Amazing Spider-Man #32 Preview

[Daibhidh]

Example was MJ in the annual and Chasm in X-men dark

MJ will still be a mother who lost her two children and has spent four years due to time dilation without Peter in a post-apocalyptic dimension and who has had a career as a superhero. Unless future writers all agree to pretend that never happened that's a permanent alteration to her character.

[Mercwmouth12]

MJ will still be a mother who lost her two children and has spent four years due to time dilation without Peter in a post-apocalyptic dimension and who has had a career as a superhero. Unless future writers all agree to pretend that never happened that's a permanent alteration to her character.

Which can easily be she believes she that's what happened as it's been pointed out that if Rabin knew where they were this whole time then why wait that much time. That can easily be explained away in this run. Also it's something not to get stuck on as again it won't be something that sticks.

[Daibhidh]

Which can easily be she believes she that's what happened as it's been pointed out that if Rabin knew where they were this whole time then why wait that much time. That can easily be explained away in this run. Also it's something not to get stuck on as again it won't be something that sticks.

The four years in a post-apocalyptic dimension thing can be disposed of like that. The experience of parenting and the being a superhero are things that have been witnessed by other characters in Earth-616.

[Mercwmouth12]

The four years in a post-apocalyptic dimension thing can be disposed of like that. The experience of parenting and the being a superhero are things that have been witnessed by other characters in Earth-616.

3-4 of the things seen by other characters are hardly mentioned again or whatnot unless it's a plot driven thing later. The kids could be not mentioned at all or just in passing the rest of the run

[Spider-Tiger]

I mean Marvel also shrugs off a significant chunk of 90s canon including an entire pregnancy (which now supposedly happened out of wedlock) and a missing/possibly dead child of the actual main character.

Not saying that this is necessarily the best approach, but just saying, in practice, most of this stuff will probably just be ignored by the next guy. And that's okay to some degree. I think Spencer's run ultimately suffered from trying to address and fix too many things. I preferred the JMS approach after Mackie (where he rebuilds the relationship but functionally ignored the kidnapping/fake death story.)

Building a good story from a retcon of a story with an inherently bad premise (like Sins Past) is probably expecting too much. I'd prefer that the next run wasn't bogged down by the Wells stuff.

[Frontier]

spoilers:

Ten bucks says it's Peter, and that's how they get close/romantic. I swear I don't have a gambling habit, I just bet a lot of random money on random comic happenings. It's totally healthy and I can control it.

end of spoilers

That is EXACTLY what is going to happen. And it will be Peter, because even though spoilers:

Michelle and Peter have all the chemistry of wet toilet paper

end of spoilers that is the most obvious cliched thing to do, so of course that's what Wells will write.

spoilers:

At the risk of sounding anti-Jackpot I'd just find it funny if MJ goes out there during the Gang War and is so inexperienced at being a Superhero that she ends up getting arrested instead of succeeding at anything .

end of spoilers

[Venomsaurus]

spoilers:

At the risk of sounding anti-Jackpot I'd just find it funny if MJ goes out there during the Gang War and is so inexperienced at being a Superhero that she ends up getting arrested instead of succeeding at anything .

end of spoilers

That would honestly be pretty funny, not gonna lie, I'd get a good chuckle out of that.

[Garlador]

I mean Marvel also shrugs off a significant chunk of 90s canon including an entire pregnancy (which now supposedly happened out of wedlock) and a missing/possibly dead child of the actual main character.

Not saying that this is necessarily the best approach, but just saying, in practice, most of this stuff will probably just be ignored by the next guy.

Yeah, this.

When you think about it, it's crazy that decades later, we never got 100% confirmation that Mayday was alive or dead, and now we don't have 100% confirmation Mayday was even conceived in the first place (Quesada was on record saying the pregnancy didn't happen, but then you got stuff like Norman referencing "The Baby", and so much of the 90s comics don't work without the pregnancy...).

Marvel has a pretty frequent habit of just ignoring absolutely insane things in Spider-Man history, and if it gets too extreme and messy, well, Mephisto can always swoop in again...

[Nightcrawler92]

I… just can’t anymore. I’ve put up with a LOT of bullshit over the years with Spider-Man. But I just think this is terrible writing. For the first item since 685, I’m dropping the main title. See you next run folks.

[Xenon]

I'm legitimately impressed that he continues to put out bad issues. Like I thought it was just an MJ thing mostly but no this really is the worst run of all time. Mackie and Slott can rest easy.

