Let's Do the Time-Warp Again!

Wow. I've already read this week's issue of Amazing Spider-Man.

Wow.

Coming to me apparently via the US Postal Service's temporal delivery service, I have this Wednesday's issue of Amazing Spider-Man.

Now I realize there's no street date on comics. I mean the script for this issue was probably finished at least three weeks ago, possibly even further back. And it's not like Marvel's going to fine themselves $10,000 for shipping me the book early. I'll just have to remember to check the mail more often. Truth be told, this actually arrived yesterday. I'm just so conditioned to think of New Comics and Wednesday as the same concept that getting a book on Monday or Tuesday... that's just crazy-talk!

I've actually subscribed to four additional books through Marvel, at a special price of $19.97. (Sadly, the offer was limited to four titles.) So Daredevil, Captain America, The Invincible Iron Man and X-Factor will be coming to me factory direct from the House of Ideas. It's good to know that even as I begin to move towards online purchases for my new comics, I'll still get a few books near their ship dates.

Marvel Comics... Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

It's weird... over the course of one day, I had two experiences that carried me to two very different thoughts about Marvel as a whole.

First, let's start with the positive. I got my first issue of Amazing Spider-Man direct from Marvel. It arrived day and date with the 'newsstand' release. I received it in the mail on the day I would have purchased it in the store. That's extremely cool. With the alternatives I'm exploring regards to getting my comic fix cheaper, it's great to know that this option is letting me purchase Amazing Spider-Man three times a week for less than half the cover price. My purchase price for the issue was roughly $1.39 and I can't complain about that.

What I can complain about is Secret Invasion. I love the concept of the event, and in some ways the execution has been pretty cool... but I can't for the life of me figure out why I'm paying an extra dollar for it. It's not a longer title... it's not bereft of advertising. Why is it more expensive than any of the other 32-page monthlies out there? Can anybody answer me that? Aside from that complaint, there's also the usual gripe that it's Bendis doing what Bendis does. The entire second issue could be summed up by saying "we think that Mockingbird from the ship isn't a skrull." Maybe I need to re-read it, but I think that's all that actually happened in SI #2.

But I think that the positive outweighs the negatives. And on top of that, Marvel's offering me further discounted titles for being a subscriber. I guess that'll make up for an extra dollar a month.

Brand New Spidey-Post

As the fallout hits on message boards across the country and the internet breaks in half, I have to say it for myself.

Brand New Day isn't that bad.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to be. Despite what some of the more radical/paranoid bloggers might be saying, I doubt that Joe Quesada is trying to ruin Spider-Man. I think I've gone on the record stating that I can see where he's coming from in regards to some of the changes. (Or at least the removal of Spider-Man's marriage.) So the story itself wasn't bad. The $3.99 price tag was a little unpleasant, but a quick check of Previews for the coming week indicates that next week the book drops back in line with a regular title.

And at the end of the day, I think I'm willing to pay $2.99, thrice a week to the Spidey braintrust. After due consideration, Spider-Man's spider-senses have helped him to avoid the cancellation list. Now let's see some of these great stories you couldn't tell us because Spider-Man was married.

Brand New StatusQuo

I'm going to try to make this my last post regarding the One More Day/Brand New Day stuff. (Well, alright, I'll post if I decide to drop it, or if they keep the price at a ridiculous $3.99, which will cause me to drop it.)

Deep down, I guess I wish Joe Quesada would just come out and say "Alright, you got us. We're rebooting Spider-Man to what we feel was a more exciting time in his life, to help get the character back to the iconic vision of what he's about." Now, I liked Spider-Man where he was. He'd matured and grown both as a hero and a person. The issue in which he and May talk about why he's Spider-Man (Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 2 #479) was the single issue that truly sold me on comics as a medium. So if they feel that it's best for the character to reboot him, I can understand that... and while it may change the things that I like about him, I'll probably give it a look.

