How will the success of Ultimate Spider-Man (2024) impact the franchise?

[bat39]

Hickman's Peter acts his age.

The post BND ASM Peter - with the exception of Spencer's run - is depicted acting like he has Peter Pan syndrome and behaves even more immaturely than people a decade or so younger than him, which makes him a rather sad figure - and ironically, also makes him appear older than he's supposed to be (see the "how do you do, fellow kids" meme). I agree, Hickman's Peter feels younger.

I wonder if that's leftover from the original plan they apparently had for BND - a somewhat 'harder' reboot which would have seen the undoing of Gwen's death and literally all Spider-Man continuity since the 70's erased to make Peter a college kid again.

[Kevinroc]

I wonder if that's leftover from the original plan they apparently had for BND - a somewhat 'harder' reboot which would have seen the undoing of Gwen's death and literally all Spider-Man continuity since the 70's erased to make Peter a college kid again.

Peter has major "divorced guy" energy in BND and by extension the Wells run since it is basically BND 2.0.

It's a consequence of trying to make Peter seem "young" after a major break-up story.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

I wonder if that's leftover from the original plan they apparently had for BND - a somewhat 'harder' reboot which would have seen the undoing of Gwen's death and literally all Spider-Man continuity since the 70's erased to make Peter a college kid again.

I think that's just what you inevitably get when the writer is self-conscious about making him "young" and isn't allowed to make him grow.

Whether or not it was planned because of a reboot, I think you're bound to get that either way.

[Knightsilver]

I think that's just what you inevitably get when the writer is self-conscious about making him "young" and isn't allowed to make him grow.

Whether or not it was planned because of a reboot, I think you're bound to get that either way.

Yeah...the problem with a rigid and unchanging status quo...is that you eventually hit a wall in what you can do. As someone said when BND first started "why should we care who Peter dates...we know it's not going to go anywhere". And that sums up the entire "young single loser" direction of the past decade and a half. Nothing changes...so it gets boring.

[Frontier]

It's not whether Hickman's Peter feels young - he feels like a guy who got married and had children young and is beginning to have an early midlife crisis, which is indeed what he is meant to feel like. The question is whether despite all that he feels younger than post-Brand New Day Peter, and I rather think he does.

Hickman's Peter acts his age.

The post BND ASM Peter - with the exception of Spencer's run - is depicted acting like he has Peter Pan syndrome and behaves even more immaturely than people a decade or so younger than him, which makes him a rather sad figure - and ironically, also makes him appear older than he's supposed to be (see the "how do you do, fellow kids" meme). I agree, Hickman's Peter feels younger.

I mean, he's deliberately being written as an older Spider-Man and individual, and all that entails.

He's not a man-child but he also isn't like a young 20-something like Spencer wrote him or like he was during the Bronze age or early married years.

[wleakr]

Yeah...the problem with a rigid and unchanging status quo...is that you eventually hit a wall in what you can do. As someone said when BND first started "why should we care who Peter dates...we know it's not going to go anywhere". And that sums up the entire "young single loser" direction of the past decade and a half. Nothing changes...so it gets boring.

Ahhh...but what if it DID go somewhere???

WHAT IF....Peter meets an entirely new character, dates that character, they get serious about each other and they actually GET MARRIED???

It might result in a "little" outrage, but fandom wouldn't be bored!

[Frontier]

Ahhh...but what if it DID go somewhere???

WHAT IF....Peter meets an entirely new character, dates that character, they get serious about each other and they actually GET MARRIED???

It might result in a "little" outrage, but fandom wouldn't be bored!

Considering the handling of his love life recently, I doubt we'd ever get that far.

[Kevinroc]

Ahhh...but what if it DID go somewhere???

WHAT IF....Peter meets an entirely new character, dates that character, they get serious about each other and they actually GET MARRIED???

It might result in a "little" outrage, but fandom wouldn't be bored!

Have you seen the way Marvel Editorial treats a character created by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and John Romita Sr.? There is no reason to think along these lines ever.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Ahhh...but what if it DID go somewhere???

WHAT IF....Peter meets an entirely new character, dates that character, they get serious about each other and they actually GET MARRIED???

It might result in a "little" outrage, but fandom wouldn't be bored!

That would be better than it not going anywhere, yes.

But Editorial made it clear to us several times in the past 16 years that nothing will go anywhere. The most recent example of that is the Black Cat romance.

