Rereading Nick Spencer's Amazing Spider-Man

[Kevinroc]

Yeah, he was going to propose in Sinister War, and didn't do anything for the final pages where Doctor Strange is talking about true love.

With Zeb Wells breaking them up, there wasn't much reason not to do a proposal story.

On a side note, I keep having the feeling that the Wells/ Romita run kicked off immediately after Nick Spencer left, so I keep forgetting about Beyond.

Do you plan on doing a reread of Spider-Man Beyond before Dark Web?

[Iclifton]

Did this run retcon Gwen and Norman sleeping together or is that still a thing that happened?

[Kevinroc]

Did this run retcon Gwen and Norman sleeping together or is that still a thing that happened?

Yes. It retconned Sins Past. Gwen and Norman sleeping together was retconned to never have happened.

[Matt Rat]

The Norman/ Mephisto connection is a big misstep, elevating the significance of One More Day to the mythos. I get the rationale for something like that, to try to make a story that's despised more significant so that fans who bought it would be happy with the purchase. My view is that if a story is bad, we should try to make it less significant.

On what planet is OMD ever going to be considered insignificant? It's very much the reason the status quo you follow exists and wouldn't function properly without.

You know what would make OMD insignificant? Having Peter and MJ RE-MARRY.

[Mister Mets]

On what planet is OMD ever going to be considered insignificant? It's very much the reason the status quo you follow exists and wouldn't function properly without.

You know what would make OMD insignificant? Having Peter and MJ RE-MARRY.

I didn't say it's significant. I don't want it to be more significant.

Do you plan on doing a reread of Spider-Man Beyond before Dark Web?

I'm thinking about it. It might be useful now that Ben Reilly's got a big role in a big story and to see if Wells was seeding anything else.

Yes. It retconned Sins Past. Gwen and Norman sleeping together was retconned to never have happened.

Yup. They were part of Harry's scheme along with the robot parents.

Thinking a bit about how Harry was handled, it might be easiest to just reveal that someone was manipulating Norman with fake info, that BND Harry is the real deal and that he realized the goblin serum kept him alive when he wakes up in a morgue shortly after the events of Nick Spencer's last issue.

[Lukmendes]

Firstly, welcome back! I hope you had a good holiday.



I'm in the minority here but I disliked this issue.

It felt really forced. Also, why wouldn't MJ have tried this years ago.

As a way of getting Peter to voice what he's going through, to me this just showed an inability of the writer to naturally bring this out in Peter's internal voice in the issues themselves. He'd had 59 to this point. It's a complaint I had from the start of the run where Pete and Spidey completely split but we learn nothing about them from it. Peter's inner monologue is just reacting to/describing what's going on without giving a sense of how that's actually affecting him. It lacks depth.

So this came across as covering a weakness in the writing. Like Spencer needed Peter to be in a specific emotional place but hadn't taken the time to guide us there with him so was essentially doing an exposition dump.

It also highlighted that Bagley's art isn't what it used to be (though his staging is fantastic).

Honestly, MJ not doing this before is fine, not everyone has seemingly good ideas earlier when it would make sense earlier on.

As for the way Peter felt, I didn't find a problem with it since at random points of the run he felt like he's fucking up with his life, and him feeling like his life being so consumed by Spidey side makes sense since that is something that was happening for years, though it does suck nothing was done with that afterwards.

You raised good points, even if I did generally like those issues when they first came out. As for the livestreaming suit, I figured the Chameleon gave Norah Winters the resources to have it made for Spider-Man, given their secret alliance some issues back, though it was disappointing that aside from Spider-Man ultimately ditching the suit for his own reasons, he never did discover that connection between Norah and Chameleon.

I don't remember anything about Norah and Chameleon being connected.

Honestly though, that suit having a bunch of shit that a newspaper shouldn't be able to get so casually was bizarre lol.

Nick Spencer clearly built on OMD, but there's no hint from him or anyone at Marvel that he was going to do more.

My hunch is that he figures it'll be overturned at some point, and he thought it was helpful to set a lot of the groundwork for whoever undoes it, which would retroactively make his run more significant.

If he did it expecting it to be overturned 'cause Marvel is Marvel, then he really did a bad decision by making the run bank so heavily in Kindred and his connection with Mephisto at the fucking end lol.

