Yah, paged through this one and I'm done.
Aunt May is apparently completely immune to magical healing and all other forms of being able to make someone better. Its a really amazing hill that Marvel seems intent to die on.
Last edited by Scott Taylor; 04-11-2019 at 10:18 AM.
Every day is a gift, not a given right.
I get the frustration; my stance in all of this is you either are going to directly address the elephant in the room or you're not. If it's going to be the latter, then writers are just wasting everyone's time in just **** teasing them.
This has been going on for the better part of 4 years now, the occasional sly reference or nod. At a certain point, there absolutely need to be payoff for all the references and callbacks or what was the point?
The artist formerly known as OrpheusTelos.
It can indeed be hard at times to hold an opposing viewpoint to an overwhelmingly popular point of view. As a fan of PeterxGwen (especially a Spider-Gwen variant) and PeterxFelicia, I feel your pain. Hang in their friend.
Edit - My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was in junior high school so this storyline hits very close to home for me. I freely admit I cannot be objective as I am deeply upset about what I fear will be a trivialization of a serious condition that devastates millions of lives annually.
Last edited by Celgress; 04-11-2019 at 07:35 PM.
"So you've come to the end now alive but dead inside."
To each their own... I don't think your opinion is wrong but I do think Bendis' Ultimate is easily among the best runs and I think it's the definitive portrayal of High School Pete (for me).
The consistency would be something I'd put in the plus column (for me), as would the completeness of it. It's a Spider-Man story that has a beginning and an end -- that alone is extraordinarily rare for Spidey, or any superhero -- I mean, aside from the Chris Nolan Batman trilogy, what creators even get that opportunity to tell the "full" story?
There are so many great creative choices -- and to be fair, a lot of it benefits from being a "second draft" of concepts or characters from the 616, but still -- having Norman Osborn and OsCorp be central antagonists from the beginning; Gwen Stacy living with Aunt May; Peter dating Kitty Pryde; and Mary Jane being Peter's best friend; the integration of Venom is great; I like Peter having a temper; I like the explanation for how he creates the web fluid... on and on.
Again, I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, just that I think that Bendis has become so ubiquitous that his name seems to elicit groans from fans and he seems to be almost underrated, in a weird way.
I'm sorry to hear that, man. My grandmother once had some form of cancer. It went into remission, but she had a whole myriad of illnesses that eventually did her in. It wasn't easy, and my father...seeing his face, and tears, it made me wish there was a way to save her. So, yeah, I agree that I don't want this story to trivialize real emotional pain. Will it? I can't say. But I'm still going to keep reading it.
Tom Taylor, in the letters pages of this issue, describes his own pains with his family and cancer, and it touched my heart. So knowing his own history, I trust that he knows what type of story he's telling.
My issues with this story, and title thus far, have much less to do with Aunt May's diagnosis and more with the pacing (painfully slow; there has been perhaps 3 issues of story told in the series' 5 issues thus far), the underwhelming Under Yorkers storyline and what I have found to be a fairly dull and listless palette thus far for what was promised to be a "street level and back to basics title". It was the same for the relaunched PP:SSM title; it was hyped as an alternative to the big wide screen action movie feel that was Slott's ASM at the time but ended up being consumed by a long time travel storyline and not much else (apart from the great Jonah reveal issue). This title seems destined for the same path----and sadly I expect the same fate for it based on it's anemic sales figures. I am puzzled as to why Marvel cannot simply produce a true "street level" Spidey title that just focuses on his more grounded foes and provides a bit more spotlight on Peter, much the same as the 1980's run of PP:SSM did. It seems that most everyone agrees that was a great title and provided the perfect counterbalance to ASM.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. I tend to agree with you on the whole (and certainly with Spidey titles the last few years) but Daredevil and Immortal Hulk (2 of my current favorite titles) have a more grounded approach even by the standards of their title characters. The 1980's run of Spidey titles still gets a lot of love on these boards and most polls you see online (even by readers too young to have read them as they were published) and it's little wonder: Marvel as a whole focused on "putting the character back in characters " back then. Avengers, X-Men, Spidey all focused on (relatively) smaller, character-driven story arcs and it paid off handsomely.
Times change and there is no going back but I do wonder if a similar approach for a Spidey satellite title might not produce better sales results/reviews than what they have been getting with FNSM and last year's PP:SSM.