Amazing Spider-Man #634

[flint_marko]

This is from Amazing Spider-Man #634 by Joe Kelly and Michael Lark.



The Kraven guy is Alyosha Kravinoff, one of Sergei Kravinoff's sons.





A strange, wolf-like creature emerges from Vladimir Kravinoff's grave.

Comments

[hybrid2]

woah....

[geooco.blogspot.com]

Nice art. Can we get a roll call? I recognize Electro, Diablo, Madame Web and Mattie Franklin. What I don't know is which of the replacement Kravens Alyosha is (is he the kinda good/funny one gone dark? Or is he yet another son we didn't know about?) , who the other two women are, and who's the wo'fman?

[flint_marko]

Yes, Aloysha is the guy from the Ron Zimmerman mini, though Zimmerman is the only guy who really wrote him like that.

http://www.spiderfan.org/characters/kraven_alyosha.html

The black-haired woman is Sasha Kravinoff, Kraven's wife. The blond-haired girl is Ana Kravinoff, Kraven's daughter. Both are fairly new characters who were introduced recently.
http://www.comicvine.com/sasha-kravinoff/29-63807/
http://www.comicvine.com/ana-kravinoff/29-61343/

The wolf guy is Vladimir Kravinoff, aka the Grim Hunter. Another one of Kraven's sons. He made a couple of appearances in the 90s before being killed by Kaine.

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/grimhu.htm

[angelophile]

Oh... fuck this shit.

[taggerung301]

pretty much my reaction
:/

sigh . .. and I liked her character too

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Killing off Mattie for a were-wolf? Not exactly seeing a great trade-off there.

[long_silence]

They're killing her off because they're thinning down on Spider characters. I've heard rumor that at the end of this apparently there's only going to be Peter, Jessica, Madame Web, Arana and Kaine.

Poor Julia Carpenter.

[silverzeo]

So all this weird stuff leads to reviving a werewolf? Speaking of Mystic stuff, what ever happen to that toher SPider-Guy back when they added in the whole magic spider thing to Spidey.

[darkknightjrk]

I interpreted it as them reviving one of the Kravenoffs resurrected as a beast. They want to resurrect Kraven, but in order to do that, they have to kill Peter, so they're starting a herd of "hunters" to out-number him.

[protogarrett]

I dunno anything about this particular Spider Woman/GIrl (there's like five of them). Dramatic. No dobut. However, if she were an important character I assume I would have seen her in one of the billion crossover stories by now.

[hatman]

It's Mattie Franklin. She was introduced in the godawful Gathering of Five storyline, which was supposed to have re-killed the recently resurrected Norman Osborn, but that aspect has since been simply ignored.

Short version of Gathering of Five is that there's this mystic object which grants cosmic gifts to the five people who assemble the pieces. Five gifts, five people, random distribution. Of course, no one got what they wanted or expected. Norman ended up with Insanity (cosmic level incurable drooling moron who completely lost touch with reality Insanity), Madame Web was given Life, two guys we never heard from again were given Death (which turned out to be a horrible living death) and Knowledge, and a little street urchin named Mattie Franklin was given ultimate cosmic Power.

Mattie, inspired by Spider-Man, went on to become Spider-Woman. There was a whole storyline involving power stealing and every Spider-Woman ever, and Mattie ended up with the combined powers of all the Spider-Women in addition to her ultimate cosmic Power from the Gathering.

Somewhere in there, for a while, overwhelmed by the power she had (and unable to deal with the corresponding responsibility), she became a burned-out homeless drug addict. But she got better and became Spider-Woman.

And then no one heard anything about her for a few years. A cameo appearance here or there, maybe. According to Wiki, there was also something involving her being sedated by a boyfriend who was using her to make MGH. And then everyone forgot about her again for a decade or so.

And now... Despite her overwhelming power level, the mysterious spider-hunters have captured her, beaten her, and killed her. Only to confirm that the process doesn't work because she's the wrong spider. I... don't know.

[yvonmukluk.livejournal.com]

Look kids! Comics!

[midnightvoyager]

Wow. I... goddamnit, I keep thinking I couldn't care less about Spider-anything, but they keep proving me wrong.

This is not a good feat, guys.

(PS: Why the fuck does Spider-man himself's blood- god, thinking about it makes it worse.)

[tahngarth.livejournal.com]

And somewhere, John Byrne fires up the internet.

Mattie was his big creation for Marvel in the last 20 years, his new Kitty Pryde. And now she's kaput.

While I hated the character, I also find myself sighing at the juvenile "grim and gritty" thing going on in comics. Yet another attempt to bleed some more sold copies out of the seminal "Kraven's last hunt". The Lizard eating his own son was worse though.

Thanks for helping me in my decision not to buy any Spider-Man titles.

[halloweenjack]

See, that's the thing. I really didn't care about the character--Byrne's gambit at doing the Spider-Lady thing always seemed confused and weird, what with the legs-sprouting-out-her-back nonsense--but this whole thing that the Big Two keep doing over and over again, fridging characters (especially female characters) just because they're sort of superfluous, just reeks of creepy snuff porn.

[zechs80]

Let's be honest here. Has Mattie done anything worth wild other than the Loners? She debuted during the lonesome Mackie/Bryne run. Had an ongoing done by Bryne that wasn't up to par either. She had numerous upgrades and costumes.

Truth is.. I'm surprised it took Marvel this long to do away with her. Though to bring back the Grim Hunter for her? Can't we've had just brought in Gregor instead?

[halloweenjack]

Yeah, fuck this shit.