I agree.

Spencer was working to re-instate the stuff he liked in the late-80's and early 90's that he feels was removed (or left in limbo) by OMD/BND, rather that outright overturning it.

I think we get caught up in our little echo chamber here, where overturning OMD seems to be some people's universal fix all solution,

I point out once in a while here that undoing OMD really doesn't mean anything will get fixed lol.

ASM's problem is crap writing in Simpsons style, meaning the characters go through weird events just to try this gimmick and whether or not that's in-character is irrelevant, OMD being undone can still keep this crap writing, same way as it remaining can also improve the writing, the important thing are the people involved and what they do.

whereas I imagine most regular readers of Spidey have likely moved on or started reading after it happened.

Comic books are a dying medium, I find it very hard to believe they got so many new readers post OMD that they're "most readers".

As for how many fans moved on, well, a lot of 'em definitely did, I even see people saying Bobbi had a fun relationship with Spidey (even though all she did was be a bitch most of the time), so yeah, there's something, and it's hard to measure how many like or dislike the way ASM is written, specially since quiet majority is definitely a thing.

Spencer probably thought older fans would just get a kick out of referencing it, while he was actually using Mephisto/Hell for a different purpose.

Referencing such a sore spot and doing nothing about OMD is very dumb lol.

Amazing Spider-Man Volume 5 #67-69/ The Chameleon Conspiracy:
There are a lot of plot threads here and retcons, but it does build pretty well on Spider-Man lore. A Silver Age villain seemingly killed off in his first appearance returns, and it's the guy who killed Peter's parents, so his connection to Teresa Parker works. It's frustrating to see Teresa unclear about whether she's really Peter's sister since the original story went back and forth on it, and I think she's a decent addition to the series, but it does fit the earlier material. The Finisher's now involved in a conspiracy involving the Chameleon, who faked the return of Peter's parents right before the Clone Saga, so all of that makes sense.

Ned's arc comes to a satisfying conclusion here as he gets a rematch with the Foreigner, the 80s villain seemingly responsible for his death. Teresa's arc is a bit less satisfying, since we don't get a definitive answer. There's a splash page reveal about what she's afraid to learn which may mislead some readers into thinking it's confirmed.
B

Honestly, while I see why Spencer did it, it's just dumb to make Teresa not be sure over whether or not she's Spidey's sister.

On DC side we have Donna Troy, she's a character whose story was an incomprehensible disaster because of how many retcons were made to her past, and as a character there isn't much to her, and the writers keep trying to define her by her past instead of actually developing her as a character.

This is something similar that is going on with Teresa, first she thinks she's Spidey's sister, then the same story makes it sound like it's dubious, then Zdarsky confirms she is Spidey's sister, now Spencer makes it sound like she's may not be his sister again.

Basically what this means is that Teresa can very well become a Donna, and you don't want that, and while Spencer at least has Teresa not wanting to know and seeing herself as Spidey's sister, she's still being defined by her past instead of actually developing.

It was very much a "choose your own canon" moment. Not entirely a bad decision, considering how polarizing Teresa's introduction into main continuity became.

She's not even that controversial, I see more apathy about her existence than anything, in that "She can exist, whatever" sense lol.

While I dislike OMD, I'm in the camp of wanting more Mephisto. If you're going to make his deal this notorious game-changer, then go all the way and make him very important to the mythos so OMD has more of a justifiable impact. It seems those who don't have a problem with OMD want it to never be anything more than a means to an end, to serve editorial's means of getting from here to there and then to ignore it...but a contingent of fans are always looking for a bigger, bolder story to splash their cash on, with raised stakes. Isn't it better to make OMD a more 'OK' read by giving it reason to exist beyond it's purpose?

By tying Mephisto to the Osborns, Spencer's era makes OMD just that, something you can read knowing there's even more to it, that Mephisto's intervention wasn't just a random notion, that it's been part of a long game he's been playing this whole time with Peter, a man destined to conceive the child that will defeat him. It makes you question also why Gwen was killed by Osborn...could it it have been her and Peter's child that could have stepped up to Mephisto?