But for Joe Quesada to to say that the way he's doing this protects decades of continuity makes me angry. In reality, he's taking years worth of Spider-Man stories and flushing them, or at least instilling a great deal of doubt as to whether or not they ever happened. What about Spider-Man: The Other - Evolve or Die? Did that happen? Do the other Avengers remember that Spider-Man was an Avenger? Is he still part of the New Avengers? If they do remember, do they remember that his Aunt lived with him in Stark Tower? How is May's house back? The only answer to these questions that makes any sense is that these things never happened. Because if they did, any Avenger with any degree of curiousity could figure out who Spider-Man was based on the old lady he brought with him to Stark's Tower.

I can cope with the fact that Spider-Man as I came to enjoy the character is gone. I can probably even like the new status quo. But either own up to the reboot, or stop talking about it. It's the statement that this doesn't invalidate everything I've read that makes me go on and on about this.

One More "One More Day" Post

As a child, my Mom would frequently tell me "Stop picking at it, Jason. You're only making it worse."

You can probably guess about how well I took that advice.

It seems as though there's nothing else in comics that deserves discussion as much as One More Day so I'm going to back up the car here, and run over it again. Well, figuratively speaking.

Weeks after JMS' now legendary blog post in which he reveals that he asked to have his name removed from the final two issues of One More Day, Comic Book Resources interviewed Joe Quesada about the story now that it's complete. In the second segment of the interview, he begins to address JMS' comments. To summaraize, he goes on to say that Straczynski didn't object to the idea of writing a retcon story to undo Spider-Man's marriage to Mary Jane, which anyone who's been following comic book news for a few years should know is a bee that's seriously up Joe Quesada's bonnet. He implies that this was also the planned way to undo Peter's unmasking on live TV.

Continuing here in part three of the interview, Quesada says that when it came down to the fourth and final issue of the story, JMS turned in a script that wasn't what Quesada, and the writers on Brand New Day, the Spider-Man relaunch were expecting. It didn't jive with where those guys were starting their stories from. Straczynski fought for his vision of the story, but with three teams already at work on new material, everything had to end a certain way. JMS agreed to try to give them what they needed, but in the end he gave Quesada, Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort permission to change what they needed to in order to make the story fit the way they wanted.

The crux of the story differences, according to Quesada, is that JMS wanted Mephisto to make one small change in an early Spider-Man story, that would ripple forward in time resulting in a new continuity with the needed changes. By contrast, the current story contains all the subtlety of the worst-comic-trend-of-2006, Superboy-Prime beating on the walls of reality. Basically, Mephisto snaps his fingers, and Peter wakes up in Aunt May's house (which burned down almost three years ago around issue #516 or so). He goes to a party, and runs into Harry Osborne, who's looking quite well for someone who's supposed to be dead. Nobody knows that he's Spider-Man anymore.

According to Joe Quesada, the "Mephisto casts a spell" explanation is designed to preserve years of Spider-Man continuity. In Quesada's own words:

This, in my mind, while it neatly puts the pieces back in some way, was not what we wanted to do. First, it discounted every issue of “Amazing” since that story arc. Second, the series of events that it discounts in the Marvel U are too far-reaching to contemplate. And third, it had severe ramifications for the creators already well underway on “Brand New Day,” the thrice-monthly “Amazing Spider-Man.” In other words, there was just no way to tell Joe’s story without blowing up the entire Marvel U and every Spider-Man’s fan’s collection. What we originally discussed with Joe and the group was much simpler and cleaner: The wedding? Something happened on the wedding day that prevented it from happening. The unsmasking? Mephisto makes people forget it; much like the Sentry, it happened -- it’s just no longer remembered. And Harry? Well, there’s always a price to pay when you make a deal with the devil. Is it a perfect solution? Absolutely not. Does it get us to where we want to be? Yes.

...

So, to get this straight, OMD doesn’t actually negate the previous 20 years of Spider-Man stories?