[janegray]

At least her death wasn't sexualized.

...It's pretty damn sad that I've grown used to such low standards.

[stig]

So apparently Jonah didn't have enough excuses to hate Spider-Man this month. That's...that's terrific, Joe. That's really special.

[skalja]

He's appeared several times since Mattie was abducted and hasn't shown any concern that, you know, his twenty-old-niece is missing. His twenty-year-old niece who as a teenager ran away from home to be with her drug addict boyfriend who then abused her, hooked her on drugs, and drilled a hole in her spine to harvest her spinal fluid.

You'd think an experience like that would make any parental figure somewhat paranoid about the whereabouts of their charge, but apparently not?

[spockfran.livejournal.com]

Screw this
and here I was hoping Mattie was not important enough for them to ruin like this.
I loved the Loners and I was hoping Marvel would at least kill the new new spider girl who has been running around but poor Mattie just couldn't escape.

[skalja]

I don't see how that would be any better. One, Araña is great! Two, I don't think we should have to make a choice between the white Spider girl getting killed off and the Hispanic Spider girl getting killed off; how about neither?

[mullon]

Adding my count to the "While I never cared about Mattie, I'm not impressed with Marvel killing her for a cheap plotline" pile.

[icon_uk]

Plus one...

[dorksidefiker]

Why do I click on posts of Spider-Man? I KNOW it's never gonna be anything I'll like... though in this case it's really more of a "I just don't care" than "HAAAAAAAATE!" Mattie never really did anything for me.

[starwolf_oakley]

Didn't Bendis make Mattie look a little pathetic in ALIAS? I didn't really like what I read of ALIAS (even though I liked POWERS) so maybe I'm wrong.

[kirke_novak]

angelophile tweeted there's something vomit-inducing in this issue of Spider-man. He was wrong. I'd say it's more deadly bloody diarrhea level of WTF?!ness

Hate to be the lone dissenter, but...

[nefrekeptah]

I really liked this. Mattie Franklen was a one-shot character that few remember and nobody really liked. She could have easily been killed off in, like, a panel with little fanfare, just to progress the story.

But she wasn't; her death is portrayed as a really big deal; the climax of the whole story, in fact; and she faces her own death with her head held high, without even shedding a tear. She's being treated with more respect here then she has been for decades.

Now don't get me wrong, I get how everyone's getting tired of minor characters getting killed off to advance the story. But if you're insist on doing it, this is how you should do it.

Re: Hate to be the lone dissenter, but...

[skalja]

I have to disagree. This isn't the climax of the story -- this is the end of part one of four; it might not even be the end of the first act. Mattie, a female character, just got killed to up the dramatic stakes for a more popular male character; that's the exact definition of a Woman in Refrigerator killing. She's playing the same role here as the first character to get killed in a horror film, and she matters just as much to the story. That the story is well-executed on a technical level doesn't really change that.

The writers could have killed anyone, really, but using a preexisting character adds momentary shock value. You can bet that we will see zero to no attention to the effect Mattie's death has on her friends; we might not even see the reaction of her uncle, even though he's one of ASM's most important supporting cast -- J. Jonah Jameson. Given that he's appeared multiple times since she was first abducted and we haven't seen him worry once that, you know, his 20-year-old niece has vanished, it's likely that the writers don't even remember their connection. (I would be very happy if they did, but I'm not holding my breath.)

While Mattie's part of the story in ALIAS and the Loners wasn't as heroic as her noble death here, I would say both stories -- yes, even ALIAS -- were more respectful of her as a character than Grim Hunt. Her personality, her powers, and her relationships with other characters were all relevant to the narrative. Here, the only reason Mattie's been used is that Araña is more popular.

I am not saying that killing minor (minority) characters can never be done well. My go-to example for Doing it Right is Peter David's The Death of Jean DeWolff. I'm not 100% ruling out the possibility that Grim Hunt will make a sudden turnaround, but so far it isn't even in the same ballpark as tDoJD, either on this one point or overall quality.

[philippos42]

I don't expect this dull-as-soap ersatz British morbid shit from Joe Kelly.

And I liked Mattie.

[darkknightjrk]

Yeah, I find it really amazing that the guy can write such...odd crap like in Amazing, and yet write beautiful comics like I Kill Giants.

[lonewolf23k]

If they do manage to resurrect Kraven, I believe he'll be really angry with Sasha and Ana. He had accepted his Death. Being torn from the rest of the grave will undoubtedly piss him off, and it won't be Spider-Man he'll take it out on.

[darkknightjrk]

That's what I'm thinking they'll end it to--they get Peter to be sacrificed, Kraven's resurrected, and angered that his peace has been disturbed, he takes down his own family and save's Peter's life, reversing the spell and heads back to the either.

[fifthie]

Oh wow a character's grisly death, what a shocking and consequential developmHUUUUUUUUUUURF

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

And just a nitpick on my part, but would it have been too much to ask for Mattie to have gone down fighting?

I understand that characters are there to fill out the plot, but it just strikes me as so stupid that any hero can overcome any odds...until they become a bit player in someone else's story, at which point a wet kitten can take them out and restrain them without breaking a sweat.

[comicoz]

I'm somewhat lost on Spidey continuity since I stopped after BND...is this after the lizard guy eats his kids, or the current issue, or a future preview?

I only know Madame Web in these scans, and never really understood her character, so very confused.

[darkknightjrk]

Yeah, this takes place directly after Lizard's whole arc. This is the most current issue.

[thanekos]

so diablo is now the non-technological version of the tinkerer, then?

(less alchemist, more arcane pharmacologist)