She's supposed to be at Empire State University - so why on Earth wasn't she involved with the first couple of issues of ASM Beyond, when Peter and Ben were attacked on campus? It's like they forgot she was supposed to be on Earth-616. That preview page for Gwen-Verse shows her using her dimensional amulet without issue, even though last time she used it, it dragged Em Jay from Earth-65 instead of sending Gwen back there as she intended.
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You know what they should've done? Immediately follow up the King in Black tie-in with an Outlawed one - the Outlawed Champions run takes place either side of KIB (I assume KIB happened during issue 5, as Miles's solo book had a tie-in involving Kamala, so that can't be set between Outlawed #1 and Champions #1 because of Kamala's coma). Gwen was affected by Kamala's Law but it only got a passing mention in her book.
I wouldn't be surprised if COVID did put an end to their plans. 616 Gwen's book never resumed either.
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Miles goes to 616 - Joins the Avengers, gets his own teen Superhero team, gets involved in major Marvel events, etc.
Gwen goes to 616 - Goes to college and deals with a creepy old dude obsessed with a version of her she has nothing to do with.
Miles had a bit of an advantage in that his move to 616 happened right after the world rebooted. At the time there was a pretty sizable section of younger heroes also rising up so connecting them together was fairly easy. Miles move to 616 was also permanent.
Gwen's arrival as a mainstay was in the middle of the world's progress. Gwen had a sort of 1 foot in and 1 foot out thing going on. Her move was billed as permanent (until banishment by the Storms anyway) and it'd probably be difficult to bring her over wholesale because her earth-65 cast is full of duplicates. When a Miles came over all of the dupes that he knew got culled like Jessica, Ultimate Gwen, Cloak and Dagger, Kate Bishop etc. But he still had enough unique elements that could be translated to 616. With Gwen it's basically just her, her father, and Bodega bandit. There would probably need to be a serious effort to build a cast if she really wanted to stay.
I think with Miles it helped that they struck while the iron was hot with him and built up on the Ultimate Universe momentum even while that universe ended.
With Gwen basically her momentum kind of stopped with the conclusion of her original run which pretty much ended her story satisfactorily and then they had to pivot away from that to make her a more conventional Spider-Hero they could use and promote, which made it feel kind of artificial and just didn't seem to hold up as well.
I agree it also probably didn't help that Gwen's cast was more reliant on AU versions of main 616 characters than Miles did, which makes it harder to integrate her wholly into 616. Especially when her universe still exists. Her character is arguably more reliant on her universe than Miles was with the Ultimate Universe.
And I guess at the end of the day it helped that Miles just sells better.
Ultimate Jessica wasn't really a dupe. She has Jessica Drew's civilian name, Natasha Romanoff's codename, and a combination of Ben Reilly and Laura Kinney's origins, so she's a composite character. She just needed to change her surname (the first name is fine, there's already two big name Jessicas, Drew and Jones, and it's no different to Gwen Stacy and Gwen Poole). I think Bendis wanted to bring her over, but editorial said no due to the existence of Spider-Gwen, Silk, and 616 Jessica Drew.
Last edited by Digifiend; 02-08-2022 at 06:51 PM.
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