[TinkerSpider]

Ahhh...but what if it DID go somewhere???

WHAT IF....Peter meets an entirely new character, dates that character, they get serious about each other and they actually GET MARRIED???

It might result in a "little" outrage, but fandom wouldn't be bored!

Marvel editorial has been extremely clear in the past that they think the concept of marriage is the problem, and that’s somehow been extended to Peter having any sort of a stable relationship, at least so far.

Which is why we know your scenario will never happen and there is absolutely no tension or suspense because Peter is doomed to be a perpetual lovelorn manchild whose contemporaries have all grown up and had children (Normie is now, what? At least 10 if not older?) while Peter is figuratively carrying his skateboard and wearing his hat backwards and asking “how do you do fellow kids?”

Nick Spencer didn’t even get to finish his story. There’s an engagement ring somewhere out there, just spinning in the ether. Spencer tried to set it up for the next run before he left that Peter and MJ were now “unbreakable” but LOLOLOLOLOL.

I’m also going to point out that Peter’s relationship with MJ would be extremely hard to match much less replicate. MJ is a Ditko/Lee/Romita Sr. character. She has deep ties to Aunt May, Harry and Gwen; also Flash, Liz and Felicia. She’s an integral part of seminal, classic stories such as The Night Gwen Stacy Died and Kraven’s Last Hunt. She wasn’t even meant to be the primary love interest - that was Gwen - just a “dizzy dame” Stan threw into the story for fun (one can argue MJ might have been a different character under Ditko, but by the time she made her full appearance on screen she was the comedic foil, not The Girl - and MJ is the better for not being shoved in that box, which allowed her to be three dimensional instead of "perfect").

And MJ’s character took over on page - as her character is wont to do, pulling focus whenever she appears and even she is off the page, like this run where the only thing people really talk and speculate about is what are they doing to MJ. That kind of organic character development and growth over decades was lightning in a bottle and impossible to reproduce.

In a series of puzzling decisions made by Marvel, continuing to sideline a very popular female character - one of the most iconic civilian female characters in all of comics next to Lois Lane - and constantly destroying the relationship between her and Peter when the relationship drives reader interest and affinity - while MJ has a preponderance of fans in her own right - is truly mind boggling. Like New Coke mind boggling.

(Jackpot is even more headscratching, because Jackpot has little to nothing to do with MJ: she's dressed as a casino dealer but MJ doesn't gamble. When she said her iconic line she was making a joke about how lucky Peter was to meet her. She didn't even make the decision to be Jackpot out of her own agency, but had other people pressure her into doing it. And for one of the most independent, stands on her own female characters in comics they gave her powers created by a man who also controls her device from afar. That's not MJ, it's using her image for a third attempt at creating a corporate Jackpot trademark).

What USM gets right - so far - is respecting the core of 616 characters but putting them into a new scenario. One wishes the actual 616 comics would also respect the core of the 616 characters, but alas.

[Knightsilver]

Marvel editorial has been extremely clear in the past that they think the concept of marriage is the problem, and that’s somehow been extended to Peter having any sort of a stable relationship, at least so far.

Which is why we know your scenario will never happen and there is absolutely no tension or suspense because Peter is doomed to be a perpetual lovelorn manchild whose contemporaries have all grown up and had children (Normie is now, what? At least 10 if not older?) while Peter is figuratively carrying his skateboard and wearing his hat backwards and asking “how do you do fellow kids?”

Nick Spencer didn’t even get to finish his story. There’s an engagement ring somewhere out there, just spinning in the ether. Spencer tried to set it up for the next run before he left that Peter and MJ were now “unbreakable” but LOLOLOLOLOL.

I’m also going to point out that Peter’s relationship with MJ would be extremely hard to match much less replicate. MJ is a Ditko/Lee/Romita Sr. character. She has deep ties to Aunt May, Harry and Gwen; also Flash, Liz and Felicia. She’s an integral part of seminal, classic stories such as The Night Gwen Stacy Died and Kraven’s Last Hunt. She wasn’t even meant to be the primary love interest - that was Gwen - just a “dizzy dame” Stan threw into the story for fun (one can argue MJ might have been a different character under Ditko, but by the time she made her full appearance on screen she was the comedic foil, not The Girl - and MJ is the better for not being shoved in that box, which allowed her to be three dimensional instead of "perfect").

