that we'll get answers only to raise more questions?

    Last one is the only one I'm very close to answering, and it's likely going to be "no".

    The only things that save this issue from being just bad are character moments that Norman and MJ had, and Harry making a good point about Peter (That him keeping a secret that Norman is Green Goblin was a bad idea), for once, outside of that, just raising more questions and not being that interesting...

    This will definitely read better on trade, but even then, I doubt it'd improve much, since all it'd do is make the bad pacing less noticeable (And it's still noticeable), which will make this issue look less disappointing, so it's only somewhat mitigating some of the bad points, but still looks like something is going to happen, then not much happens... So yeah.

    Oh and good thing Ben, Kaine and Miguel weren't part of this, they were spared, the other Spiders weren't so lucky.

    Except Julia, she actually looked good in ASM#54.LR with her gambit to defeat Sin Eater... Thinking of it, with what Julia did, and MJ calling out Norman, redheads were looking good there .
    Last edited by Lukmendes; 12-30-2020 at 02:00 PM.

  15. #90
    Astonishing Member Vortex85's Avatar
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    One positive:

    Despite having 2 blank page I think we got several pages for free. This was an oversized issue by 4 pages or so I believe and it was regular priced.

    One negative:

    In hindsight, this arc was a midway arc and did not need .LRs. There should have been no more than 6 issues max to tell the story told here. You could have easily had a page or two to show what was happening in .LRs. Too over indulgent for a story that did not progress things enough to warrant it. I do believe over indulgent is the right word here.

    One extra note: Despite being annoyed I loved every issue of this arc. Especially issue 55. What an epic.
    Last edited by Vortex85; 12-30-2020 at 02:07 PM.

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