I keep going back to that moment where Peter as the Spider That Gobbles was about to kill Paul and he was all "you do what you gotta do" almost like he accepted that he was deserving of death for one reason or another.
I'm going to laugh if she ends up beating Francine again without the watch showing she really doesn't need powers .
I think it's more of an artistic assistant than a real fill-in otherwise they'd be listed as doing separate pages.Too bad this issue is only a one-shot yet it had to a have a fill in artist, looking at the names listed. Wonder why?
Looked at his Twitter - seems he did do pages?
https://x.com/ericgapstur/status/172...158239897?s=46
https://x.com/ericgapstur/status/172...951310820?s=46
Last edited by TinkerSpider; 01-14-2024 at 03:12 PM.
“I always figured if I were a superhero, there’s no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager."
— Stan Lee
They are 100% going to explicitly walk back the genocide assistance and have Paul have "helped" his father altruisticaly survived or some nonsense
This post implies they actually care about Paul. They don't. Paul is just a means to an ends. Paul's time is almost up.
They also keep lessening the description for MJ and Paul's relationship. Remember when they were "mysteriously married" and now he's just her "partner" (which, yes, can be used to denote a romantic relationship, but also it can not be that. It's certainly more ambiguous than Paul being "married" to her). Wouldn't shock me if they end up describing him as MJ's "trauma buddy whom she actually hates" in a future issue.
It's really strange. It has to be that they're adjusting to the extreme backlash because if they were walking back the relationship descriptors on purpose, surely there would have been something on-panel to draw attention to it, yeah? Coupled with the constant lack of even physical contact between them, I assume it's just as way to play it safe until the (hopefully) inevitable Paul exodus.
I think they wanted to keep the exact nature of their relationship ambiguous but that Wells always wanted to write Peter and MJ getting back together as the ending. It's very Spider-Man 2, and the people at Marvel all seem to love Spider-Man 2. It was even in Brevoort's Spider-Man manifesto.
But they really screwed up the execution of... well... everything...
Lowe wouldn't have slipped and said MJ and Paul were married - and he took responsibility for making that mistake - if their relationship was originally meant to be ambiguous. And we know that was an old BND idea, to have MJ show up for the first time after OMD married to someone else with kids. If they're going for Spider-Man 2, MJ and John were engaged, after all.
It seems obvious they decided to back off from establishing Paul and MJ are married, although they still haven't made it clear (whether afraid to or just can't be bothered, who knows) just what the state of the relationship is between Paul and MJ on the page, with recaps being the only real clues - but maybe this one-shot is finally more illuminating. I will say "partner" to me means committed romantic life parter in this context. But we have no idea how the Spider-office is using it, or if "partner" won't also be walked back.
Screwing up the execution nails this run.
That excuse didn't fly at Nuremburg...
And let's say Marvel believes that. But why, for the love of anything and everything that is holy, would you even saddle a character with helping to kill all life on a planet? Why even create that association?! And then have MJ compare it favorably to Peter's guilt over not stopping the burglar?!?! Which also implies Paul DID know what he was doing, as Peter knew full well he was letting the burglar go. It is such an inexplicable, incomprehensible story choice.
Last edited by TinkerSpider; 01-14-2024 at 05:59 PM.
“I always figured if I were a superhero, there’s no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager."
— Stan Lee
Maybe Paul can genocide 616. It's used up; let's just have a clean break.