No spoilers, but ASM#32 is decent. There’s a couple scenes in the buildup which I don’t care for, but the ending is really interesting and one I didn’t see coming or see anyone else speculate about (but should have been obvious). Wells continues to improve post-Dead Languages which was really the nadir of his run. The only thing that really annoys me is the letters page. It’s feedback for #26 which is universally loathed, and Lowe refuses to run even slightly critical letters about it.* It’s like he found the four people who actually liked it. Who is he fooling? But that all has nothing to do with the story itself, which is good and has me actually excited for the next issue (which is something I haven’t been able to say for this run since the first Tombstone arc in #2 or #3).

*-EDIT: I want to be fair. I reread my advance copy and there is one letter that is critical of #26 that I missed the first time.

I mean it's critical in that it doesn't think they gave Kamala enough screen time. Kinda weak.

And I called the Sins thing two months ago. It's in the August or September solicitation thread, lol.

spoilers:

It really wouldn't make any sense since Peter discovers she's Tombstone's lawyer. But a "Zeb Wells written Amazing Spider-Man story" and "making sense" do not belong together in a sentence.

end of spoilers

Amen to that.

How ironic that this is one of the few dates that Peter did not miss

Wow you found something else for me to be mad at lol.

I'm starting to find the Norman apologism and revisionism in the comic just plain offensive at this point. What's it trying to tell us? That we should forgive sadistic murderers as long as they have their sins sucked out of them with a magic gun? That abusers secretly care about their victims deep down so we should just be nice to them?

Has Norman even apologised for half the stuff he's done or acknowledged that by rights he should be in prison by this point? It's so frustrating. I hate it.

I thought they could do something interesting with Good Norman, at least for a time, but Wells clearly is not the guy to do it because it hasn't worked at all. Peter interacting with Norman should be this huge undertaking for him, a constant source of internal conflict and self-doubt. Especially in the situation he's in, isolated and without his emotional support. Instead there's just no drama. He blows up at Norman a few times and just gets over it.Norman killed both a love of his life and his baby, and ruined the life of his best friend. The conflict between his current state where he is innocent and his previous normal state should be a source of great internal conflict and drama. And instead it's just kind of nothing. It could have been this big focus of the run and this huge build up if he hadn't been so hell bent on breaking Peter and MJ up.

But the consequences of those sins can't be removed. Gwen's still dead.

If Norman really feels remorse for anything he did, why hasn't he turned himself in? Instead he's a billionaire businessman playing superhero in a gold costume while absolutely failing to meaningfully engage with most of his many, many victims.

I asssume Norman was pardoned for those crimes long ago and there's no current legal case but that not really satisfying, no.

I think the Gold Goblin mini touched on some of this more than the main series has.

I enjoyed Gold goblin but it really just makes it so Norman is literally haunted by his past deeds more than explain anything like that.

Honestly, people, your getting this all backwards. Right now, I couldn't care less about who is Peter dating. What worries me the most in the event in the final page, with Peter infected with the sins of the Green Goblin.


If Peter is now able to contain himself, this could be a similar case. Maybe the Green Goblin's sins will take over Peter while he's unconscious and will do the things Peter would never do, like possibly killing Paul? This would certainly be worse than anything "Superior Spider-Man" gave us.

Peter is probably going to kill Queen Goblin and maybe Kraven (it seems dumb to kill Kraven again already but Wells run means any idea is possible). QG is a clone and a villain so there should be no legal repurcussions. IT removes the place to put the Sins back into instead of Norman. It's a bad thing for Spider-Man to do to sour public opinion on him and make Peter feel bad. That and he will be a jerk to MJ who is trying to reconnect but will give up on it after Peter says nasty things to her under the Sins influence.

The thing is though, this has all been obvious for several months at this point. It's very predictable and not that interesting. The Michele thing is interesting in a "how bad can this series get?" kind of way.

I said in an earlier post that the ethical metaphysics of the set up would be interesting to explore and then I didn't explore it.

Let's start with the apparent set-up. Norman's sins are something separate from Norman as a person. They can be removed from him leaving Norman essentially intact but just without those particular malignant character traits.
...
I don't know if I've managed to make myself clear.

Because Spencer initially came up with it and I liked that run I think I was giving this concept too much of a pass before because when you lay it out like that it doesn't make any sense. Like, from an eternity perspective, aka where do we go when we die, or in this case where do Marvel citizens go when they die, the Sin Eater does exactly what the old superstition does, it forgives your sins and wipes them away (though in Christianity this shouldn't be necessary by virtue of the central tenets but people get things wrong let's just roll with it)., so when they die they would not be punished. But the reality is that it seems more like the "sins" he was taking was more like the person's capacity to do evil. Like Evil was a substance in a person and he just literally shot it out of them. I guess if I'm trying to make it work I would say that Evil is, under this theory, a self-reinforcing energy. So you do a small evil and that evil stick with you and encourages you to do more evil. So if all of your evil is removed, you still have the capacity to do evil,, but without your built up evil you are less likely to make that choice. To use another metaphor, every bad act makes the devil on your shoulder louder and stronger. There is SOME truth to this. Bad actions tend to cause us to feel bad which can then lead to more bad actions. But this seems much more direct.