So much rides on OMD to this day, and so much more can be made of Mephisto's involvement. That's what readers ought to demand of their comics and their stories. Something more.

The problem with doing that is how it undermines the Osborns into being little more than Mephisto's mooks.

It doesn't help that wanting OMD to have more significance by giving Mephisto better reasons does not fix OMD, Mephisto's motivations aren't the real problem, they never were, it's to the point that it's very rarely pointed out how much of a moron he was in that story.

It's also worth asking if a bad story like that really should be given bigger significance.

I think that some comic books are going to be bad, and it's generally a good idea to ignore those, so that newer readers have less reasons to pick up that stuff.

The main exceptions would be if someone has a good idea to build on something that wasn't that great initially. For example, the story introducing the Spider-Queen was critically trashed, but Slott found a use for her in Spider-Island, which was one of his most popular stories.

There's something a bit masochistic in intentionally referencing bad stories, to reward fans for putting up with it in the first place. That seems like an example of sunk costs fallacy to me, or an effort to punish Marvel and readers for telling a story that some people didn't like.

Seems to be a thing comics likes to do, we got Ben, Kaine and Jackal back despite how much Clone saga was detested, with Kaine and Jackal really not being liked lol.

[Lukmendes]

I wonder if he was planning to do anything with that.

Because there are a handful of dropped plots.

The King's Ransom arc ended with the return of the Rose, but we don't see him do anything.

Ned Leeds was working for someone when he was believed dead.

A similar cloaked figure is also shown burying the twins:



(ASM#73 vol 5).

And considering that AI Harry was controlling the corpses, he could only be burying them if he was controlling another batch of corpses, which could be the case, but it could also be that there's a third party involved, who may be connected with Ned.

It kind of amazes me how little Mysterio knowing Peter's identity has mattered.

He seems to know since the retcon about him being Ultimate Mysterio back in Spider-Men, back in 2012, so yeah, it's a lot of years of him knowing and it not mattering much.

Like fuck, he knows it for 12 years at this point...

I can partially see why, Mysterio isn't as vindictive as some of Spidey's villains, but it also shows how secret identities are redundant now lol.

Or that MJ willingly worked on a fraudulent movie with him and never told Peter until it was, like, way too late.

And it's also weird she didn't tell him, 'cause Spidey can at least try to understand helping a villain.

Though yeah, making a fradulent movie in someone else's name, that's bad, why the hell was MJ okay with that? Lol.

One day I hope we find out what Spencer had planned if he had stayed longer on the title, because there are so many dropped balls and I doubt it was just carelessness/laziness.

I would say that his own screw up is part of the reason the run went to shit, it's still worth pointing out this is the same guy who wrote Secret Empire, and some of the problems with his ASM run are shared with Secret Empire, to the point Kindred is another attempt at Kraken, as "villain with a secret identity for so long that the readers stop caring about it" lol.

Thinking a bit about how Harry was handled, it might be easiest to just reveal that someone was manipulating Norman with fake info, that BND Harry is the real deal and that he realized the goblin serum kept him alive when he wakes up in a morgue shortly after the events of Nick Spencer's last issue.

Honestly, checking out older comics has AI Harry's actions look flanderized in how much of a douche he is lol.

Like, back in DeMatteis' Spectacular#200 and previous issues, Harry basically hated Spidey because he saw Spidey as someone who only brings bad stuff, and Harry was lying to himself about Norman being something like a good person, and even the "LMD parents" retcon was at least an attempt at fucking up Spidey in particular, but revealing he made the Stacy and Sarah clones, and hired Mysterio to make the story more believable, he went from "Guy who thinks Spidey is a bad person who fucks up people around him" to "Guy who's actively tainting Gwen's past with a lie", it's, a pretty weird decision compared to how he was acting back then.

Not that I'm saying that LMD parents made sense, that shit was bad but in some ways it followed the logic he was using, this flanderized his traits even more.

Next retcon it'll be revealed that Harry went back in time to guarantee Spidey was born just to make sure he suffers, or somethin' like that lol.

Oh and, Harry knowing Norman would come back someday and planning for that is completely ridiculous, back then resurrections weren't as common in general, and with how long Norman was seemingly dead, Harry expecting how to come back around Spectacular#200? Ridiculous.

