Four more pages from Amazing Spider-Man #687

[cyberghostface]

Note: If I can only post three givenstillanerd's post, let me know and I'll get rid of one.

So Spider-Man and Silver Sable attempt to stop Doctor Octopus from destroying the world. Earlier on Doctor Octopus revealed that he had no plan on saving it; he decided that if he was going to die, he wanted everyone else to as well.

Honestly, maybe I'm romanticizing Octavius here, but I would have figured it to be much more in character for him to actually save the world so he can go "See how brilliant I am that I could do what you could not?" Full-blown genocide isn't his style. Heck, even during JMS' run he helped Spider-Man save a group of civilians from being crushed to death. But whatever.

So anyway, Rhino is there stop them. Spider-Man tells them that Doc Ock plans on destroying the world but Rhino knows and doesn't care. After his fiance died he has nothing left to live for.



Spider-Man tracks down Doctor Octopus, and its revealed that Ock planned for .008% of the population to survive and rebuild, and that he will live on in infamy as someone worse than Hitler or Stalin.





Y'know, I'm a bit surprised that Ock is STILL in this 'dying' state by this end with no change to his status quo. I mean we all know that sooner or later he'll be back to normal so how much longer are we going to drag this on? Either kill him already or cure him. I figured with this being touted as "The last Doc Ock story" there'd be some resolution to his condition in one form or another...but nope, he's still alive and he's still on death's door. And next issue features the convenient return of the Lizard so it's not like there's going to be an 'epilogue'.



I'd say something here about Slott killing off characters but I think we all know that both Rhino and Silver Sable are alive and well.

Comments

[greenmask]

Depends on the pagecount - if it's a third or less, you're still good.

I like the scientist gang.

[salinea]

It's good. It brings us to 6 pages total.

[shadowpsykie]

I'd say something here about Slott killing off characters but I think we all know that both Rhino and Silver Sable are alive and well.

they are?

also didn't a couple of heroes also die in the begining of this?

[cyberghostface]

They're last seen alive and there are no bodies. It's only a matter of time before we find out that some deus ex machina saved them.

[bewareofgeek]

I believe that would be called:

"Sable's checkbook" :)

[sherkahn]

and I think Sable had Sandman on her person, and she released him. That's why she made such a big deal about using Flint Marko in this pages.

[flint_marko]

Avenging Spider-Man #8 is going to be an epilogue to Ends of the Earth,and it's guest-starring Silver Sable.

[stillanerd]

Given that the solicit states it's also an "untold adventure" and in light of what happens here, I'm willing to bet it's a flashback story involving the last time Spidey teamed-up with Silver Sable.

[stolisomancer]

Sabra's fine, according to Rob Williams's Twitter. The Kangaroo might not be.

[kd_the_movie]

I don't know about you guys, but i'm kinda getting sick of all these Spider Man stories that are huge in scale and rope in all of Spideys rogues, supporting cast, and a good share of the Marvel Universe...and there's IMO hardly any direct fallout or substantial changes in the status quo. Really with as big as these Spidey events have been, the changes that have occurred in the Spidey books are really miniscule in comparison.

[cyberghostface]

Yeah, smacks of desperation due to plummeting sales. There's this, The Gauntlet, Spider-Island, the one with Doc Ock wanting the Osborn baby, etc....

[stolisomancer]

Except the sales have been holding steady all year, are actually slightly up due to the "Ends of the Earth" event, and they've got a movie coming out soon.

I think it has more to do with Slott wanting to be more epic than he can handle. He's a great comedy writer and he does fairly well with the light, funny stuff like his She-Hulk run, but something in his brain flipped and now he wants to be self-consciously epic all the time.

[mrstatham]

I think it's this. I think Slott's trying to push out of his comfort zone, but he just can't handle the big stuff. I mean, the last 'big' story I enjoyed to a degree, despite the rather reckless scattering of characters to the winds, was the Grim Hunt story that brought Kraven back. Built up on the Gauntlet stuff? It worked. And the telling thing is that it wasn't a Slott storyline.

I think Joe Kelly should've been given the book when they whittled it down to one writer again.

[liliaeth]

esp. since Slott lacks the understanding of the difference between an underdog and a loser. Spidey is always the underdog, but should never ever under any condition be a loser and Slott just doesn't get that.

[mrstatham]

Well, yeah, pretty much. Spidey should be the equivalent of Rocky Balboa, basically. The guy's the perpetual underdog who can play in the big leagues, doesn't always win, and up until OMD, had the girl, which was the important thing.

[darkknightjrk]

I really couldn't stand Grim Hunt--Spidey started off as an even whinier shit than normal, bad continuity, the climax involved Spider-Man ripping someone's face off, and resurrecting Kraven so far still has no point or reason worthy enough of his death.

Really, if you use the BND writers and their stories to choose who should have the book to themselves after that era, I don't think any of them would have worked.

[halloweenjack]

This.

