Venom #256

[heartsways]

 

Comments

[thanekos]

Ewing's scripted this as ready for decontextualization (full page of Paul getting stabbed) and also readable entirely straight (" .. your spiral's wrong.. I'd die for that kid. ")

[cyberghostface]

The whole Paul situation reminds me of Carlie Cooper; a “shilling the Wesley” character that everyone hated although with Paul it seeped over into the actual comics (he showed up in the Superman crossover with “everyone hates me by I’m such a nice guy!”). Carlie lasted longer but I think she was an editorial mandate (she was even named after Joe Quesada’s daughter) whereas Paul had no such protection. I remember a few people suggesting that the reaction to Carlie Cooper was based off misogyny but I think the reaction Paul got shows that any “Wesley” character shoved in the middle of a fan favorite relationship is going to be met with scorn.

[nyadnar17]

Street Fight 3: New Generation vs Street Fighter 3:Third Stike

If people see a character as "in the way" of their current fav they are gonna hate that character regardless of the character's merits in a vaccum.

[blues32]

Ah, Paul was useful for once. Now Torment is down a gauntlet. One more to go and he'll be fairly helpless against Venom.

[scorntx]

Hmm.
Paul getting fatally stabbed trying to buy Dylan a little time to escape.
What is this strange feeling? Some sense of remorse that Paul is no longer alive...
...
... well, whatever it is, it's gone now.


Bye, Paul. You died as you lived.
A momentary obstacle.

[onsokumaru]

This is a character I shouldn't care about, but the hatred toward him made him oddly likeable to me. I feel he got way more hate than Carlie.
At least Ewing didn't have the bad taste to turn him into a villain or a coward before killing him.

[tcampbell1000]

I'm with you, basically!

[akodo_rokku]

Al Ewing made me feel proud of Paul and a little bad for him dying, because Al Ewing is the GOAT.

[tcampbell1000]

Damn right.

[tcampbell1000]

Paul Rabin's existence essentially had two phases: before Ewing and after. Before Ewing, he was barely a sketch, with what character details he had to offer seemingly made up on the fly or rushed out at the last minute. I'm not sure any character with such a blatant function as a spoiler would've been popular, but it didn't help that his backstory was a complete nothingburger until large parts of it were rendered moot.

In retrospect, Zeb Wells may've been going for suspense..."Who is the new MYSTERY MAN in Mary Jane's life?"...and who knows, maybe more time spent on Paul earlier would've led to an outcry against "forcing him down our throats." In the end, I can only speak for myself: I was prepared to give this a read, to see what MJ saw in Paul...and aside from the overall idea that MJ likes hot, responsible, guilt-riddled nerds, I wasn't given anything to work with.

Then Ewing latched onto him, and Ewing is practically incapable of writing a boring character. (Some of the Arakkans, maybe.) Every new time Paul showed up gave us a reason to enjoy him a little bit more, often because his relationship with MJ seemed founded on shaky ground (and finally ended). I mean, reread Venom #253, with his nostalgia for alternate-universe Friends and his reaction to the destruction of his apartment and the "BETTER ACTING NOW!" scene, and tell me you wouldn't like to see more of that guy as Ewing wrote him.

But that's the paradox of Spider-Man comics; they often run on tragedy, but it's hard to kill anyone the readers have a stake in these days. Even though I quite like Ewing's Paul, I still think he might be more useful dead than alive. Because of Paul's early unpopular history, he's got a decent chance of staying dead--and if he does, that could be serious development for both MJ and Dylan. I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes.