Is Spider-Man supposed to be an unbroken story?

[clonegeek]

If we want to get technical, Spider-man isn’t supposed to be anything. This is a fictional character handled by multiple creative teams and operated by multiple editors. Many of whom disagreed as to the creative direction of the series. Spider-man will continue to outlive any one vision or editorial direction for the character.

Ultimately, Spider-man did age and grow in a story that unfolded with subplots that were developed over decades. This, I think, has been part of the appeal of the comics for some. Because a medium this long can do and tell far more with its characters than most other mediums.

After a certain point, editorial decided that this progression was a mistake in that they had lost some of the more "classic" elements of the character. Too many characters had died, too many subplots had been resolved, etc. that the series no longer resembled what it used to be. And so they altered the creative direction of the franchise so that it would reflect a better representation of what they think it should have been from day one: a series in which the status quo basically resets itself at the beginning of each run. This is what the series has mostly been for the last 15 years.

However, I think we’re starting to move away from that creative direction to some degree. They went to great lengths to revive Harry and Kraven with OMD/BND, but they have recently put both characters back in the grave. And the story of Jameson discovering Peter’s identity is likely not something that would have been approved several years ago because it requires some retcon to go back to the original status quo. I think the only thing holding back marriage at this point (aside from the ongoing tensions with fans) is that this editorial still seems to want the option to use other love interests in the main book.



If I'm not mistaken, shows like Succession had a single showrunner or head writer for the course of the series to move the series in a consistent direction. Spider-man has seen numerous editors or "showrunners" including two that thought that marriage was a viable direction for the franchise.

The ironic thing is though they moved away from the classic elements of Spider-Man. Him selling pictures to the Daily Bugle is gone.

[WebLurker]

Think it all depends on the writer and whether they want to continue what came before or go their own way (all with the Powers That Be's permission, of course).

[Alex_Of_X]

If we want to get technical, Spider-man isn’t supposed to be anything. This is a fictional character handled by multiple creative teams and operated by multiple editors. Many of whom disagreed as to the creative direction of the series. Spider-man will continue to outlive any one vision or editorial direction for the character.

Ultimately, Spider-man did age and grow in a story that unfolded with subplots that were developed over decades. This, I think, has been part of the appeal of the comics for some. Because a medium this long can do and tell far more with its characters than most other mediums.

After a certain point, editorial decided that this progression was a mistake in that they had lost some of the more "classic" elements of the character. Too many characters had died, too many subplots had been resolved, etc. that the series no longer resembled what it used to be. And so they altered the creative direction of the franchise so that it would reflect a better representation of what they think it should have been from day one: a series in which the status quo basically resets itself at the beginning of each run. This is what the series has mostly been for the last 15 years.

However, I think we’re starting to move away from that creative direction to some degree. They went to great lengths to revive Harry and Kraven with OMD/BND, but they have recently put both characters back in the grave. And the story of Jameson discovering Peter’s identity is likely not something that would have been approved several years ago because it requires a retcon to go back to the original status quo. I think the only thing holding back marriage at this point (aside from the ongoing tensions with fans) is that this editorial still seems to want the option to use other love interests in the main book.

completely agree with the bolded part! I think you have it right on the money.

On the jameson front, I think him remaining aware of Peter being spidey is a case of a writer not coming along whose vision required he be turned back. I do think editorial would "burn" jameson if they thought they had a banger of a story on the other end of it.

[Spider-Tiger]

completely agree with the bolded part! I think you have it right on the money.

On the jameson front, I think him remaining aware of Peter being spidey is a case of a writer not coming along whose vision required he be turned back. I do think editorial would "burn" jameson if they thought they had a banger of a story on the other end of it.

That's certainly possible. Although I'm skeptical that they'd retcon the retcon of the retcon with Harry anytime soon lol

[Lee]

It's never been one story. There's never been a time in the series' history where a typical reader could be reasonably expected to have read every issue.

When Amazing Spider-Man #1 hit store shelves, it wasn't a given that the average reader would have read Amazing Fantasy #15, released half a year prior. And if you jumped in with #7 then good luck finding the first 6. Marvel would eventually do reprints, like the pocket books and Marvel Tales, but if you missed out on the brief window they were available then you were out of luck again. And Marvel lost the masters for ASM #29, so that one wasn't reprinted until the 1980s. Distribution was so spotty that you could easily miss out on current issues too. It took many years for the back issue market to take form, and then you were limited by what was available in your area and what you could afford, with key issues becoming increasingly expensive.

I don't think Marvel Unlimited yet has every issue of every Spider-Man comic ever published in its catalogue, and even if it did we're now at a point where it would be incredibly unreasonable to expect an average reader to read every single issue of every Spider-Man ongoing series, mini-series, one-shot, and crossover. If someone were to want to do that they'd have to put in a lot of research beforehand just to figure out an ideal reading order and to ensure they didn't miss anything.

And if someone were to do that, what they'd end up reading wouldn't be one coherent story. It would keep on shifting narratively, tonally and aesthetically from run to run, era to era, and even story to story once multiple titles are involved. You can't reasonably look at a Ditko/Lee issue of Amazing Spider-Man and a JMS/Deodato issue of Amazing Spider-Man and say that they're two chapters of the same novel. They're just not.

One criticism I've heard of the current Spider-Man comics is that the series was one big story until One More Day.

Do you agree with this take? Do you think Spider-Man is supposed to be an unbroken story?

And are there other "breaks" in the narrative?

I remember when forums were absolutely livid when the ongoing Spider-Man titles referred to events from Spider-Man: Chapter One that contradicted the 1960s comics.

[Mister Mets]

It's never been one story. There's never been a time in the series' history where a typical reader could be reasonably expected to have read every issue.

When Amazing Spider-Man #1 hit store shelves, it wasn't a given that the average reader would have read Amazing Fantasy #15, released half a year prior. And if you jumped in with #7 then good luck finding the first 6. Marvel would eventually do reprints, like the pocket books and Marvel Tales, but if you missed out on the brief window they were available then you were out of luck again. And Marvel lost the masters for ASM #29, so that one wasn't reprinted until the 1980s. Distribution was so spotty that you could easily miss out on current issues too. It took many years for the back issue market to take form, and then you were limited by what was available in your area and what you could afford, with key issues becoming increasingly expensive.

I don't think Marvel Unlimited yet has every issue of every Spider-Man comic ever published in its catalogue, and even if it did we're now at a point where it would be incredibly unreasonable to expect an average reader to read every single issue of every Spider-Man ongoing series, mini-series, one-shot, and crossover. If someone were to want to do that they'd have to put in a lot of research beforehand just to figure out an ideal reading order and to ensure they didn't miss anything.

And if someone were to do that, what they'd end up reading wouldn't be one coherent story. It would keep on shifting narratively, tonally and aesthetically from run to run, era to era, and even story to story once multiple titles are involved. You can't reasonably look at a Ditko/Lee issue of Amazing Spider-Man and a JMS/Deodato issue of Amazing Spider-Man and say that they're two chapters of the same novel. They're just not.



I remember when forums were absolutely livid when the ongoing Spider-Man titles referred to events from Spider-Man: Chapter One that contradicted the 1960s comics.

I forgot about Chapter One as an example that obviously contradicts the unbroken story thing.

You could probably make an argument that you don't need every issue to count for it to be an unbroken story, that some stuff counts more than others just as a TV show may have filler episodes or weird tie-ins.

[NathanS]

I think its one of those things were the less you have read the easier it is to view that the whole thing prior to when you got on had been this great unbroken single story. Because all you have is the highlights of previous eras, so all the dropped plots, changing in casts that last a single creative team, changing tones and how yes major era will have next to no stories that "move things forward" and are just a bunch of fun "Spider-man fights this one bad guy well soap opera stuff happens in the background" gets forgotten well you can how it all fits together in theory, without confronting what it actually was in practice.

[Spider-Tiger]

To add to Mets' initial post and counter argument: The problem is, if you argue in favor of the Spider-man comics being a broken story in the OMD context, then it sort of nullifies a forever anti-marriage mandate. If part of the purpose of "no marriage" is to keep future storytelling possibilities open, then in a broken story, being married today shouldn't affect what happens in the next run or the run after and vice versa. The same with any character deaths.

If you're arguing it is a quasi-unbroken story with an illusion of change, then for some readers OMD very much breaks that illusion. Hence, their arguments that removing the marriage "broke" the ongoing story. (Or an illusion of an ongoing story.) This is one of those scenarios where neither broken, unbroken, nor some mixture of both works in favor of keeping marriage forever off the table. It's very much a matter of personal preference with regards to the current status quo and how that status quo has affected the reader's experience with past and present material.

I also agree that there's some nuance between expecting readers to know every story and having a passing familiarity with the major milestones and story beats of canon (as seems to be the present case.) It's not an all or nothing type scenario.

[godisawesome]

Yeah, I’ll be honest - I’ve always labeled some stuff as “skippable”. It’s just that I noticed that post-OMD, if it was anything involving Peter himself or his family, than it was automatically skippable compared to anything involving his villains; Harry being engaged to a cheating She-Goblin, Rhino going legit for five minutes, the Kravinoff family drama, Superior Spider-Man, all that was stuff that actually had relevance or could become potential new milestones. But anything involving his personal life outside of reconciling with MJ was automatically doomed - as in hindsight, was anything resembling reconciling with MJ as long as editorial preferred trash and trolling to doing the most obvious milestone thing you could do with Peter or MJ now.

[Celgress]

Until OMD 616 Spidey very much at least felt like a long-form episodic story. When I began collecting Spidey comics as a kid in the 1990s, I fondly recall how events from older issues/older stories were frequently and lovingly referenced in almost every current issue of Amazing, Web, Spectacular, etc. *sigh* Those were the days.

[Lee]

I think its one of those things were the less you have read the easier it is to view that the whole thing prior to when you got on had been this great unbroken single story. Because all you have is the highlights of previous eras, so all the dropped plots, changing in casts that last a single creative team, changing tones and how yes major era will have next to no stories that "move things forward" and are just a bunch of fun "Spider-man fights this one bad guy well soap opera stuff happens in the background" gets forgotten well you can how it all fits together in theory, without confronting what it actually was in practice.

Agreed. It only works when observed from a distance, up close it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. More and more so as the years go on. It's like the pre Daniel Craig James Bond movies, technically they're all in one continuity and films would make reference to previous films, but they don't function as one big cohesive story. The consistency isn't there. It's different people with different sensibilities telling different stories in different decades. Were Sean Connery and Timothy Dalton playing the same guy? Ostensibly yes, but it's largely an illusion.

Could anyone read a 2020s Fantastic Four comic, immediately followed by a 1960s Fantastic Four comic and say "Yep, this is what Sue was like when she was ten years younger, in the 2010s"?

[Daibhidh]

Agreed. It only works when observed from a distance, up close it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. More and more so as the years go on.

If I understand you correctly, in other contexts you're firmly against the idea that Marvel should reboot Earth-616, and here you're arguing that Marvel should be taken to be effectively rebooting continuity with every run. Perhaps you could explain the apparent contradiction?

The thing is Marvel does want to have it both ways. It wants to present itself as a single unbroken continuity with no reboots. The Marvel website regularly features 'History of So-and-so in the comics'. It only very rarely explicitly retcons something that is felt to be out of date. (The main example that I can think of Byrne's backstory for Reed and Sue according to which Reed and Sue fell in love while Sue was underage, which Fraction retconned so they met while Sue was an adult.)
As I said earlier it's clearly not a single cohesive story in the sense that Ditko plotted out Peter's life story when he started writing, and all subsequent writers worked to that plan. And it's not a single cohesive story in the sense that every episode is supposed to contribute to the whole. On the other hand, there was a general sense that there were no reboots: this was someone's life, and while you could ignore inconsequential stuff that other writers did, in the same way that most days in people's lives are fairly forgettable, you couldn't just rewind the consequential stuff.

That said, I think the story of someone's life era was already over before OMD. Most people date the end of the era to the end of the Clone Saga (the 90s one), the changes of mind about who was and wasn't a clone, and the return of Norman Osborn and Aunt May.

[Lee]

If I understand you correctly, in other contexts you're firmly against the idea that Marvel should reboot Earth-616, and here you're arguing that Marvel should be taken to be effectively rebooting continuity with every run. Perhaps you could explain the apparent contradiction?

I don't understand what you're confused by. No incoming Spider-Man writer thinks they're writing Chapter 3054 of a work in progress novel. They're just writing new Spider-Man stories.

You have a Doctor Who avatar, that show's continuity operates similarly to Marvel Comics. It's ostensibly all one continuity dating back to 1963, but that's largely an illusion. Doctor Who doesn't work as a single cohesive story.

[Daibhidh]

I don't understand what you're confused by. No incoming Spider-Man writer thinks they're writing Chapter 3054 of a work in progress novel. They're just writing new Spider-Man stories.

The point is that elsewhere you argue strongly against Marvel rebooting its main continuity; if you think that every run is effectively a reboot I don't see what your objection is to making that explicit.

If the next writer wants to tell the story of how Peter and MJ get married, and the writer after that wants to tell a story of a Peter who had never been married, and a third writer wants to tell the story of Peter and Gwen married with two small children, what is your objection? (Leaving aside your personal subjective preference for one of those status quos.)
That is maybe an exaggerated position.
But since you mention Doctor Who, Doctor Who, the classic series would never have plot points that depended on previous stories, or for that matter, care conspicuously about whether those plot points contradicted previous stories. Once Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, was written out she was never referred to again. The Doctor's origin was later retconned entirely so that he stole the TARDIS. Marvel makes a general pretence of caring about consistency in the past. Would you be happy with a version of Peter's story in which no writer may ever refer to Uncle Ben or Gwen Stacy, or in which his origin is retconned so that there never was an Uncle Ben?

[Lee]

The point is that elsewhere you argue strongly against Marvel rebooting its main continuity; if you think that every run is effectively a reboot I don't see what your objection is to making that explicit.
If the next writer wants to tell the story of how Peter and MJ get married, and the writer after that wants to tell a story of a Peter who had never been married, and a third writer wants to tell the story of Peter and Gwen married with two small children, what is your objection? (Leaving aside your personal subjective preference for one of those status quos.)

I'm not strongly against Marvel rebooting its main continuity, I just think there are a lot of drawbacks to it and difficult problems that would need to be solved.

Marvel has a shared universe. Rebooting one title but not another causes problems for crossovers and guest appearances. Explicitly ending the current continuity creates a definitive jumping off point. Readers may become less inclined to check out the back catalogue. Marvel would have to consider how frequently a series can be rebooted before it becomes a case of diminishing returns, and what the backup plan is if a reboot simply doesn't catch on.

It would be easier to reboot Doctor Who. And that would be a bad idea too.