[gamerguy]

I don't think it's really reasonable to expect some sort of sea-change to the status quo in any non-creator-owned book. Every comic is someone's first, and every five to ten years, it's /everyone's/ first, for the vast majority of the audience. There will be no fallout or direct change, ever, barring a significant change in company policy at the very top (and since the Disney acquisition, the possibility of that is vanishingly small). The character has to be kept reasonably recognizable for the next group of people that discover him.

[stolisomancer]

This whole arc has just been bleh.

[lascoden]

Hm, in a way, Rhino was the only one of them that actually beat Spider-Man. But yeah, no way Rhino and Sable are gonna stay dead. It's really just important to the story for him to think they're dead.

[beyondthefringe]

You could show me a complete sequence where Silver Sable breathed her last underwater, died, was found, brought up to shore, pronounced dead, cremated, her ashes spread over all of her beloved Symkaria - and I still wouldn't believe she was actually dead for good. Because comics has jaded me to the point where I no longer believe a character can die for any longer than story and writers demand.

It might take 5 months or five years, but sooner or later, someone will trot out the time bullets, LMDs, alternate dimensions, Superboy punches, or whatever, and they'll be back. Death no longer holds any weight in comics, unless it's a brand new universe where such rule-breaking hasn't had a chance to settle in.

So yeah. Not exactly sweating Sable or Rhino here.

[nefrekeptah]

I've really liked Ends of the Earth. It was a good old-fashioned evil super-villain plot with enough twists to keep it interesting, with some great action pieces and character moments along the way.

[bulletsandbraclets]

Thank you! I've been having a lot of fun with this title! I did feel miffed about Sable dying since I felt like I had just met comics Sable. But, it wasn't a Bridge Dropping, and she got a fine tribute issue in Avenging.

[starwolf_oakley]

So, Ock's motives are now "See what Ra's al Ghul wants to do. Do that. Repeat as needed."

Someone on this board once said that Ra's never really gets how all the survivors of his "purified Earth" will be too crazy with survivor's guilt to properly rebuilt society. That same problem exists in Ock's plan.

[cyberghostface]

Well it's not even that. He just wants to leave his mark and go down in infamy as the guy who destroyed 99.999% of the human race.

If he had less than completely evil intentions he wouldn't be a mustache-twiddling villain anymore and Slott wouldn't want that.

[nefrekeptah]

...and since Doctor Octopus was awesome throughout this entire arc, I have no problem with that.

[leoboiko]

What did it for me was the jabbing reference to waterboarding. See, kids, Spider-Man approves of it too!

[protogarrett]

Oh, Silver Sable has been dead since the 90's. It's just official now.

[glprime]

BURN.

[long_silence]

Did they ever explain how Ock got Peter's new tech from Horizon Labs for his plan?

[lascoden]

They all had commercial uses, so he could pretty much just buy it from Wal Mart, and tweak it a bit.

[arilou_skiff]

" Full-blown genocide isn't his style."

Well, he's tried it before. (at least blowing up all of New York just to show hat he can)

[espanolbot]

That wouldn't be genocide though, just mass murder.

[arilou_skiff]

Technically, neither would this, it's not targeted at any specific ethnic or religious group.

[biod]

Spider-Man has been in the hero buisness for how long exactly? I know the "No one dies" thing is important, and it's a good goal for him to set, but he has to know that people die sometimes. He's seen it happen again and again, so to outright label the saving of the world a failure because two people died to make it happen seems overly angsty even for Spidey.
At least it was one hell of a Rhino moment.

[starwolf_oakley]

Yes, and when someone dies, Spider-Man *feels* like a failure. And this time, he had brought as much SCIENCE with him as he could to stop anyone from dying.

[biod]

I get that and I understand he won't outright label it a success or party hard, but at least some acknowledged that he's just saved the world would be nice, that her sacrifice meant more than another thing to angst over. Hell, it strikes me as downright disrespectful.

[halloweenjack]

Webbing over the Rhino's mouth and nose. He rips it away, Peter sprays on more. He needs both hands to clear it... see how easy it is?

We're how many years past BND, and Slott still has Peter carrying the idiot ball. It's sad.

[biod]

Yeah, that' my second problem with this. A fully focused and motivated Rhino is a foe to be reckoned with, but Spidey has experience, smarts, and willpower to match. At least, he should.

[arbre_rieur]

Alternately: Rhino, realizing he'll suffocate from the webbing before Sable drowns, decides to simply snap her body in half then and there. Considering the only reason she isn't dead already is because the Rhino's choosing the long route, I don't think it's idiotic of Peter to want to avoid making him think the long route's not a viable option.

Hmm

[kenwyn89]

Well, my dislike of this spidey is tempered by the fact it's easier to not believe it's Peter Parker when he's in that costume. The red or the black are ok, not iron spidey 2.0. Actually I think iron spidey was better.

I think Peter would at least acknowledge a sacrifice someone else had made; sure he may feel like he had failed but he carried out her apparent last wishes.