[Hulkout42]

The current run really makes me appreciate Nick's run more than ever.

[Mister Mets]

I wonder if he was planning to do anything with that.

Because there are a handful of dropped plots.

The King's Ransom arc ended with the return of the Rose, but we don't see him do anything.

Ned Leeds was working for someone when he was believed dead.



Mysterio alluded to having a bigger role to play during the events of Sinister War. Presumably his big role wasn't just to be one of many bad guys punched conscious in the final issue.



Mysterio does seem to know about One More Day and Mephisto's role in Spidey's life, which will be interesting for other writers to navigate.

Connecting the dots to my own post, given the link between Ned Leeds and the Rose in the aftermath of the original Hobgoblin saga, it seems likely that Nick Spencer had at least one more story in mind with the reborn Ned and Rose.

[exile001]

I missed that you were back on this! I'm going to re-read the finale before reading your thoughts.

Amazing Spider-Man Volume 5 #67-69/ The Chameleon Conspiracy:

There are a lot of plot threads here and retcons, but it does build pretty well on Spider-Man lore. A Silver Age villain seemingly killed off in his first appearance returns, and it's the guy who killed Peter's parents, so his connection to Teresa Parker works. It's frustrating to see Teresa unclear about whether she's really Peter's sister since the original story went back and forth on it, and I think she's a decent addition to the series, but it does fit the earlier material. The Finisher's now involved in a conspiracy involving the Chameleon, who faked the return of Peter's parents right before the Clone Saga, so all of that makes sense.

The idea of a larger organization of Chameleons worries me, since it's a potential retcon machine likely to be abused later. It does lead to some revelations about Kindred later in Nick Spencer's run, although that does kinda make sense given Harry Osborn's connection to the original parents story.

Ned's return makes up for the ignoble death of Clone Conspiracy Ned earlier in Nick Spencer's run. It's an interesting twist especially given what Peter expected to have happened (for clone Ned to have met and knocked up Betty.)

I do have to say I'm not a fan of the art-style of Marcelo Ferreira or Carlos Gomez. It just seems kind of ugly and fits a trend of obscure artists on what really should be Marvel's main title. Their Spider-Man is fine, but I don't really care for the depiction of ordinary people.

We have a payoff to the clairvoyant device storyline, which generally works. The inventor, a lab partner of Peter's, has a good arc trying to use it to make money, and getting involved with some villains from earlier in the run. And it does fit Teresa's quest to figure out who she is.

This story does have a lot of bad guys, which makes the upcoming Sinister War a little bit less special if Spider-Man consistently finds himself in battle royale situations. The Sinister War preludes with Doctor Octopus reassembling the Sinister Six are fine, especially with the return of the original Electro (even if it doesn't lead to much.) Ed Brisson is the cowriter on the giant-sized special, although I didn't notice a significant difference, which is an indication that he did his job.

Ned's arc comes to a satisfying conclusion here as he gets a rematch with the Foreigner, the 80s villain seemingly responsible for his death. Teresa's arc is a bit less satisfying, since we don't get a definitive answer. There's a splash page reveal about what she's afraid to learn which may mislead some readers into thinking it's confirmed.
B

I really enjoyed this. I love the whole question of identity thing (no clones but close enough) so a crazy over the top caper with twists and turns over identities and double identities and crosses and triple crosses was really fun for me.

Bringing back Peter's ESU experiment felt really disjoined at this point. It was such a non-event in the run that having this be the only payoff felt forced. That said, the machine and its nonsense power was great fun.

Ned being back certainly was a choice. I am 100% meh on it but honestly I don't see what is gained by his return.

As for Teresa, I'm glad it ended on such a vague note. Sometimes the best thing to do is keep everybody deflated than completely piss off half the audience.

For my part I am never going to be okay with "surprise relation!" storytelling. It is the hackiest of low rent soap opera crap and a competent editor would never have allowed it to become cannon (which it still isn't thanks to this arc).

Family Business is great because (to my mind) she is very obviously not Peter's sister. It is just a (monstrous) way to use and ultimately kill Peter, that gave the writers a way to deeply hurt him by cruelly taking from him, a man who has lost most of his family, without killing an established supporting character.