Amazing Spider-Man #650: Context

[stolisomancer]

cyberghostface's continued posts on Amazing Spider-Man are the single greatest example of Accentuate the Negative I have ever seen in my life, but today's post on the topic of issue #650 really pushed it too far.


By posting two panels without context from issue #650, cyberghostface managed to create a scene that reads entirely differently than what is actually in the issue itself. cyberghostface's post from earlier today is, in short, a hit piece; it is divorcing a scene from its surroundings to make it look worse than it actually is.





There's a lot you can say about this scene. The first thing that jumped out at me when I read it was eating a donut and a hamburger at the same time, because that does not sound good at all, but somebody's eating those fucking Krispy Kreme burgers so who cares.

Second, there's that first page, where Mary Jane is thinking faster on her feet than Peter is, and is doing more than her share to help maintain the secret identity. That is not a stupid woman.

Third, the second page, when you get the follow-up panel with Mary Jane, just makes Dan Slott look like a moron. I'm not sure what that was meant to accomplish, aside from Slott not taking the time to research pseudo-scientific gobbledygook or something that sounded like a fashion term; the scene isn't from either MJ or Peter or Carlie's perspective as written. It's like the omniscient narrator isn't paying any attention.

The scene as written just doesn't work very well. It happens.

Yanking the first two panels off of the second page and using it as yet another batch of grist for the "hey guys, let's all sit around and hate on Quesada/Amazing Spider-Man/Dan Slott" mill, though, is simply dishonest. It's the exact opposite of thoughtful critique, it irritates the hell out of me, and it represents just about ninety fucking percent of the reactions to Amazing Spider-Man on s_d since "One More Day": people taking one or two or four pages out of any semblance of context and using it to wail about how much the book sucks now.

I figure I like about thirty-five to forty percent of the issues since "One More Day"; I jump on and off depending on the creative team. (Waid, Wells, and Van Lente have done great work. Guggenheim, not so much. Slott usually has good jokes and action scenes but lousy characterization, but even he did great on "Mysterioso" with Marcos Martin.) "One More Day" was a mistake; "One Moment in Time" compounded it; and everything Quesada has said about it or Mary Jane has been accompanied by him corkscrewing his foot further into his mouth.

Thus, it's not that I'm a big fan of the character, the company, or the creators. It's that people are still passing this crap around, absorbing just as little of the book as they can to maintain the illusion that it's a black hole of pure suck (rather than the "throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks" smorgasbord it's been for the last few years), spinning the facts as hard as they can (Amazing Spider-Man has been in the top twenty comics of the month, every month, for the entirety of 2010, usually holding down two to three spots, but no, go ahead and pretend that it's a failure) to maintain that perfect air of jaded comic-book-fan ennui. This is pointless, intellectually dishonest bullshit that does a disservice to just about everyone and everything that participates in it, and people in this community have not only done better, but do better every single day.

Comments

[stolisomancer]

Curt hadn't appeared in the book for years, always showed up in the same kind of story when he did, and they got a good, well-told four-issue arc out of it.

This is the same kind of thing where people only started giving a fuck about Ted Kord thirty seconds after they killed him off. If Curt Connors had been quietly shoved into comic-book limbo in 2004 or so, nobody would've noticed or cared, but now people get all up in arms that he's "ruined forever." Nothing of value was lost in "Shed."

[freezer]

<1>This is the same kind of thing where people only started giving a fuck about Ted Kord thirty seconds after they killed him off. If Curt Connors had been quietly shoved into comic-book limbo in 2004 or so, nobody would've noticed or cared, but now people get all up in arms that he's "ruined forever." Nothing of value was lost in "Shed."

Yeah, but I hated (without exception) the trope of "pulling a character out of mothballs just to do something horrible to them." I hated it when the X-books popularized the practice in the mid-90s and still hate it now. It smacks of a child breaking a toy he no longer wants just so no one else can have it. Petty and wasteful.

And you'll notice most of the "THEY KILLED TED" hue and cry were from those who loved Ted all along and wanted DC to do something with him. (And don't forget, that they killed Ted was only half the source of the anger.)

