Amazing Spider-Man #6

[cyberghostface]

Comments

[freezer]

"We fixed him. Cured him. Depowered him."

Until the Sinister Six movie rolls around.

[cyberghostface]

Is that even still on?

[ablackraptor]

Yep, even been bumped up to give ASM3 more time to be made.

[shadowpsykie]

i am still not buying this from Felicia... she's coming off really petty. She's usually... i don't know... above stuff like this...

[seisachtheia]

Who knows, maybe SHE"s been mindswapped this time.

[arrogantcur]

I know that as Spider-Man stories go--and PARTICULARLY following the last year and change of grimdark bullshit--this one has a pretty happy ending with Spider-Man actually acting like a real hero instead of Ock or even the guy who was willing to torture Sandman, but...

...I can't help but focus on the negative, which is that Slott has turned Felicia Hardy into a villain. First he ruins Phil Urich, and now Felicia. The sooner this guy is off the book, the better.

I can honestly and sincerely say that not even Howard Mackie's run on the book in which MJ was seemingly killed in an exploding airplane and the writing was generally crap caused me as much frustration as Slott's run has. I mean, okay, fine, I'm capable of admitting that as far as storytelling capability goes, Slott is a better writer than Mackie ever was. But I'd rather read a mediocre or crappy story where nothing changes than a mostly decently-written story in which the writer derails a character because he feels like changing things just for the sake of changing them. Because just doing one bad thing can negate all of the good you do.

[shadowpsykie]

actually, i think Phil Urich as Villain started way earlier, during the Loners run (which i honestly think i liked, it was done more subtley) but here it's more... mwahahaha *twirls mustache* villain. they made Phil a straight up jealous villain instead of the guy who means well, but the goblin formula finally started taking its toll, i would have liked seeing him go from hero to jaded anti-hero... but this turn i didn't like. (what happened to Penance btw.... and i don't mean robbie baldwin)

[arrogantcur]

Now that you mention it, I believe you're right; the seeds were planted in Loners where he was losing his mind or something, and Slott decided to run with that, crank it up to eleven (to mix my metaphors) and have him cross the Moral Event Horizon.

At least when Harry Osborn went bad, DeMatteis wrote him as somebody who was clearly batshit crazy, which allowed Harry to make up for it in the end when he snapped out of it and saved Spidey's life before finally dying himself.

With Phil, from all I've seen of him on here, you can't do that. A future writer would have a very hard time writing a story where Phil redeems himself. He's just done way too many evil things, and he doesn't really seem to have any good excuses for why he behaved that way and did those things. I'm not saying it would be impossible to fix him and make him into somebody resembling the Phil Urich seen in Spider-Girl again--if you can de-villainize Helmut Zemo, then I guess anything's possible--but it would be difficult to pull off.

[shadowpsykie]

yeah i agreee. Phil urich wasn't someone slowly being driven crazy, or even disenchanted with his treatment by the superhero community. He was just jealous and power hungry. none of the complexity he showed in Loners.

[terrykun]

+1

And what the heck happened to "Hollow"/I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Penance? Didn't they take off together?

[long_silence]

She rejoined the Loners when they joined the Avengers Academy.

Which made no sense since the whole point of them was that they were trying to quit Superhero-ing. For some reason they forgot about Namie though

[zechs80]

The seeds were planted way back in Phil's own ongoing. He was talking to "dead" men in #4. Okay Harry and Norman turned out to be not so dead. Ned wasn't the original Hobgoblin either, BUT STILL Phil was talking to "dead" people, which even "dead" Bart Hamilton thought kind of kooky.

[quatoria]

It's really frustrating, because not only is she coming off as a villain, she's petty, and cruel, in a way that never even *vaguely* fit her. Murdering other people, happily, eagerly, like this? It's just - vile.

[shadowpsykie]

yes. very much so... she used to be one of my favorite characters...

[arilou_skiff]

The thing is, I can totally see Felicia being petty, but "keep stealing your underpants" kind of petty, not "murder randomy people" kind of petty.

[shadowpsykie]

THAT i would read!

[drtechnobabel]

Well, so much for his company sticking around... seriously, way to ruin any build-up or potential reveal with that flashback at the end.

[icon_uk]

Given the sheer number and variety and pretty much impossibility of keeping supervillains locked up, in what way is designing traps for supervillains anything but a growth market?

[akodo_rokku]

This is the Marvel universe. Nobody wants to pay for that stuff because like you said, it never works.

[writeofway]

Plus, having to create new villains for superheroes to fight would be too, well, creative. Can't have villains kept in prison or dead for too long, can we?

[big_daddy_d]

You know...there's a comic where being a Superhero and Villain is a...franchise isn't it? That or it needs to be made.

[bizarrohulk]

I don't know why Felicia is suddenly a villain again, but in that first panel, wouldn't it take Spidey like two seconds to web her up before going after Electro?

[arrogantcur]

I guess it would depend on what kind of luck powers she has these days.

I've got a trade collecting 8 issues of ASM set right after "Secret Wars", in the days when Spider-Man almost always teamed up with the Black Cat to fight crime instead of doing it solo. In one of those issues, Felicia holds her own against a debuting Puma because of her bad luck power. For example, right when he's going to attack her the roof they're on just happens to crumble beneath his feet. That's the kind of improbable shit that her power could make happen.

So if she has that same power back now, or similar ones, Spidey might shoot a webline at her only for a light fixture to fall onto his wrist and throw his aim off, or something like that. And maybe he knew that.

Then again, both SpOck and post-SpOck Peter have been able to beat her in fights, so I don't know.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

That brings a thought to mind: Have Black Cat and Scarlet Witch ever tangled?

[grapeweasel]

I have a sneaking suspicion that very soon a new African-American character is going to have a bad experience with electricity......

[terrykun]

They'll all pay for pushing around Uatu Jackson....

[ablackraptor]

Probably not; more likely, they'd amp up Max's power until he becomes a glowing blue being of electricity, since as I kept pointing out to this one racist dude concerning the casting, ASM!Electro wasn't really effected by the race change since he spent most of the film as a glowing blue guy (and, you know, since when has Electro ever been a character who's physical appearance really mattered?). If they wanted to tie in with the film, changing him into a Dr Manhattan-like being of electrical energy would be the most likely solution.

[kevinroc]

ASM!Electro basically looked like Ultimate Electro anyway.

[ablackraptor]

Weirdly enough, I actually brought that up when arguing about it; apparently, me acknowledging the existence of the Ultimate Universe meant that I clearly didn't know about the classic comics or something.

[cyberghostface]

I actually doubt Marvel would do that for a number of reasons. As half-assed as the new Nick Fury is SLJ Fury has become fairly prominent with various Marvel properties, the MCU being the biggest so at least that makes sense from a marketing standpoint.