Spider-Woman #30

[iamrman]

It’s the Fly! This series seems to be a breeding ground for Scourge fodder.

Spider-Woman's annoying sidekick is still on ice after being shot by the Enforcer.

This is the first appearance of Dr. Malus as well.

Comments

[thanekos]

" Scourge fodder ", or " Mark Gruenwald can't see a use for 'em - better just trash 'em, because that'll magically make our character stable better forever. Somehow. "

[beyondthefringe]

To be fair, he did later regret his decision to Scourge-purge the villain pool. And I can see his logic at the time of "there's a lot of obscure, third-rate villains who've either run their course or otherwise feel unnecessary, let's cull the herd."

It's easy to look at some of them and feel like they don't have any good stories beyond "show up and get their ass handed to them in an issue of Marvel Team-Up." Now, we can all sit here and go "yeah but..." and I think Gruenwald, whose Cap and Quasar runs definitely demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel's character pool, was thinking about things on a macro level. For every villain he bumped off, he seemed to revive another from obscurity, or create new ones. (The Serpent Society, for instance, introduced a good dozen -new- snakes in addition to the pre-existing ones.) Kill old villains, introduce new ones with less "Marvel Team-Up fodder" vibes...

And of course in the '80s, there wasn't that same sense of fan-based knowledge and nostalgia that comes with having ready access to Wikipedia and a million fan sites. Today, it's easy for anyone to look up the Fly's history. But during Gruen's run, the Fly was a "who??" and a half-page in the Marvel Handbook, just like so many other Scourge victims.

Do I agree with the decision to kill off so many villains? Nah. It was wasteful and in the long run, most of them have either come back or been replaced, and I don't think anyone's shedding tears over the ones who haven't. But at the time, younger me was fascinated by how this storyline played out across the various titles.

[bravest_spinja]

Fun little factoid: In the 80's Marvel released a series of VHS tapes pulled from almost all their animated shows to date (The only exception being the Hanna Barbara stuff, and Spidey and His Amazing Friends), with nine volume deciate to the villains. The Fly got his own, even though he was never a major character, and in fact, it wasn't even him in the two episodes (one being the Spider-Woman show), but unrelated Fly villains. I suspect this was to capitalize on the Cronenberg remake (Not as a tie-in per se, I just think people had Flies on the brain.)