[stolisomancer]

There was nothing else to do with Curt but break him, though. Every time he showed up, his life got that much worse; his wife divorced him, his son hated him, his wife died of cancer, his son got adopted by other people, he lost his career...

We could go around and around on this, really, and we already have once, so let's agree to disagree. I would submit that "Shed" isn't just shock value for shock value's sake; it's well-constructed horror fiction that achieves its stated goal. When I think of "shock value," I tend to think more of, you know, dismemberment on-panel, and that ain't this.

[janegray]

No, there was something else to do with Curt. They could have left him alone.

I absolutely detest the mentality that, if a character doesn't have any more story options, said character has "outlived their usefulness" and must be killed off or broken.

Do you know why I nearly stopped reading Marvel/DC comics? Why nowadays I virtually only read manga and UDON comics, and the very few Marvel/DC comics I buy are mostly AUs?

Stories like "Shed" are why.

Oh, Spider-Man saved Curt! It doesn't matter, sooner or later he is going to eat his son and become a complete monster. Oh, the X-Men are giving shelter to a bunch of kids! It doesn't matter, sooner or later their bus is going to blow up. Oh, Poison Ivy has saved a bunch of kids and is taking very good care of them! It doesn't matter, sooner or later a pharmaceutical company is going to use them as guinea pigs and kill them. Oh, Roy found out that he is the father of an adorable child and Cheshire let him take her! It doesn't matter, sooner or later she is going to be crushed to death. And so on and on and on.

The (rarer and rarer) happy endings we get are meaningless, because more often than not they are just momentary: sooner or later something horrible will happen to the people who were saved.

The writers can't think of anything new to do with a character? Here is a novel idea: how about letting the character get away with their happy ending and writing about somebody else?

[twigcollins]

Yes. This. All of this.

[arysteia]

A thousand times yes.

[stolisomancer]

That's the serial medium. Sooner or later, something bad happens to everyone in the name of further plot development, and hopefully it's either a good story or, if it isn't, it's easily undone.

Curt didn't have a happy ending. It was nowhere near the character. Every time he showed up, he was too weak to resist the temptation of turning into a monster again; every time it happened, he got cured, and his life continued to degenerate. They went pretty dark with it and came out with a story that actually reads quite well, in the end.

I don't object to a character getting killed or permanently altered if the story winds up being good, and often that isn't the case. Cry for Justice was awful from issue #1, Sin getting abruptly shuffled off to limbo was distasteful, and I remain convinced that Ultimatum is the result of a bet of some kind, like they brainstormed the worst story they could and decided to see if they could get it to sell.

"Shed," on the other hand, does it right, just as "Kraven's Last Hunt" does it right, or something like Mike Grell's Green Arrow made Ollie into a richer, more interesting character. Doing permanent damage to a long-running character is often done poorly, but that just makes the arcs where it's well-handled shine brighter.

[angelophile]

"Curt didn't have a happy ending."

Wasn't that the exact point being made? Rather than keep bringing him back to little or no purpose, give him one.

Or just leave him alone. If you don't know what to do with a character, don't do anything.

But then, you think Shred did it right, so I guess our opinions aren't going to mesh on that storyline or the direction for the character. Which will never last longer than the next storyline or two anyway and all that will have happened is another dead kid in comics.

[stolisomancer]

Oh, I think they knew exactly what to do with him. They did the same thing with him that they did with a lot of the villains during the build-up to "Grim Hunt": they made him a greater threat, and that's a perfectly valid direction.

What I chiefly seem to disagree about, with you and with several others, is that a dark storyline that involves a teenager getting killed is necessarily bad. It's certainly done poorly often enough, most notoriously in recent issues of Teen Titans.

[angelophile]

Child. Not teenager.

[thehefner]

Thank you for nailing a point that I was circling around but couldn't actually nail down. God, this.

[nezchan]

This. More this than there is "this" to give.