Exactly, that’s precisely what we wanted to avoid. What didn’t occur was the marriage. Peter and MJ were together, they loved each other -- they just didn’t pull the trigger on the wedding day. All the books count, all the stories count -- except in the minds of the people within the Marvel U, Peter and MJ were a couple, not a married couple. To me, that’s a much fairer thing to do to those of us who have been reading Spider-Man for all these years. Like I said, is it perfect? No. As far as we investigated, short of divorcing Peter, nothing really is.

So, according to Joe, the past twenty years of Spider-Man continuity is left untouched except for the fact that Peter and MJ weren't married. And from a big-picture vantage point... that might look like a good solution. But in an e-mail to Newsarama, JMS responds to Quesada's comments in the interview. In it, he states that while he thinks that Joe Quesada pretty accurately represented their exchanges, he felt that his reasons for disagreeing with the changes were omitted. For the sake of folks who've already read it, he points out that simply undoing everything with magic is sloppy, and leaves a ton of loose ends. Does Aunt May have a scar from where she was shot? If everybody just forgot that Peter was Spider-Man, is there still news footage of the unmasking? Was Harry brought back from the dead, or has he been alive all this time? If you ask him what he did last summer, will he have an answer? That sort of thing.

While it's hard to call this story a firestorm, since JMS and Joe Quesada are going to such lengths to keep things civil, it's pretty clearly a huge story. But I think that it highlights something very specific about Marvel's outlook. It seems to me that Marvel is very much about what happens next, while "what's gone before" takes a distant back seat to it. And it makes sense. Marvel doesn't make anywhere near as much money on their history as they do on what they're doing right now, or preparing to do next month. It's a bigger priority for them to have "Brand New Day" come out, then to tie up everything neatly. Big events are quickly forgotten and swept under the rug to make room for the next big events. The Other was supposed to redefine Spider-Man and his powers. Only Peter David's Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man addressed the story at all.

In general, I consider myself more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan right now, but things like this in their editorial culture bother me. How can a story really have resonance, or really connect with readers for more than a month and a half when the company is racing at a breakneck pace into the next event?

While I liked Peter being married to MJ, it's not the idea of undoing the Marriage that has my brain doing backflips over the story... it's the sloppiness of it. The average comic book reader is far too sophisticated for "It's magic... we don't have to explain it" to fly as an explanation. But that's what we're being asked to swallow. At this point, Dan Slott is just about the only thing keeping me interested in Spider-Man. I'll give Brand New Day a look... but I won't guarantee I'll stick around.

The "One More Day" Post

Well, all four issues of the retcon Spider-Man story "One More Day" have arrived. (Or as I prefer to think of it, they've been dropped from a great height onto an unsuspecting populace.) But why take my word for it? Let's go straight to the source. Taken from his website, in his own words, this is what J. Michael Straczynski has to say about the story.

In the current storyline, there's a lot that I don't agree with, and I made this very clear to everybody within shouting distance at Marvel, especially Joe. I'll be honest: there was a point where I made the decision, and told Joe, that I was going to take my name off the last two issues of the OMD arc. Eventually Joe talked me out of that decision because at the end of the day, I don't want to sabotage Joe or Marvel, and I have a lot of respect for both of those. As an executive producer as well as a writer, I've sometimes had to insist that my writers make changes that they did not want to make, often loudly so. They were sure I was wrong. Mostly I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. But whoever sits in the editor's chair, or the executive producer's chair, wears the pointy hat of authority, and as Dave Sim once noted, you can't argue with a pointy hat.

So at the end of the day, all one can do is try to do the best one can with the notes one is given, and try to execute them in a professional way...because who knows, the other guy may be right. The only thing I*can* tell you, with absolute certainty, is that what Joe does with Spidey and all the rest of the Marvel characters, he does out of a genuine love of the character. He's not looking to sabotage anything, he's not looking to piss off the fans, he genuinely believes in the rightness of his views not out of a sense of "I'm the boss" but because he loves these characters and the Marvel universe.

And right or wrong, you have to respect that.