Seriously, people, stop discussing Peter's love interest. Considering what is going to happen to him, I don't think his love's life will be at any importance here.

Remember how the Goblin formula affected Norman and Harry, they turned paranoid, so I don't think Peter will be open to a new relationship here.

Norman will have the sins back by the end of 36. Maybe end of 35. It's not an ongoing concern.

spoilers:

Ten bucks says it's Peter, and that's how they get close/romantic. I swear I don't have a gambling habit, I just bet a lot of random money on random comic happenings. It's totally healthy and I can control it.

end of spoilers

This is a bad enough idea that it may be true.

What's amazing is just how much the stories Wells writes are at odds with the stated aim of ending the marriage. The marriage was supposed to end so that Peter could have a status quo. Wells' writing on the other hand seems to be to loot and pillage the status quo for cheap thrills and leave it unuseable for the next writer. So Curt Connors, for example, was a man with a Jekyll and Hyde problem: he had a normal life on the one hand and an unfortunate tendency to turn into a villain on the other. But that meant that Lizard stories had to include the fact that the Lizard was the alter ego of a good and sympathetic character. (The Lizard's appearances in the original Secret Wars don't quite riff on that, but they do make it clear that the Lizard isn't simply a part of team villain and that being so many of them are actually funny.) Wells just ripped that up and threw it away for a quick shock, so that it can't ever be the status quo for Curt Connors again. It looks like he's trying to do the same to MJ. He's the asset stripper of Spider-man writing. And with the possible exception of Shed, he's not even selling the assets off at their full value. He's doing quite the reverse of handing on the status quo in as good a shape as he found it or better.

This, again, is why they absolutely retcon this MJ to just be a totem Paul created when the original wouldn't give up on Peter. WE've only seen the real MJ in 21, 22 and the very beginning of 25. Everything else has been the clone that Paul made. No messy kid trauma. No ooc weak love. No comparing Paul to Spider-Man. No four years in a post apocalypse. Just relatively innocent real MJ sleeping in a Stasis pod for this whole miserable run. I 100% give my consent for this idea to be stolen. PLEASE.

Because yeah. He took the MJ toy out and smashed it with a hammer. He dunked the Peter toy in a dung heap, and drew all over the Felicia toy for some reason. EVen the good Norman setup, if it had any potential, which I'm not really sure it did, has been completely wasted.

[Xenon]

Yeah, this.

When you think about it, it's crazy that decades later, we never got 100% confirmation that Mayday was alive or dead, and now we don't have 100% confirmation Mayday was even conceived in the first place (Quesada was on record saying the pregnancy didn't happen, but then you got stuff like Norman referencing "The Baby", and so much of the 90s comics don't work without the pregnancy...).

Marvel has a pretty frequent habit of just ignoring absolutely insane things in Spider-Man history, and if it gets too extreme and messy, well, Mephisto can always swoop in again...

Ignoring works better with some things than others. Character moments its pretty bad at. Time it's pretty good at, considering Peter has been in his mid-twenties for about 15 years now.

[Xenon]

I… just can’t anymore. I’ve put up with a LOT of bullshit over the years with Spider-Man. But I just think this is terrible writing. For the first item since 685, I’m dropping the main title. See you next run folks.

They really do make it hard,, it'd be funny if i didn't care so much lol.

[Ursalink]

Norman will have the sins back by the end of 36. Maybe end of 35. It's not an ongoing concern.

Check the solicits, pal.

#35 says "This sets up the next 24 issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN".

#37 says "GANG WAR: FIRST STRIKE! Rek-Rap returns! Spider-Man’s fun-house reflection might just be the thing to help the wall-crawler out of the darkness he can’t seem to shake. Well, Rek-Rap might help if he weren’t targeted by the scariest new Spidey-Villain in decades! GANG WAR IS COMING".

For me it's obvious this is going to last for quite sometime.

[Frontier]

Check the solicits, pal.

#35 says "This sets up the next 24 issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN".

#37 says "GANG WAR: FIRST STRIKE! Rek-Rap returns! Spider-Man’s fun-house reflection might just be the thing to help the wall-crawler out of the darkness he can’t seem to shake. Well, Rek-Rap might help if he weren’t targeted by the scariest new Spidey-Villain in decades! GANG WAR IS COMING".

For me it's obvious this is going to last for quite sometime.

Could be he's depressed over what happened to him.

[Mercwmouth12]

Could be he's depressed over what happened to him.

You lose your new dad/new uncle Ben you'd be sad too lmao