[mister_cairo]

motto

[big_daddy_d]

I had an Amazing Spider-Man Annual where Spidey has a big final confrontation with the Lizard. In the story, Curt's son had eough of the Lizard tormenting the family and follows Spider-Man into the sewers. There after a battle, the Lizard turns back into Connors permanently as it turns out Curt has been working on a way to rid himself of the Lizard DNA for. During that moment, his son was going to stab a vulnerable Lizard until he saw him change back. It's been a long time since I read it, but it was a good issue and I thought they should've just left Curt and his family alone then.

[rallamajoop]

This comment made reading this whole thread worthwhile. Very well put.

[recognitions]

Well, to be fair, something bad happens to everyone eventually.

[amaniwolf]

Oh hell yes to all this, people can have a happy ending, some deserve it. Hell...we deserve it.

[icon_uk]

There was nothing else to do with Curt but break him, though

Not really true, how about something CONstructive rather than DEstructive. Something about his nature that actually benefits from his Lizard state. Saviour of the Savage Land, something like that.

All they did in "Shed" is give him the usual Connor's shitstorm and remove a sympathetic character for Connors to interact with, and killing innocent kids in a grotesque manner (no matter how subtly depicted) is rarely more than shock value and certainly something I could live without.

[kagome654]

Not really true, how about something CONstructive rather than DEstructive.

Exactly. If a character has hit a low it's almost impossible to get him or her out by continuing to dig a deeper hole of misery and failure, you'll bury the character at that rate (and considering how difficult it is to create new characters that the readers are willing to accept you can't always afford to do that). Hitting lows is normal for a character, but if you want the character to continue to be viable all you have to do is match those lows with highs. Be creative, use some imagination!

[stolisomancer]

They didn't remove anything. Billy's relationship with Curt was already torched beyond repair, and had been for six years before "Shed" came out. They could've gone constructive; they went destructive instead, and the result was well worth reading.

I have no philosophical objection to this particular behavior when it's done well. "Shed" is done well. If I want to read happy stories of reconstruction or good triumphing over all else, there are other comics on the rack that I can turn to for my uplifting fix. The story as it is works.

[icon_uk]

Billy's relationship with Curt was already torched beyond repair,

See, that's where your argument just breaks down completely, this is comics, the graphic text equivalent of a soap opera. There is no such thing as a relationship "torched beyond repair" in such a narrative context, and too many examples of the reverse being true, where apparently completely irreconcilable characters ARE reconciled out of a need for some sense of narrative continuity.

The Lizard only has something like three characters he interacts with regularly on a human/lizard level; his wife, his son and Spider-Man. Killing Billy simply removes story "potential" for the future, because now they can't use him as a touchstone for humanity for Connors.

[stolisomancer]

There are things in comics that are irrevocable, by dint of their importance. Repairing Curt's relationship with Billy would've required a few years at this point. They chose to use it as a pivotal scene of horror instead, and that's perfectly valid.

Your argument that killing a character is somehow inherently wrong does not hold any water with me. A character is a tool in the service of the writer's story; Billy was taken off the board to achieve the effect they wanted. I disagree strongly that doing so carries an intrinsic flaw.

[thehefner]

Not really true, how about something CONstructive rather than DEstructive.

And again, here's a point that more eloquently states what I was fumblingly trying to say. That's exactly it.

[stillanerd]

Absolutely! The Lizard, even though he's a villain, was sympathetic one because you knew, deep down, Dr. Connors was still within him, and Spidey knew this (which was what also made the Lizard a challenge as well) and with Connors having a wife and son, there was always that hope that Connors could find some kind of redemption. Now, by having the Lizard eat Billy Connors, whatever sympathy for the Lizard that we might have had is gone. Because, as the issue also showed, Dr. Connors "died" leaving only the monster. We no longer want to see the Lizard redeemed or cured--we want to see him punished. If anything, the Lizard, as a character, is in even more of dead-end than when Billy Connors was still alive.

[angelophile]

Quite. Shades of grey are where interesting characters lie. Black and white? Not so much. The Lizard is now pretty much pure evil and... well... where do you go from that? There's no moral conflict.