And MJ’s character took over on page - as her character is wont to do, pulling focus whenever she appears and even she is off the page, like this run where the only thing people really talk and speculate about is what are they doing to MJ. That kind of organic character development and growth over decades was lightning in a bottle and impossible to reproduce.

In a series of puzzling decisions made by Marvel, continuing to sideline a very popular female character - one of the most iconic civilian female characters in all of comics next to Lois Lane - and constantly destroying the relationship between her and Peter when the relationship drives reader interest and affinity - while MJ has a preponderance of fans in her own right - is truly mind boggling. Like New Coke mind boggling.

(Jackpot is even more headscratching, because Jackpot has little to nothing to do with MJ: she's dressed as a casino dealer but MJ doesn't gamble. When she said her iconic line she was making a joke about how lucky Peter was to meet her. She didn't want to be a hero but had other people tell her to do it. And for one of the most independent, stands on her own female characters in comics they gave her powers created by a man who also controls her device from afar. That's not MJ, it's using her image for a third attempt at creating a corporate Jackpot trademark).

What USM gets right - so far - is respecting the core of 616 characters but putting them into a new scenario. One wishes the actual 616 comics would also respect the core of the 616 characters, but alas.

Exactly. Whether Marvel likes it or not...Peter has aged...and he'll continue to age because everyone else in 616 is. Even characters that are canonically younger than him like Kitty Pryde and Jubilee...are now adults...and in Jubilee's case an adoptive mother. The only way around this for Marvel...would be to just dump Peter in a pocket dimension where he and all of his contemporaries are in back in high school for all eternity.

[Daibhidh]

She wasn’t even meant to be the primary love interest - that was Gwen - just a “dizzy dame” Stan threw into the story for fun (one can argue MJ might have been a different character under Ditko, but by the time she made her full appearance on screen she was the comedic foil, not The Girl - and MJ is the better for not being shoved in that box, which allowed her to be three dimensional instead of "perfect").

I am not sure her first full appearance is comedic foil - I think Lee and Romita hadn't quite decided what they wanted to do with her or even whether she or Gwen was going to be the primary love interest. What she is, on her first appearance, is an actual character who has actual interests and reactions to things and events independently of her relationship to the protagonist, and yet she clearly is romantically interested in Peter, or at least more than happy to flirt. (Even these days writers find it harder than they should to balance female characters as both romantically interested in the protagonist and having their own interests.) She gets fitted, or flanderised, into the comedic foil role later as Lee and Romita settle on Gwen as the love interest. (Gwen's personality also changed as that happened.)

Jackpot has little to nothing to do with MJ: she's dressed as a casino dealer but MJ doesn't gamble. When she said her iconic line she was making a joke about how lucky Peter was to meet her.

I think her iconic line was riffing off Peter's expression. Does Peter say, 'that's Mary Jane?' loud enough for her to hear?

I suspect that the genesis of the line was that Stan Lee originally wrote it for the narrator, and then decided that it didn't quite work from the narrator but did work from MJ. The narrator routinely addressed the readers as "Tigers" in that period of Spider-man. In other words, MJ has for one panel become the narrator of the comic.
(If MJ did gamble it would be poker, not slots. I want to see her at one of those Marvel heroes poker nights.)

[Frontier]

Looking at the effort they put into Peter's relationship with Felicia...I think that just about sums up the problems with writing Peter's romances recently.

I suspect that the genesis of the line was that Stan Lee originally wrote it for the narrator, and then decided that it didn't quite work from the narrator but did work from MJ. The narrator routinely addressed the readers as "Tigers" in that period of Spider-man. In other words, MJ has for one panel become the narrator of the comic.
(If MJ did gamble it would be poker, not slots. I want to see her at one of those Marvel heroes poker nights.)

She was at one of them. I think she attended one at Avengers Tower and she was at one of Ben Grimm's along with Black Cat (and called out Felicia for lying).

[Huntsman Spider]

Exactly. Whether Marvel likes it or not...Peter has aged...and he'll continue to age because everyone else in 616 is. Even characters that are canonically younger than him like Kitty Pryde and Jubilee...are now adults...and in Jubilee's case an adoptive mother. The only way around this for Marvel...would be to just dump Peter in a pocket dimension where he and all of his contemporaries are in back in high school for all eternity.

You mean like the classic Archie Comics?

[Knightsilver]

You mean like the classic Archie Comics?

Pretty much. Deep down...that seems to be what they actually want. Peter being an actual functioning adult is what OMD was meant eliminate.