It's a big quote, but I wanted to take the utmost care not to take any of his words out of context. For any who want, you can find the full text of this quote here. So from the context of the quote, it seems pretty clear that this story was an editorial mandate, and Straczynski was pretty set against it.

When your writer doesn't like a story, I'd generally call that a problem. And when he wants to have his name taken off of it? Well, that just really speaks for itself, doesn't it?

I think that this is possibly one of the worst comic stories I've ever read. Seriously, this is just bad on a level that's difficult to comprehend. For those that know me... I think The Dark Knight Strikes Again is light years beyond OMD. For starters, the only real conflict is internal, which is something that's difficult to carry out to begin with. But come on... the second half of the story was completely predictable. And was there anyone who didn't figure that they'd bundle in a retcon for Peter's unmasking along with his separation from MJ?

Here's the thing... I've got no problems with separating Peter and MJ. I'm not a blind fanatic that Spider-Man has to be married. I'll even go so far as to agree that a married super-hero's stories are limited in an important way. I don't think we had to undo the public knowledge of Peter's existence of Spider-Man yet... I still think there were probably some neat stories to tell there, but hey... not my call. I can live with both of those changes, but if you're going to write a story explicitly to retcon a few facts about a character's continuity... and if you're going to make a big 'event' out of it... at least try to do it artfully. Try to do it with some skill, and intelligence. One More Day was like trying to crack an eggshell by hitting it with a bus. The results are painfully direct and incredibly sloppy. Not to mention just plain bad.

Spider-Man 3

Thanks to a little scheduling assistance at work, I made it out to see Spider-Man 3 at a midnight showing late last night, or early this morning, all depending on how you look at it.

On the whole, let me say that I think it was very well done. I don't think it quite topples Spider-Man 2 for the best of the franchise (and possibly best super-hero movie I've seen) but it gives it a good, respectable try, and somehow avoids a whole host of pitfalls associated with super-hero movie franchises that run for more than two pictures.

So if you're asking me if I recommend it... I do. Wholeheartedly. But it's not perfect.

First, there are the detail oriented things that just bug me. Why isn't Venom talking in the plural? My impression of the character was that because of the failure to bond with Peter, he never properly bonded with Brock, leading to the use of plural pronouns when referring to himself. And while I like using Topher Grace as Eddie Brock to show commonalities between him and Peter... Venom's usually drawn as being big. Like, body-builder big. Something just doesn't look right, specifically about his head. Maybe that's just me, but I think it's because of the basic body-form.

But those are just little details, and conceptually I think there are some bigger issues that handicap this movie more than the others. I understand why Sam Raimi made the choices he made... and I can't say that I disagree with him, but they do stop him from just swinging for the fences.

There was a three-movie deal for the Spider-Man franchise before anybody could re-negotiate. As long as the studio wanted to make this movie, the prices were all locked in, and the actors and staff were guaranteed work. So if or when there's a Spider-Man 4, there's no telling who the director will be. Sam Raimi would, rightly, ask for more money for any future pictures. He's taken Spider-Man to the top of the comic-book movie pile. Heck, it was the dual successes of Spider-Man and the first two X-Men movies directed by Bryan Singer that restored credibility to comic-book movies.

But the fact of the matter is, Columbia Studios, owned by Sony, may tell Raimi to get lost if he asks for more money. And a change in director is the kiss of death for the comic book movie franchise. The first spate of Batman movies died when they were handed over to Joel Schumacher, Public Enemy #1. The Superman franchise took a severe hit when Richard Lester. And Brett Ratner's X-Men 3 puts him just one step behind Schumacher in my book.

So since this is quite possibly Sam Raimi's last Spider-Man movie, I can understand him wanting to cram everything into it that he can. So we get a resolution to the whole Peter/Harry/MJ thing, we get Gwen Stacy, the black suit, Sandman, Venom... there's enough material in here for three movies. And Spider-Man 3 loses it's focus.

Like I said... I understand why the movie is the way it is. I don't like it any less... it's a ride, and there's no denying that. But I would've liked to have seen all this over two or three movies.